Everyone's your friend in New York City

The weekend of March 19-21, James and I went down to NYC for his birthday. It was the first time I'd stayed in a hotel in the city (and the second I'd ever stayed overnight in the city, the first time being with Kelly Barrows a couple years ago), and only the second time James had ever been to New York. The weather was lovely all weekend, which was awesome because we had a LOT we wanted to see!

We drove down to the city on Friday morning, arriving sometime around 2pm. I was really impressed by James driving through Manhattan - all of my memories of driving through the city involve my dad driving and being extremely stressed out and both of my parents freaking about all the traffic. I guess their fear of driving in the city rubbed off on me, because I was majorly intimidated at the thought of driving in Manhattan, thinking that it'd be WAY WORSE than ANYYWHERE else, and CHAOTIC and AWFUL but it turned out to be not such a big deal. I guess if you can drive in LA, you can drive anywhere. Anyway. We found our boutique hotel, which was on the corner of Madison and 27th. We checked in and our room was TINY - just big enough for a double bed, really. But it was very clean and modern and had obviously recently been remodelled so we were happy.

Then we set off on our first adventure! We got subway passes and went down to the Brooklyn Bridge. We walked about halfway across, which was really all we had time for, but it was really fantastic. We both got a huge kick out of being on such an iconic bridge. Then we walked over to the WTC site, which is nearby. We walked by City Hall Park, which was a nice spot, then stumbled across the St. Paul Chapel, which we learned is the oldest surviving church in Manhattan. It's the church where George Washington first worshipped after being made president. Pretty cool. We wanted to pay our respects at the WTC site, which James had never seen but I saw on a college trip in 2002 or so. Unfortunately the whole site is hidden behind chain link fences that are covered in plastic, but we got to peek in and see how huge the hole in the ground is. It was encouraging to see the frame of One World Trade Center starting to rise up - they have probably a half dozen floors built so far.

Next we went up to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What a spectacular place. I could spend weeks in there - there's just so much to see! We only got a few hours but I think we made the most of it. We got a poster of Pierre August-Cot's painting Spring, which we didn't actually get to see in person. That's a bummer because it's one of my all time favorites, but I'm so excited we'll have a copy of it at home. After the Met we made our way over to Junior's, a Brooklyn-based restaurant that's famous for its cheesecake. We went to the one near Times Square, and while my meatloaf was forgettable, James' Reuben (or pastrami sandwich, I forget which) was super yummy, and the raspberry swirl cheesecake was pure awesome.

The next day, we woke up in time to get the free (and surprisingly good) coffee and danishes in the hotel lobby, and that combined with the homemade granola bars I'd packed made for a pretty satisfying breakfast (those tasty, tasty granola bars saved us from having to buy breakfast or lunch during our visit, which I think saved us quite a bit of cash). Our first adventure of the day was visiting the Museum of Natural History, but rather than take the subway right there, I took us to the other side of Central Park and we walked across. James had never been in Central Park before and I think he got a kick out it. It was lovely to stroll through the sunny park with trees and flowers beginning to bloom (it was also nice to get an early taste of spring, northern Mass is at least a couple of weeks behind NYC).

We really enjoyed the Museum of Natural History - I remembered it as being a lot of cheesy dioramas, but it's really a lot more than that, especially with the Rose Center and Planetarium. James especially loved seeing the meteorites and the dinosaur bones. And even the dioramas were pretty neat, it's nice to be able to look at the animals up close. Although, at first, all these dead, frozen animals made the museum seem like a creepy zoo.

After about four hours in the natural history museum, which was definitely not enough time (especially if you want to see any IMAX shows or the planetarium show, which we didn't do), we headed over to the MoMA. We saw a lot of good things there, from Pollock and Warhol to Starry Night (which had a big crowd around it and a big guard sternly guarding it!) and performance art by Marina Abramovic, who I knew only because she was featured (parodied?) in an episode of Sex and the City. We were kind of burned out on museums at this point, but we spent some time checking out the design section of the MoMA which was a nice change of pace because it wasn't just oil paintings and it was less esoteric than pieces of string pinned onto the wall (I actually saw more than one of these, amazingly enough). The MoMA can be kind of exhausting because you're trying hard to understand some pretty wacky stuff and it can be a bit overwhelming.

After the MoMA, we headed downtown to meet up with Caitlin (who was one of my bridesmaids) for dinner at 'Smac, the mac and cheese place. On our way down to meet Caitlin, we got a bit lost looking for the subway but we stumbled across a Magnolia Bakery! I thought Magnolia was in a completely different part of town, but I guess there's more than one? We got three red velvet cupcakes so we could share them with Caitlin, and one chocolate one because we needed a cupcake RIGHT THEN. Mmm, such good cupcakey goodness. I got the brie, walnut and fig mac, which sounded awesome on the menu but turned out to be pretty greasy and kind of tummy-hurting. I guess I love brie in certain applications but not really in mac and cheese. It was still good, I just couldn't eat a whole lot of it. Anyway, it was awesome to be able to catch up with Caitlin! We hadn't seen her since the wedding, which is ridiculous. After dinner, we went with Caitlin to meet up with some of her friends, including Shola, another film production kid, who I hadn't seen since graduating from BU. We went to a karaoke bar and had a blast. I even sang a couple times! Always in a group though, because, c'mon.

The next day we slept in (almost to our checkout time!) because we were so exhausted by all the walking we'd been doing, then we checked out and drove home. It was a fantastic weekend and I think a complete success. I'm pretty proud of how well it went because I organized the whole thing, planned out what we were seeing and when, got our reservation at the hotel, and navigated us through the subway. The next week though we were pretty wiped out!