I started the day today with a bowl of Oreo’s cookie cereal, a sickly mass of souvenir bounty. Yes, we’re back in the UK (as of about 8 A.M. yesterday).

I’ve summarised the holiday a lot for postcards and phone calls already, but I’ll try not to do that here. To summarise though, we had a great time and did loads of stuff. It went far too quickly and we did not want to come back at all.

To anti-summarise then (this is going to be very, very long):

Monday, 17th

Our flight was OK, the plane was practically empty and Louise slept across five seats for half the journey. I read lots of Life of Pi and failed to sleep. On landing, we got a taxi to the hotel because it was just easiest. The driver was a very funny stereotypical Puerto Rican guy. He was quite chatty and drove like a madman. It was cool watching the city fly by and when the Manhattan skyline came into view from Brooklyn it was stunning. When we arrived at the hotel, we just gave up on life and went to sleep.

Tuesday, 18th

We decided to kick off with some major league tourism. We had breakfast (eggs sunny side up) in the diner next door to the hotel and then took the subway to Times Square. We then walked to and climbed the Empire State. The subway is cool BTW, we got a Metrocard that was good for an unlimited number of journeys in seven days for $17.

When we got to Times Square, it was a crazy, all the lights were off and it took us a minute to work out where the famous bit was, we did though and took photos. The walk to the Empire State gave us a chance to look at the city streets a bit. The canyons between the skyscrapers in mid and downtown are cool and we did the standard tourist thing of walking around staring up into the sky. Even at the end of the holiday I was still doing that (and taking loads of pictures of them as well).

The lobby at the Empire State is a horrific piece of modern gothic showiness, but it is kind of fitting I suppose. It’s free to get into and has possibly the highest density of opportunities to waste money of anywhere I know. Entry to the lifts to the 86th floor viewing platform only costs $10. I was not expecting my ears to pop in the lift but the view is magnificent! I could have stayed up there all day. It was a bit hazy but Manhattan and beyond looked very beautiful from that height. The Empire State has the advantage of being far taller than anything for a good half a mile around and as tall as the biggest buildings in the financial district about two miles south.

After returning to ground level we walked a short way up 5th Ave. to the main building of the New York Public Library. We just went to check out the big reading room, but it turns out they have internet access in there. So we sat and posted to Hype in the middle of austere splendor and rows of diligent students (bad photo).

I can’t quite remember how, but by the time it came for us to eat we had found our way to Greenwich Village, quite a way away. We probably walked, we did a awful lot of random wandering throughout the 10 days. We ate and, as became the pattern, went straight back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Wednesday, 19th

We continued the tourism with the Statue of Liberty. It was bloody cold down on the south shore and on the boat, but the financial district did look cool from the water. For some reason neither Louise or decided to pack hats etc., pointlessly leaving them in the hotel while we shivered.

It is worth taking the ferry to the Statue just for the views of Manhattan, New Jersey and Brooklyn and it is also probably the best place to photograph the statue from. There isn’t a lot to do on the island except look at the statue and take more pictures. The statue itself has been closed since 9-11, which was a damn shame. I couldn’t quite get over the fact that I wasn’t going to get to stand in the crown and I hatched plans to overcome the guards and sneak inside. Louise suggested I would probably be arrested and held without trial as a terrorist for the rest of my life. Statue fact: the base bit is about ten stories high and the whole thing is frankly bloody huge! It’s very difficult to get a sense of scale from the ground though. Strangely, there was some snow left on the island, even though it was lovely and sunny. A testament to how cold it was.

After the statue we went to Ellis Island. This island houses a group of buildings that used to the main immigration centre for America, but are now museums dedicated to that subject.

Throughout the New York Bay there are a series of islands that were used for various purposes in the immigration chain. At one the seriously ill were separated, at another the poor and the middle and upper class passengers were separated. Most of the passengers ended up at Ellis Island where the poor, the needy, the disabled and those with epidemic scale illnesses such as smallpox or trachoma were summarily sent back to where they came from. These cases represented a very small percentage of those arriving, the steam ships bringing them from the old world were required to pay for the return trip and so only brought lively candidates. America’s population has swelled throughout the last two centuries.

The Museum itself is pretty good. It presents the statistics of the immigration in interesting ways, using huge 3D graphs and maps and a careful spattering of technology. Tufte would love it.

After that we returned to Manhattan, we decided that, as we were nearby, we would go and check out the WTC site. I had previously decided not to go. I had heard that it was a morbid place with people still distributing photos of their loved ones and such things. But when we went there it was little more than a big building site. Given the size of the buildings that stood there we were surprised that the site was not much bigger, it did seem rather small. It was rush hour and there were lots of financial people moving through, few people stopped to look.

We walked up on to a raised platform which our guide book said was a viewing platform. As we kept walking along it we found ourselves inside a nearby cluster of skyscrapers, the World Financial Centre. Some of you may have seen a building topped with a large green dome and another with a green pyramid next to the World Trade Centre in the footage of the attacks, these and a third building constitute the World Financial Centre. The buildings themselves are open, which surprised us as we passed the WTC site. With security far tighter than before everywhere else it seemed distinctly risky to be wandering around the corridors at the base of the WFC buildings. But there was a reason. The WFC centres around a large lobby area called the Winter Garden. This has a set of palm trees growing very happily inside it under the light from an array of floodlights. The light is very sun-like and it is a pleasant place to sit when it’s cold outside. From the top of a flight of steps leading down to the Winter Garden you can see the WTC site. Louise and I and a couple of other people stood here and looked for a while. It seemed strange to see people who obviously worked in the building staring at the site, but such is the nature of New York’s strain to cope with 9-11. Whatever you may have heard about picking up the pieces and moving on does not apply to a large part of the visible city, it is still very much in the pit of dealing with the attack.

After the WTC and WFC it was far too cold to do anything else so we scooted back to the hotel and bought food on the way, there were several pretty nice mini-market places within feet of our hotel. Food in America is far, far better than here. At these small markets we were able to buy relative delicacies. The ranges of fine foods such as cheeses and beers was excellent and they all seemed to have a good selection of freshly prepared ready meals, pastas, salads and more. We had a picnic in our room and watched war footage on CNN, ABC, BBC and NBC.

Thursday, 20th

Pretty heavy rain kind of limited our options and we decided to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is one of the richest museums in the world with an annual budget of over $120m and indeed there are some pretty audacious exhibits to be found there. The most notable is the Egyptian art exhibit which includes part of a temple lifted from the flood plain of the High Aswan Damn. Remarkably, they allow you to take photographs of pretty much anything, so I have pictures of the temple. It’s a pretty remarkable thing to find in an art museum and it is well presented with a context of hundreds of other smaller objects.

The Met also boasts a fine collection of Greco-Roman statues and busts and, my particular favourite, a fine collection of modern art, particularly surrealists and a nice selection of Klee. By the time we got to the modern art they were closing and we whisked around it all. Just before we left though I caught sight of a number of photographs by Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. These three are all extremely skilled photographers and the pictures on display were amazingly perfect. I’m going to try and find a print of Gursky’s Schiphol for one of the walls here in the flat. I found these three particularly interesting because of their focus on photography of the unreal. Each had subjects that were commonplace and had produced images of amazing beauty because of the clarity and quality of the production, but at the same time their compositions and the detail which is normally not seen made the images distinctly unreal.

I do very much like modern art and I regret that we were unable to make it to either the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art during our stay. We did make it to the doors of the currently relocated MoMA QNS in Queens, but it turned out that they are closed on Wednesdays (26th).

After the Met we caught the subway down to the East Village or perhaps even Alphabet City to go to an internet cafalled alt.coffee. Sadly there are no photos on their site. It was a nice little place, vaguely reminiscent of a school staff room with an assemblage of mismatched comfy armchairs and about five computers dotted about. Happily it was the antithesis of an easyInternet hate barn. We grabbed hot drinks to warm ourselves against the rain and a machine to surf Hype and update the hordes.

We had gone to the cafecause I had filled 48mb of storage with photos. It had not been enough to buy a new card at CompUSA two days before whilst wandering along 5th Ave. I was hoping that a place with “alt” in the name would have Macs on hand, preferably running OS X so I wouldn’t need any drivers. They had PC’s, but they also had an Airport base station. After we’d been there for about fifteen minutes a guy with a brand spanking new 12" Powerbook turned up. I asked him if I could use his machine, something which is a lot easier to do in the states than here, and he was happy to let me use his gorgeous computer for ten minutes and not only upload my pictures to this site, but create a page for them as well. Thanks, Ruben!

That evening we waded back to the financial district to eat at Le Zinc, a lovely restaurant serving an extremely fine Thai marinated steak salad and good old Belgian beers. That was probably the best meal I had during the holiday.

Friday, 21st

We set out to have breakfast at the City Bakery and then try and go to Brooklyn. However, by this point in the holiday we were starting to get up pretty late and I don’t think we actually left the hotel until about two, by which time we were too hungry to wait until we actually got to the bakery. We snacked and then got on the subway. When we got to the bakery we found we weren’t too hungry and went instead to the nearby Barnes and Noble’s store. Their flagship Union Square branch, it claims to be the largest bookstore in the world. It was certainly pretty vast. I didn’t explore that much as I found the IT section pretty quickly. It is an excellent store and I just sat in their comfy chairs and read for at least an hour, eventually only buying two of the five or six books I had pulled out to look at. There was none of the hassle to buy that was present in a lot of big stores particularly Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. I bought the new Gibson, Pattern Recognition and a book about AI, Blondie 24.

After that we went back to the bakery. Incidentally, I should mention that the reason we were at the City Bakery was because it was featured in Sex and the City. HBO’s site for the series has an extensive guide to the shops and restaurants featured in the series for anyone else wishing to experience Carrie-life.

After all the browsing it was too late to go to Brooklyn and the rain came down again anyway. Louise, who’s love of going to the cinema knows no bounds, convinced me that we should go to a film. I thought this a bit silly as there was so much else to do. I conceded when she agreed we could go to Bowling for Columbine which has now all but closed here. It was great, review to come in my new critical mood.

Saturday, 22nd

The weather got nice again, very nice and sunny, so we went to Central Park. Central Park is quite different from parks in London and the UK. Here parks tend to be flat and fairly formal. Central Park is very undulating and feels much more a patch of woodland. It would be possible to get lost in Central Park, but certainly not Hyde Park. It was apparently landscaped to look like the movies but it wasn’t at it’s prettiest when we were there, sporting neither snow, blossom or much in the way of leaves. However, it was still very pretty.

After the park we wandered out into the city again and found, amongst other things, a big Love statue, the Fox and CNN news rooms and the Rockefeller Plaza. The Rockefeller Plaza is a weird place, a mini-mall buried under a skyscraper and an ice rink in it’s shadow. Very odd.

Then we decided to try again at Brooklyn, or at least the bridge. We took the subway under the East River (which is actually not a river at all, but a waterway between two islands) and walked back across the bridge as the sun set, affording lovely views of both the bay and the city.

For supper we went to China town and dined in a crazy Malaysian restaurant. Malaysian food is cool, if slightly indecipherable. We made a mess of ordering and ended up with strange meals indeed. They were still delicious though.

Before we found the restaurant we were wandering around trying to choose somewhere when we discovered a guy selling IT books from a stall on the sidewalk. He had a pretty large selection and all at low low prices. I could have bought a ton of stuff, but I settled for a copy of Lightwave Applied, a hands-on guide to the 3D package. It set me back $20 instead of $50! Woo hoo. I’m going back to New York if only to find that guy again :-)

Sunday, 23rd

We went for breakfast at the Diner again. Some woman collared us for being British and proceeded to tell us what to do in New York. Apart from being obsessed by candy shops she had some good points. She told us about a park in north Spanish Harlem called The Cloisters and we decided to check it out. The cloisters bit was actually a monastery that had been converted to a gallery under the banner of the Met, but it was still nice and the park around it was more like Canada than New York City with no buildings visible in the view across the Hudson to Jersey. The was a crazy number of squirrels and they were very very tame, coming within three feet of us.

We had caught the bus up to the park and did so again for the return journey, it gave us a chance to see Harlem a bit without spending ages wandering around, which had done a lot of. Our legs were starting to hurt. A Spanish family, obviously just out of church got on and spent the rest of their journey singing Spanish gospel hymns with gusto, it was funny and distinctly likeable.

We caught the bus back to Central Park so that Louise could go skating at the Wallman Rink, at the south east corner of the park. I would have skated too but I’ve only skated once before and didn’t enjoy it at all. It looked like fun, but I would have just been falling on my arse a lot. We arrived just before sundown and Louise skated as it got dark and the lights came on around the park. It was very pretty and very romantic.

That night we watched the Oscars in our room. It was quite tense waiting to see who was going to say what about the war. Michael Moore was funny, never the pragmatist. Other people particularly Susan Sarandon and Barbra Streisand, both known trouble makers, were remarkably quiet.

Monday, 24th

Resolving to visit the Stock Exchange and the UN in one day we set off for the financial district straight away. The NYSE apparently has a system where you get a ticket for a particular time and then come back at that time. This is because the tickets all go in the morning. When we got there though we found it was closed to visitors and had been since 9-11. Bugger, we thought, and, resolving to email Lonely Planet, went for breakfast. We wandered up to Pier 17 on the east river looking for a place to eat. I took a nice picture of Brooklyn Bridge, which is just next to the pier and we ate in a little tourist authentic 19th-century buildings area just behind the pier itself.

Next stop, the enclave of international territory that is the UN. We took the tour, which lasted an hour and was absolutely fascinating. Our guide took us through the security council chamber, the economic and social council chamber and the general assembly and explained the workings of the UN as we went. I’d love to go through it all here but there’s just too much. The two most important numbers I took away with me were that 80% of the UN’s resources are dedicated to economic and social functions and that worldwide annual arms spending is $780bn. Wiping out illiteracy would cost around $5bn. That fact nearly made me cry. I’ve decided to make disarmament a priority of my pitiful philanthropy program as soon as I have some money.

After a brief meal of soup in a deli we went to see Chicago in Times Square. Having seen it do well at the Oscars, Louise didn’t want to miss it. It was pretty good. Again, proper review later.

Tuesday, 25th

We didn’t really get up to much on Tuesday. We wandered around and did a bit of shopping in midtown and read the Hype backlog at easyInternet off Times Square. We went to a hip hop record store in Greenwich village but I didn’t know what to buy. We tried to find flyers for good clubs but there wasn’t anything happening on any of the nights when we would still be around. Afterwards we snacked and went to a bar and hung around for a bit and had a few drinks before bed.

Wednesday, 26th

Determined to do one more cultural thing and attempting to see one of the outer boroughs properly, we crossed into Queens to go to the Museum of Modern Art QNS. The museum has relocated across the river until 2005 whilst it’s old property is greatly expanded. Unfortunately it was closed for the day, as it is every Tuesday and Wednesday. So, running late as usual, we trucked back into Manhattan to do a bit of gift shopping at Macy’s and Victoria’s Secret. As we were nearby, we decided to do the Empire State again, this time at night to see it all in the dark. It is apparently even lovelier at night. Just as we were about to start walking over from Herald Square it started pelting with rain. Not wanting to brave the wind and downpour we called it off and went back to the hotel and got room service food. It was good, I had udon noodles with steak slices. Mmmm.

That night after resting we went downtown to a club, S.O.Bs (Sounds of Brazil). The club plays a mix of latin, jazz and hip hop and we went to a hip hop night featuring The Juggaknots and others. The night was good, The Juggaknots were really good and the other people were OK, all involved freestyled very well. The only problem was the club was a bit empty and the night was almost totally devoid of atmosphere. That’s what you get for going clubbing on a Wednesday, even in Manhattan. At least now we can say we went to see New York hip hoppers on their home turf (even though they probably all came across from Brooklyn).

Thursday, 27th

With only a couple of hours after packing and before the flight we decided to have a slow breakfast and then take a walk in the park. All throughout the holiday I had been taking pictures with my digital and Louise had been with her compact 35mm, but we had my 35mm SLR with us as well and had pretty much an entire black and white film left in it. We decided to run that off between our hotel and the park. We took loads of shots of the streets and people boating and the classic views of the city from the park. On the way back to collect our bags I snapped loads of shots with my digital to fill my last card as well.

To save a load of money we took the subway to JFK instead of a taxi ($3 vs. $30). We managed to get an express train, which are designed for commuters heading out of the city, but it turned local meaning that it stopped at three times as many stations and took much longer. It was also very crowded, not ideal with luggage. Nevertheless it worked and was cheap.

The return flight was much busier than the outward one, but we still got bulkhead seats, on the wing but with loads of legroom. They conveniently were showing Far From Heaven as the in-flight film we actually wanted to see!

Staggering back from Heathrow to the flat was too much effort given our jet lag, but we got here eventually, despite the stretched muscles.

So there you go, we did shed loads, notably less towards the end of the week, but we were holidaying and getting up late and reading the paper in the sun lots which was very lovely.

There are two things that I regret not doing. The first was not going to the large anti-war march on the Saturday. It would have been good to talk to people at the march, Americans are much more chatty, and find out what they felt and why. Beyond the stop the war slogan there is a lot of complexity. What should be done instead and so on. I would have liked to talk to NYC people about the whole America as shaper of international politics issue.

Also there is a really cool club night called Berliniamsburg at Luxx in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) that I really wanted to go to. It’s the top night of the scene that’s produced Fischerspooner and a raft of other electro revivalists. I’m really into my synthpop at the moment. Louise was unsure about it and so I said we’d see. Planning to go out somewhere we went back to the hotel to rest and change. Louise fell asleep and I decided that she would be too tired and that I kind of was too and not to wake her. The next day she said she had resolved to come with me when I woke her up. Doh! Should have been more determined.

All in all, I had a great time and I can’t wait until my next adventure!