They Say What They Say

It was a lovely sunny day when we woke up. Even though it was still very cold, the snow from the day before had mostly melted and there seemed to be a touch of spring in the air. So when I went to pick up my boots from the shoe repair shop, I wandered down 9th avenue for a while where I found the cutest cake shop selling the cutest cupcakes ever! Of course I had to buy one in the special take-out boxes, because how could I resist? Helen just laughed at me when I finally got home, and even more so when I started taking photos of it with my phone camera to send to Rache back in Queensland. Rache is very appreciative of a good cupcake so I knew she'd get a kick out of it :~)

Bit the most important thing about day six was Bloomingdale's! We'd both been hanging out to go shopping there and finally the day had arrived.

We jumped on the E to Lexington Avenue and stood in dazed wonder when we emerged from the subway station to find our destination standing before us. Shopping Mecca!

Once inside we were immediately set upon by and overly enthusiastic salesman you was plugging the new Marc Jacobs perfume. "Last day of the promotion!" he exclaimed. "Free gifts for everyone!" How could we resist? Obviously we couldn't, which is why I ended up with three new bottles of perfume out of this trip.

Already clutching a Big Brown Bag, we eventually extracted ourselves from the perfume department and made our way up to the visitor's centre where we cloaked out coats (and don'tcha just love a department store that has a cloak room?) and collected our visitors card. Then we were off!

Helen is still in shock at how much she spent. She was crying about her Amex bill the other day and I'm not surprised considering how many bags she had to cart home. Me? I was a little more restraint, but only just. There's just so much to chose from! I went insane in women's socks and hosiery and won't have to buy winter tights for about two years. I also found a beautiful scarf, some gloves and a few other odds a sods. I deeply regret that I didn't buy the coat I tried on about five times. Such a beautiful coat. And it fitted like a glove! Why didn't I just bite the bullet?

Surprisingly I didn't buy any shoes. I think it's because I got that out of my system early on, and besides, there was very little that actually caught my eye. Same went with clothes. The whole store was still pretty much one huge end of winter sale and there was rack upon rack of winter leftovers, with only a small selection of new season's fashions. In the end I was pretty happy with most of my purchases, even though I still regret that coat :~

We did have vague planes to take in MOMA while we were on that side of town, but in the end we spent the entire day there and it was dusk by the time we emerged from the shopping vortex. Getting home was fun. Helen had so many bags she could hardly get through through the subway turnstiles, and my feet were about to fall off from all the walking around.

once we got home neither of us could be bothered going very far for dinner, so we schlepped up the road to the local pizza place for a slice and then dropped in on our favourite bar for a drink. Or six. Or maybe more. I'm not entirely sure how much we drank because it was A LOT. At one stage we were chatting to this odd woman and her much older boyfriend and they left we just sat around and made our own fun, complete with drunken texts to the folks back home. I'd say that not many people would appreciate receiving blurry photo of some random New York bar in a text message when they were sound asleep. Yeah, did I mention that we drank A LOT of wine?

Then it seemed like a great idea to go to the CVS to buy even more makeup so off we went. Next time I want to buy makeup when I'm drunk, someone please stop me. I ended up with twenty lipsticks and a bag of Hershey's chocolates. I have this distinct memory of standing in front of the Revlon display tossing lipstick after lipstick into my basket before moving on to the L'Oreal stand. I even manged to pay for it all using the self-check which, considering how drunk I was, still astounds me.

However after we'd stumbled home and were about to collapse into bed, I discovered that my credit card was missing. Oh great.

I ran back to the bar to see if I'd left it there, but no luck, and no one had handed it in at the CVS. My guess is that after I paid out tab at the bar, instead of shoving it in my bag like I thought I had, I dropped in on 23rd street and was that. Fortunately I was able to get onto my Australian bank to cancel, but then I had a fraught few hours worrying that they wouldn't be able to get a new one to me before I left. Gah, that'll learn me going out to celebrate shopping!