New York (2)
Tuesday evening, 27/8

Last time we were in New York City in 2000, we didn't do it well; we were unwell, we had messed up our booking and had less time than we thought, then we wasted most of the little time we did have, looking for a hotel room (or B&B, hostel, motel, or anything) and trying to buy a stove part that we found immediately we arrived in London.  So we didn't see or do much.  This time we're making up for that in a big way, and we're loving it!

On Saturday we walked up 42nd Street to Times Square where Levi had 30% off jeans in their Broadway store (and Rob had just gone through the knees of his jeans while on this trip).  We found out about subway tickets and then roamed for hours in Central Park, watching a game of softball, riding on the carousel, walking down the literary avenue, watching the model yachts, seeing the Alice in Wonderland statue, the Belvedere Castle,  the boating lake and Strawberry Fields.

On Sunday we went south, down to Greenwich Village and Soho, then made our way back north via a string of squares; Washington Square, Union Square, Gramercy Square and of course Madison Square Park, before visiting the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum (J.P. Morgan's father) - we had thought that we'd rather like to have a library like the one at Chatsworth House; now we've upped the ante!!

With the weekend over, we thought that the galleries might not be too crowded so we spent yesterday at the Metropolitan and today we went to the Guggenheim and the Frick.  As usual, Judy had a few specific things she wanted to see before we started roaming the rest of the collections (although not at the Guggenheim).

We are totally in awe of the Metropolitan!  It is vast and full of really great stuff. It even lets visitors take photographs (without flash of course)! Jude couldn't believe her luck; a whole room devoted to each of Vermeer and Cezanne, almost a whole room of Rembrandt, and three rooms full of Degas!  There's no way that a whole day is anything like enough to see all we needed to, so it looks like we'll just have to come back to NY some other time.

There were even things we didn't see and didn't notice at the time.  It wasn't until this morning that we thought about how we entered the gallery. We just went to one of the many entrances, where we went straight in.  Contrast that with that long, long queue at the one entrance to the Louvre!

We're glad to have gone to the Guggenheim and it's an amazing building, but we feel a bit bemused by it too.  Perhaps we visited it at the wrong time, but most of the exhibition spaces were empty and there was an exhibition that we were disappointed with.  At one point we queued for half an hour to go into a darkened room to see a rectangle on the wall with a concave depression in it.  Yes it was interesting to see how hard it was to discern the shape of the depression, but was it art?  I think that the Emperor sometimes really does have no clothes.  Certainly we would not have queued for so long if we'd known what was in there!

The Frick Collection, on the other hand, was fantastically wonderful, a suberb collection still in the collector's Fifth Avenue beautiful house. No photos allowed here, or at the Guggenheim. 

After visiting a number of Rembrandt self-portraits (at ages 34 and 63) in London and seeing another one that we didn't know about at the Met (when he was 54), we were really looking forward to seeing the one (at 52) that we knew was part of the Frick collection and it was, in our opinion, the very best of all.  An afternoon really well spent!

So we now have Wednesday and Thursday ahead of us as full days in NYC before we fly out of JFK airport at 17:55 local time on Friday.

Here's a couple of pictures...

Regards from Judy and Rob