A Little Visit to the Big Apple

Posted By: Sal and Nic (but Nic is only semi-conscious)

We have just been to New York. The city that doesn’t sleep. We didn't either.

We were only there for 3 days and don’t feel like we’ve seen much of it. When you have managed to see/do:

• The United Nations
• The Statue of Liberty (ok, from the shore, not the island)
• The wonderful Duke Ellington Orchestra playing sweet swinging jazz at the famous Blue Note Bar
• The even more wonderful band that was playing at the Zinc Bar (a little underground gem that the barman at the Blue Note put us onto)
• Chelsea (replete with notorious “Chelsea Boys” aka disgustingly cute gay couples, and the "Cupcake" teashop for you Sex and the City watchers)
• The Natural History Museum
• Classic standup comedy at the also famous Comic Strip club (where Seinfeld is filmed doing standup at the start of each episode)
  
• Turkish food at an outstanding restaurant (greeted by the head waiter with: “Australians? We kicked your ass in Gallipolli”)
• The East Village
• 5^th Ave and the Flatiron Building and the Empire State Building
• The Museum of Sex (MoSex)
• Central Park

and you still don’t feel like you’ve seen much of it, you know you’re in a very big, diverse and fundamentally interesting place. Now, here’s a bunch of photos…

The rather well known UN Building, NY.
We searched long and hard for the Aussie flag out the front, to no avail.

A rather inspirational set of carvings opposite the UN building

Architectural gorgeousness (and bizarreness) abounded

And we saw the icons - the Flatiron building (left) with its strangely two-dimensional appearance, and the big-old Empire State building (right), with obligatory hoardes of crowds. It is big. Really quite big.

Experienced (but hot and tired) subway catcher waits for the train to Penn Station

Nic appeared to revel in the architectural interest of the East Village

And we were both pretty amazed by the sunbathers in Central Park

Of course we were aiming to spend a lot of quality time with Mr. Kim George, but he had other distractions of a Canadian nature to be dealing with... a rather lovely gal by name of Clare. Luckily she was cool so we all got to hang together.

And now we're home... and term starts again for Sal really soon (and she's not really that excited at the prospect of taking classes again). And Nic has food poisoning, which we can either attribute to a rather dodgy sandwich on 5th Avenue, or to his failure to wash his hands scrupulously after exiting the subway. Actually, I think we were all guilty of this failure of basic hygiene, but it was Nic who was using his hands most voraciously for eating later. Hopefully he'll be back on his feet soon!

As usual, we'd love to hear from all and any of you out there. Stay cool. Durham is like a Turkish Bath at the moment, so we won't be. Staying cool, that is.

Sal and Nic