Sunday 17th June
I have just re-read Pauline’s penultimate-day NYC email.  I am so impressed with her ability to spend so much time in The Met!  I t sounds just wonderful but…gruelling!  It makes my back ache just thinking about it!  I am able to walk very long distances quite happily, through the bush, on footpaths, through parks.  But…put me in a gallery or a museum and I get the most appalling backache and I have to limp painfully from one sitting-spot to the next.  (I have just read a novel in which the heroine tries to go to the Guggenheim in NYC.  She gets dropped off by a taxi driver at…the Guggenheim Museum Shop!  She has a lovely time in there and goes home with a big book all about the museum to impress her husband and her friends, and then sends a happy time in a café writing postcards.) 

NYC – #last episode, I think…
This morning when I rolled out of bed (literally, my bedroom floor has a decided slope) I realised that it was our penultimate day (love that word) and that tomorrow will be spent doing such things as trying to stuff an enormous amount of shopping into our bags, schlepping to the post office to try to post stuff home, trying to organise transport to Newark airport etc, so today is our last day of exploring this Very Big Indeed Apple where nothing is easy.  This simplest of tasks, eg post offices and organising cars, is very hard indeed, compounded by the language problem, for example taxi drivers can never understand us.

We have had hot (too hot, really - sorry I know Hobart has been freezing) and dry, sunny weather the whole time we have been here, but rain set in yesterday afternoon and looks like continuing for some time, so we shall have the new experience today of New York On a Rainy Day.  Maybe I have never properly grown up, but the simplest of things take on an exciting new flavour when I am in a new place: "Look, puddles, how exciting, oh, and look, they have different umbrellas to us..."
On Monday Barbara went to walk the High Line Walk, which, by all accounts is an amazing experience involving a 3 mile long elevated walk and garden above and through buildings in the Meat Packing and Greenwich Village districts of New York.  My left foot is so sore that I decided it wasn't up for that and needed to rest it in preparation for a day at the Museum of Metropolitan Art (the Met).  I decided that what my foot needed to do instead was to go and buy a handbag.  So that is what my foot did (aided and encouraged by Becky who said that in lieu of photos - I never did get to find a shop that sold a charger for my camera, despite much searching - I should have a New York bag to aid memory).  My sore foot and I now have a beautiful new Kate Spade (who began her design career in Williamsburg, so most appropriate) handbag.

Of course, I covered a lot more than three miles in search of the Perfect New York Handbag.  But in New York it is the getting to and from where you want to go that takes most of the effort and most of the day, despite a good public transport system.  First you have to work out which subway line or bus number you want (and every single map is in the tiniest of tiny writing and the internet does not seem to want to enlarge the maps) and then you have to decide whether you want to walk at the beginning or the end of the journey, for example, whether you want to walk the ten blocks to get the bus that will drop you right where you want to go, or whether to get the one that leaves from nearby, but requires ten blocks walking when you get off to get to the required destination.  We have bought two metro passes at great expense but inevitably, at the end of our journey, we get a taxi home because we are just so damned exhausted, so we are not getting good value from our public transport passes. The subways are marginally easier, but the subway stops near us are very smelly and depressing.  By the way, New York City closed all its subway toilets because of their use by homeless people.  New Yorkers must have very well-behaved bladders.  Of course, if we were the sort of travellers who could afford to stay in Upper East Side and have doormen to call us taxis to go everywhere, then our experience would be somewhat different, but, we tell ourselves, we much prefer the more gritty Soho experience, and so we do.....most of the time.

Yesterday we went to the Met.  It is huge - it stretches along Central Park from East 80th to East 84th Street - four blocks, which is a big distance.  It is full of unbelievable treasures.  More than two million objects, five million visitors per year and an annual budget of $120million.  You could spend weeks there.  It is a maze, I went from gallery to gallery to gallery and wondered if I would ever find my way out.  I loved the decorative arts and design sections, also the pre-Colombian American exhibits, also the Asian art section, and the European and American wings - oh, all of it.  I would like to go back and spend a whole day in each of the sections.  We were very lucky - the guide books warn of enormous queues, but we just waltzed in and got tickets straight away and then went to a cafe (where you can look though enormous glass windows and watch the joggers in Central Park) and we were shown to a table immediately.  A short time later there were enormous "lines" everywhere, including at the cafe.  When we emerged from the gallery many hours later it had begun to rain heavily and the bun fight for taxis had to be seen to be believed (we got one).

Last night we went to "Happy Hour" (when drinks and food are two for the price of one) to a gritty (all the guidebooks describe the Soho scene as "gritty") bar called National Underground where we listened to musicians-who-will-be-famous-one-day, drank Margaritas, ate totally (as everyone says) delicious burgers (which are available everywhere - even at ritzy restaurants) and then walked the two doors to our apartment at a disgustingly early hour.  The bars stay open until 4am each morning, when patrons bang on our steel grafittied front door and ring all the apartments bells as they walk past.  Such fun.  We looked up National Underground on the net and found that we had been at a famous and gritty place.  We are way cool.