The Big Apple: Day 2

We spent time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) on our second day in New York.  It was inspiring.  There is something surreal about seeing paintings by Manet, Degas, Monet, and Seurat that fills me up and calls me to my paint brushes.  They had the most amazing ancient Roman and Greek statues and pottery.  Even after 2500 years, those pots still look glossy and strong.  (They don't make 'em like they used to, aye?)

While there, we passed a stool and someone's drawings of the Roman statues.  The sketch was a flawless black and white representation of the statue in front of it, and I gasped at its intricacies. While gaping, a middle-age, shabby-looking black man came up and admired the owner-less sketch with us, and then asked if it was ours. We declined. He then asked if the artist was around.  We didn't know, but feeling a slight danger at this confession I weakly added, "I'm sure he'll be right back."  He just looked at me and then quickly picked up the drawing and started to run away!!  Kaleen and I stopped him and told him that we wouldn't allow him to steal the artists work. He looked shocked, and then started laughing.  He looked at our confused faces and said, "Well, I'm glad there's someone out there who'll protect my work!" He was the artist, of course. We laughed for quite awhile with him at that. And he sat right down and continued to sketch. Funny guy. He must love to play upon people's prejudices. :)

We had an embarrassing first experience on the subway that I'll not soon forget.  We entered the subway on the side where the southbound train picks up passengers, and quickly realized that we had entered the wrong platform. We needed to go north. We looked around for an exit, but all we could see were the rotating arms we came through to get into the platform, and an "Emergency Exit".  Not wanting to call too much attention to ourselves, we quietly asked a maintenance lady what we should do to get to the Northbound side.  She just looked at us with a queer expression and said, "Well, ya gotta go back out and over the street and come back down."  Right.  Okay.  Just exit and cross the street and come back down on the other side.  Of course!  We already thought of that. It was the exiting we couldn't figure out.  So we started walking in the direction she had gestured with her hand and got to the Emergency Exit at which point she yelled for all on the platform to hear, "No!  Exit!" And pointed to the rotating metal arms. Everyone turned.  Apparently those go both ways.  Sigh.  So much for being inconspicuous tourists.  We ducked our heads and walked as fast as we could out of there, laughing all the way!

So, it rained all day this day and we used our flimsy corner-store umbrellas to keep dry.  That was a joke.  By the time we got 10 steps my shoes were sloshy and my clothing soaked.  The umbrella bent, warped and turned inside out at every gusty wind. Apparently, a $6 umbrella doesn't last as long as it used to. Either that, or the NYC rain is just really serious at doing it's job. 

But, we did see some pretty neighborhoods on the Upper East Side.

 We stopped by Grand Central as well.  Just for the fun of it. They had this AMAZING market with gourmet foods.  We bought some gourmet bread and cheese and had that for lunch.  Divine!!

 Kaleen had cooking class in the evening, so I ended up perusing some of Times Square at night. Wow.  More on Times Square later.

Home to hotel.  Collapse on bed.