NYC

On Wednesday we spent the day in New York City. We got up at 5:30am so we could get an early train. Dad drove us to New Haven station, we bought our tickets--peak fare, no discounts--and we boarded the train for the approximately 1.5 hour trip to the city. I tried to get our tickets online on the Metro North website but the system they use is outdated. You have to book your tickets at least two to three days ahead of time because they mail them to you rather than enabling you to print them off yourself! Onine tickets save a bit of money. Our tickets ended up costing about $120.

We got into Grand Central Station about 8:30 and then took the subway shuttle to Times Square. The station exit didn't quite face the well-known view of the square so we ended up walking away from it for a block, then turned north along 8th Avenue to 43rd street before walking back to the square to have a look at it. The kids were not impressed. Jarrah wanted to know why an street intersection was worth looking at! Paul took some video and I took a couple of pictures then we returned to 8th avenue and took a bus to the American Museum of Natural History--the museum that features in Night at the Museum.



The statue of Teddy Roosevelt on his horse was still standing guard out in front. When we entered we had to go through a bag check. Paul keeps insisting on carrying his Swiss Army knife so this was a problem as knives and other weapons are confiscated so before he went in he hid the knife in his video bag. I wish he wouldn't insist on carrying this knife in his pocket all the time! We bought our tickets from an automatic machine. $80 for the 4 of us! The museum was worth every cent though. It is really magnificent. In the main entrance foyer there are two dinosaur skeletons. One of them is a herbivore with a very long neck and it is standing on its back legs stretching up as if to eat from the top of a tree. I wish I'd taken a photo of it.





We wandered through the second floor where the main entrance is then went up to the 4th floor to see the dinosaurs and down to the third floor. By then it was lunch time so we went to the lower level to eat in the cafeteria there. The food there included a lot of healthy choices and wasn't expensive. Jade wasn't impressed with the salad bar and in this cold weather I must say I agree although it seemed to be a popular choice.

After lunch we had about an hour before our planetarium show. I wanted to see the rocks and minerals but it was diagonally opposite where the planetarium was and on a different floor so we decided it was too far away so we looked through the astronomy section instead. This also included a lot of rocks and was very interesting.

The planetarium show was very good. The theatre was huge and despite the crush to get in there had a lot of empty seats available. The show was called 'Journey to the Stars' and was about the life-cycle of stars--a bit different from the usual type of planetarium show. Whatever the show was they used to always look at the sky above NYC at the end of the show and discuss what constellations and planets were visible but they've cut that out of the show now. I guess that's to keep the show to about 20 minutes so they can turn the audiences over faster.

After the planetarium show we'd had enough of the museum so we went out and walked along Central Park West looking into Central Park as we went. Paul had wanted to walk through Central Park but some of the paths hadn't been cleared and looked slippery so we decided not to. At 72nd Street we went into the park to look at the Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon. This consisted of the word 'Imagine' done in a circular mosaic in the path.

A busker was there giving people a lot of background information about the memorial and he was very interesting. One of the things he said was that there wasn't a statue of John Lennon there because Yoko didn't want birds to poop on it. As we went out of the park I saw a building which I thought was the Dakota Building where John and Yoko lived (and where Yoko still lives) so I crossed over to see it and also took a photo of it. There wasn't any indication of the building's name nor any plaque about John being shot there so I wasn't sure if it was the Dakota. I've just checked on wikipedia and it was so I'm glad I took a photo.



We then took a subway back to near Times Square (to the Port Authority bus terminal) and started looking through various souvenir shops. Jade had seen a Yankees shop before and we found it again luckily as Jarrah wanted to buy something Yankees as his souvenir. He got a pennant and beanie both of which say 'Yankees World Champions 27 times 2009'. He's thrilled with those. Jade had already chosen her souvenir as a small bag of coloured polished stones from the museum. Paul had got a plastic drinking cup from the museum and I bought a navy New York City t-shirt. I love navy t-shirts!

We had dinner near the souvenir shops then took the subway shuttle back to Grand Central and took the train home. From New Haven station we got a taxi and the driver was very talkative and also very interesting. He is a Muslim as most of the limo/taxi drivers seem to be but he's married to a Jewish woman who is a professor at Southern CT State University and they have 2 sons. He was very open-minded in his approach to religion and seemed to be very happy where he is in his life. His family had just had a holiday on a Carribean island and they'd also been to another island last year. When I was growing up in CT there weren't any Muslims here that I ever met anyway. The ethnic mix now seems to be changing quite dramatically from the Irish-Italian-WASP groups that were here before. I don't know if this means that some ethnic groups are moving elsewhere to make room for the newcomers or if the population is just becoming more densely packed. The US population is increasing significantly so perhaps it is the latter. East Asians, though, are few and far between still here.