Barb and Baden’s Excellent New York City Adventure – Part 3
Restaurant Culture
We were in a small restaurant the other day having breakfast and we noticed these pictures on the wall of famous people from the 1930's and 40's. I only recognized some of them so maybe they weren't all that famous. Anyway, my thought was that every second place that you happened to go to eat in the city has been around for over 50 years. This is so very different from Vancouver.
While there are tons of restaurants in the Vancouver area, there is hardly any that I could name that has been around since before the 50's. And those places that are that old, have been renovated and replaced and moved to new locations such that there's very little history. New York has all kinds of restaurant history.
Now, I've got to admit that some of the worst food that we've eaten in New York has been in those old, history-filled restaurants but that's a bit of a different issue.
In comparison, last night we had an amazing meal at a nice Italian restaurant called Sfoglia on Lexington Ave. We had to take the subway to get there (changing subway lines twice) but it was really worth it. Barb had made reservations with Sfoglia over email before we left Vancouver and it turned out to be a great choice.
As you might have guessed from the above picture, Barb and I spent most of the morning in a museum yesterday. It was the American Museum of Natural History and we had talked about going there after our walk in Central Park the day before. Over the years, we had been to many different museums in different cities and it always seems to only occur on the first trip to any city. The one exception to this rule is that we've been to London twice and I still want to see the British Museum one day.
One of the most interesting things that I liked about the Museum of Natural history (other than the dinosaur bones of course) was the dioramas of all of the different animals. They had a whole section of African animals which brought back a lot of memories of our African Adventure from a few years ago.
By the way, remind me to mention about our discussions about our next African trip. 🙂
Long after we had gotten back to our hotel on Monday night we had an idea to go up to the top of the Empire State Building. We had read that the observation floor was open quite late and in fact the multi-hour line-ups were quite a bit shorter at night. Since the Empire State Building was just down the block from our hotel and it was still nice and warm at night we decided to go there.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't get more touristy that going up the Empire State Building but we've found that sometimes you can't let these technicalities get in the way of a good thing and some places are just a must-see. This is one of them. Suffice to say that the panoramic views of the city at night are fantastic and the short line-up late at night made the whole experience that much better.
By Tuesday morning the weather had gotten quite a bit hotter (approaching 30 degrees) and my decision to pack a few pairs of shorts came in handy. We had decided to do a boat tour of the harbour today so we headed south (or in the downtown direction on the subway – going north is the uptown direction) to the financial district where the boats were for these kinds of tours.
The boat tour lasted about 60 minutes and was well worth it to be able to see many of the sights close up that have been in many movies over the years like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. There are some boat tours that last multiple hours but I think that the decision to do just one hour was the right decision.
A few more hours after the harbour tour were spent walking around in the Financial District around Wall street and the big construction zone that was the former World Trade Centre buildings. All in all we were pretty beat by the time that we got back to our hotel around 5PM and, after sleeping for a few hours, decided to stay in rest of the evening to recharge the batteries so to speak. Those 4 days of walking around the city were catching up to us.
It's early Wednesday morning as I write this and we still have four full days left in NYC. We still have lots of things on our list to see and do and Barb has reminded me that we've hardly put a dent into any serious shopping (there's only two shopping bags sitting on the floor of our hotel room).
I'll be posting the final episode of our Excellent New York City Adventures some time before we return home on Saturday.
Baden
