Monday was NYC. I left from Lyons station in New Jersey on Monday around noon or so and made it to Penn Station around 1:30pm. I was heading to MOMA, about 20 blocks up and a few avenues over, so I ended up walking it, going through Times Square and some other parts of town whose names I have no clue about. MOMA was awesome. Given that I’d seen the Tate Modern the week before, it was a great follow up with their modern and contemporary collection. Seeing van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the Tate then seeing Starry Night the next week was amazing. Starry Night, for whatever reason, takes your breath away when you’re in front of it.
After seeing MOMA, I walked through the area and ended up around Central Park. I continued around for a while, trying to find a decent place to have a snack and a cup of coffee and settled at a place called Le Pain Quotidian, which had a cool farm-house style interior and a good latte. I walked through 5th Ave and Park Ave and a bunch of other areas until I took a train and headed south to Chelsea. I stopped by this apothecary that I’d read about in Wallpaper called Malin+Goetz and bought some stuff there. They had a great little retail space on 7th Ave at 20th. I continued from there down to Union Square, where I met up with Derek for dinner at Zen Palate, a vegetarian Asian-style restaurant of some repute. They had lots of great items and dishes and I ate till I was stuffed, plus it was great to catch up with Derek as well and see how he was doing. I caught a cab back to Penn Station and got home around midnight.
Wednesday was Philadelphia. We had bought tickets earlier in the week to see the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute. This was the first time in 30 years it had been in the states from Egypt and the last leg of its US tour. The exhibit was awesome; they’d collected items and artefacts from many generations of Tutankhamen’s ancestors and the displays were will signed and had interesting stories painted on the walls. After the museum, we went down Market Street to City Hall and the old Wanamaker Building and walked through the general downtown area. We stopped in the old Pennsylvania Railroad Suburban Station building, which had awesome art-deco details in the lobby and elevator halls. Philadelphia is a cool city, I had no idea that it was as big as it with (with a subway/metro and all).
It’s snowing here in New Jersey. Wednesday it was in the 70s and today it’s in the high 20s. Over a 1000 flights have been canceled on the eastern sea board, but they say the storm will pass around 2am so hopefully my flight won’t be impacted. I leave tomorrow in the early afternoon for Managua, Nicaragua and I’m planning on taking a bus from the airport to Granada in order to meet up with Jamus. Next post will hopefully be from Granada, Nicaragua!