They Say What They Say

We spent Friday morning recovering from the night before, although I didn't object too much when the bank rang me at 8am to tell me that they'd organise a replacement credit card and that it would be delivered to the hotel within the next 24-48 hours. That was a relief, I can tell you. I was worried that it would arrive after we left for Washington and that it would end up chasing me all over the eastern seaboard without catching up with me before I left to go home.

After very late breakfast (or very early lunch, depending on your perspective) we made out way uptown to Penn Station, with a side trip to a little camera/souvenir shop where I bought keys rings for all my staff and another memory card for my camera. Getting onto Penn Station proved to be interesting and we did a complete lap around Madison Square Garden before we managed to find the entrance. While we were walking around I kept picturing Dan and Casey in their fight-night tuxes and imagined the bantering and bitching that would be going on as they prepared for a Sports Night live from Madison Square Garden special!

Penn Station is just as confusing on the inside as it is on the outside. I also couldn't help but feel very sad for all the homeless people who were being hassled to move on by the police when all they wanted to do was a sleep in a warm place. I remember seeing one morning news report about how the city was cutting funding to the homeless shelters and I wondered how a place with so much obvious wealth found it so easy to forget about those less fortunate.

Anyway, after a moment of introspection, we line up to but tickets for Washington and that's where we found out that the rail voucher Helen had bought before she left Australia didn't work. Or couldn't be found on the system, or something. Either way it was a very grrrr moment. She was planning on using if for going to Washington and then to travel to Michigan to visit her grandmother after we left NYC. Now it looked like she couldn't do any of it. The guy at the ticket office, was very nice about it and knew about the travel company she'd bought it from, but in the end there was nothing on the system about it and all he could do was suggest that she contact the travel company and try and get a refund.

After that I half expected Helen to give up on the idea of going to Washington. The weather forecast was not good and I would have been quite happy to stay in NYC for a couple of extra days. Even the ticket office guy questioned the wisdom of travelling to Washington with record snows predicted, but Helen insisted that she still wanted to go so we got these bargain tickets for $140 return and that was that. We were going to Washington on Sunday.

MoMA was next on the list, where we paid a fortune for an average cup of hot chocolate and lost each other in the crowd in the Tim Burton exhibition. Tim Burton was great, although there was so much stuff to look at it was hard to take it all in. Neither of us is fond of the blockbuster exhibition where just about everyone in the city turns up for a gander and it would have been better if the curators had been a little more discerning and had gone for quality over quantity. But still, it was very interesting, especially the material from his high school and early Hollywood years, whereas I found the items from his more recent films a little boring, especially when it was quite obvious that someone had done all the hard graft based on Tim's concept.

However as we found out, it's free entry after on Fridays and apparently Free Friday is very, very popular, especially on a chilly evening in February. But we managed to see most of the exhibits while were were there, and I was enraptured by the Frida Kahlos. But the sheer number of people also trying to see the same things eventually got to us. That and the fact that every museum and gallery we went to had a huge number of Picasso's and we were beginning to feel like he was stalking us from the grave, so after a go-round in the gift shop we finally escaped the madness onto the relative peace of 5th avenue.

It's possible;e that we became a little bit addicted to Gap while we were there. Nothing else could explain why we felt compelled to shop is every store we came across. And the Gap on 5th avenue is three levels of shopping heaven! I think we spent almost as much time in Gap as we did in MoMA and had just as much fun. I was thrilled to find more of the tops I'd bought on our first night in NYC. They were just so warm! I also bought even more tights and came close to buying a pair of jeans, but wasn't terribly happy with the colour selection in the style I liked. As usual Helen bought even more and by the time we staggered out it was getting on for 8pm.

Home, dinner and bed was pretty much all we could do after that because even though we'd gotten a later start, it was still a very long day.