Friday, 23 Dec 2016

This year we are spending our Christmas break in New York City.  We’ve basically never been to one of the greatest cities in the world even though it’s right in our back yard.  (The flight from Atlanta to NYC is only 1 hour 40 minutes.)

I was here very briefly with my parents in 1986 or so, and Adam has been here a couple of times for business but he hasn’t had time to do anything other than work.

My own memories of New York mostly revolve around how much my dad hated it here.  I distinctly recall that our hotel room cost $122, which he found to be an outrage.  (On that trip through the US, our hotel rooms were usually around $30 per night, for comparison.)  We took the ferry over to see the Statue of Liberty, which was no fun at all.  We spent all afternoon standing in lines, then were informed we’d arrived too late to go up inside Lady Liberty to the crown.  They were gearing up to close, so we had to make do with milling around the base.  It was also the pre-Guiliani days before the city was cleaned up.  The streets were filled with puke and other bodily fluids, garbage and general grotesqueries.

We’re counting on our experience in 2016 to be much better.  We rented an Airbnb apartment on Park Avenue in Midtown, very near the Empire State Building and within walking distance of Central Park, Rockefeller Plaza, and Times Square.  The apartment is very small, but well-located, clean and efficient.  It will be the perfect headquarters for our 2-week stay.

View from our balcony

The Empire State Building

The only item on Josie’s list of things to do in New York was to go ice skating.  The weather was fantastic today so we decided to make the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza our opening activity.

The famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

Our kids only have the opportunity to ice skate on our Christmas vacations, so they’ve been a grand total of three times.  They are not good at it but that doesn’t stop it being fun!

Isabella and Holden spent most of their time hugging the walls.

Holden thrilled to be upright and not using something/someone for stabilization.

And then it’s back to the wall.

Josie was a lot more adventurous.  She started to get the hang of it by the time our 40 minutes were over.  In the picture below, I’m the slightly taller red coat (with hat) and Josie is right behind me, also in a red coat.

Isabella ventured off the wall near the end.

After ice skating, we headed around the side of the building to the NBC Studios entrance.  We went inside (they give studio tours) and poked around for a little while, but decided against taking the tour.  Rockefeller Plaza is surprisingly dark and gloomy inside.

The kids standing outside, waiting for Adam and I to decide where to go next.

A hot dog cart, of course!  I’ve been watching 30 Rock on Netflix lately and I wanted to get a hot dog from a cart in front of Rockefeller Plaza, just like Liz Lemon.  They are quite good and, at $5 each, probably the cheapest food available in New York outside of a grocery store.  It was only 10:30 a.m., so we bought two hot dogs and two pretzels to share amongst the 5 of us, just as a snack.

Radio City Music Hall is right across the street.

We happened by a UNIQLO store and decided to do a bit of shopping.  The sweaters  Isabella and I bought in Chicago last month quickly became favorites, so we wanted to pick up a couple more. At $15 each, they are a great bargain.

Self-portrait of Adam in the mirror above the escalator.  (Holden waving with white glove, Josie in red jacket, Isabella’s face visible behind Holden’s head.)

On to Central Park.  We just visited the entrance today.  We’ll go back on another day to really explore and go to the zoo.  The kids wanted to take a rock-climbing break from walking around the city.

Josie was more adventurous than the other two on the ice rink, and way less so on the rocks.

Isabella taking a photo of Josie with the city in the background for Josie to text to her friends.

Holden photobombing.

Lunch in Koreatown.  We ate at a place called Shilla.  It was good, but our general consensus (so far) is that Korean food is a lot like Japanese food, but not quite as good.  We’ve only eaten one meal though, so we’ll give it another chance or two in case it’s the sort of cuisine that needs to grow on you.

I’d never heard of Koreatown, but a quick internet search informed us that Koreatown has the second-largest population of ethnic Koreans outside of Korea.  (I think the largest is in LA.) It really is like stepping briefly into a foreign country.

A little books & make-up shop near the restaurant.  That seems like a strange combo, but there it was nonetheless.  They have some very strange lotions and facial care products in here.  One was called “Snail Repair Cream.”  I looked it up when I got back to the apartment, and YES, the active ingredient is the slime from a sea snail.  It’s supposed to do wonderful things for your skin, but ew.  The snails produce slime when they are stressed, so I have a vision of tanks of poor snails being tortured and essentially living in hell to keep them producing slime, like a horrifying real-life version of the monsters on Monster’s Inc. scaring kids to collect screams to power their city.  I shan’t be buying any.

On the way back to the apartment, we stopped at a Best Buy and Adam bought an Xbox One.  He wanted one anyway, and decided to buy it here so he and Holden could play games when they get up hours and hours before the girls do (and way before anything else in the city is open.)  An added bonus is that we can now access our Netflix account.  We went home after the late lunch and he set it up.  Then we had wine time and a little dinner in the apartment.  (Restaurants in general — and especially in big cities — are expensive, so we only eat out once per day, almost always at lunch.  We loaded up on food at a Trader Joe’s near the apartment for the rest of our meals.)

A word about Trader Joe’s:  it’s cheap.  They have a sign on the wall saying they have the same prices in all of their Trader Joe’s locations across the country, so people in New York don’t have to pay extra based on location.  I don’t know how they sell food this cheaply; I pay more at the Publix by our house in Georgia for most things.  We are shocked at how low the prices for nutritious food are.

After dinner and a movie (our annual viewing of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) we went back out to see the lights at Times Square now that it was dark.

We passed through Koreatown again on our way.  This BBQ place had a line out the door, so we’re going to try it for lunch one of these days.  It must be really good.

Times Square!

Mounted police in front of the Times Square police station.

We ducked into Grand Central Station on the way home, just to see it.

We went across the street to Pershing Square Cafe, located underneath a bridge.  We shared a couple of warm brownie sundaes to cap off our evening.  (No photos.)

We walked a total of 12.2 miles today, not including the ice skating.  Time for bed!

Saturday, 24 Dec 2016 — Christmas Eve 

Today it is raining, which makes it a good day for a nice indoor activity like a museum.  We got an Uber and arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) only to see an enormous, winding line snaking way out down the sidewalk.  We took one look at it and said, “Nope.” It’s the Louvre all over again.

We all huddled under an awning while Adam got on his phone to find something else to do.  The Guggenheim would be open in one hour, so we headed over in that general direction on foot and poked into a few shops to kill time.  Dean & Deluca (pictured below) had some loose-leaf tea I like, so I at least was able to cross that off my grocery list for the day.

The Guggenheim building is weird.  I am not a fan.  The quality of light seemed a little bluish/harsh and the white was too stark and sterile.

A few paintings in the Kandinsky collection.  These stood out because they have actual color in them.

The kids, who don’t generally like art museums much anyway, were really bored in this one.  The visiting art collection was boring (in our opinion) — a series of paintings by a lady called Agnes Martin.  She went in for a “minimalist” approach, which translated to a bunch of huge canvasses with nearly nothing on them.  Every single one looked like a wallpaper sample aimed at people who want a neutral interior, a la “white on white” and beige popular in the 1980s .  If you look closely at the photo below, you can see a couple of her works — you can sort of make out the square edges. The paintings themselves are almost exactly the same color as the white walls.

Standing outside the Guggenheim trying to determine if the rain has slackened enough that we can walk to the Neue Gallerie down the street.

The Neue Galerie New York is small and doesn’t have a very big collection, but they have a lot of works by Klimt, with the most famous piece being “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (aka “Woman in Gold”).  We don’t have any photos because they had a strict no-photography policy.  We enjoyed The Neue Galerie a lot more than we did the Guggenheim.

Now off in another Uber to Chinatown for lunch.  We chose the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, one of the oldest dim sum restaurants in New York.

Even in an off-hour for lunch, the place was packed.  The ordering process is to mark off numbers on a list (as in, “#4″ or #32”) and each dish is brought to your table as it’s ready.  The plates are small and around $4.50 each, so you can order a lot of different things for the table.  That way everyone gets to try everything.

 After lunch, the weather had improved quite a bit.  We went exploring.  

This shop (pictured below) is the oldest store in Chinatown.  They sell porcelain.  I bought a couple of tiny wine cups.  They probably hold about 2 teaspoons each, so I’m not sure what kind of wine one would serve in them.  I intend to use them for soy sauce.

Another shop was packed with all sorts of odds and ends, including a huge jade penis statue.  The kids giggled over that one.

Across the street is a store with imported items from Nepal.  I bought a blanket/shawl made of Yak hair, although the tag on it said “made in Tibet.”

Chinatown abruptly ends and turns into Little Italy.  Josie pointed out that while Chinatown had zero Christmas decorations, across the street Little Italy was lit up like nobody’s business.

Dessert in Ferrara, one of the oldest bakeries/cafes in New York.  They opened their doors in 1892.  We were seated upstairs and had what is possibly one of the best desserts we’ve ever tasted.

Adam and I both had a cannolo Siciliano.  Josie and Holden chose Chocolate Truffle Cake “Death by Chocolate” and Isabella opted for White Chocolate Raspberry Ribbon cake.  The kids also each had a scoop of vanilla gelato.

People lined up downstairs in the bakery portion, buying treats to take home for Christmas Eve.

Across the street is Alleva, the oldest cheese store in America.  We bought half a pound of artisanal cheese to take home for wine time.

Sunday, 25 Dec 2016 — Christmas Day

Our Christmas day is off to a rotten start.  Josie woke up at 2:43 a.m. vomiting and continued to be sick all night long and well into the day.  She’s being a real trooper about it, but it did put a damper on the Christmas stocking celebration.  Adam put together Xmas socks back at home and brought them in his suitcase, so Santa could deliver a little something to the kids here in New York.  Ever since we started traveling for Christmas, we don’t do gifts.  The socks are pretty much the whole shebang.  “Santa” couldn’t put the socks out last night because Josie was camped out on the living room couch so she could be near the bathroom.

It’s now nearly 10:00 a.m. and we’re very thankful we bought the Xbox here rather than waiting until we got back home.  Josie is laying on the couch playing Battlefield One with Adam, trying valiantly to get her mind off her bad tummy.  She also used it to watch Netflix cartoons all night while she couldn’t sleep.

By 11:00 a.m., Josie thinks the only food that sounds remotely appetizing is watermelon and maybe some Gatorade, neither of which we have.  Adam and I set out to find a grocery store open on Christmas day so we could take care of our baby.  The one the internet said was open today turned out not to be (big disappointment) so we returned to the apartment and had to break the news to Josie that we had failed in our mission.  She was so gracious about it that we felt even worse, so headed back out — this time to Koreatown, hoping that a Korean market would be open.

As it turned out, the nearly-deserted streets of midtown Manhattan gave way to a bustling mob in Koreatown.  Not only was everything open, it’s seems to be where everyone in the midtown area went for lunch.  We found a Korean grocery store that carried watermelon and also bought a bag of rice and some eggs.  We returned home victorious and the watermelon actually seemed to help Josie feel a little better.

For lunch, Adam, Holden, Isabella and I went back to Koreatown to try the Korean BBQ joint we spotted the other day.  It was packed … Adam stood in line for 5 minutes or so to get to the front of the line, only to be told it would be at least another 30 minutes before we were to be seated.

Photo below:  handmade dumplings.

We ditched the Korean BBQ idea and headed in the other direction to find the Italian restaurant, Vizzo, where we ate dinner on our first night.  On the way Adam snapped a couple of pics:

The sign reads “Jews for Jesus:  Who Says You Have to Choose?  They’re Both Jewish”  We’re not sure what exactly this is, but apparently it’s a thing.

If strange amalgams of mainstream religions aren’t your cup of tea, you can go across the street and consult a psychic for $10.

Back to the apartment to check on Josie and hang out for a little while.  This is an interior shot of our dining area-slash-kitchen.  The balcony above is Holden’s room.  It’s actually a lot more private than you’d expect and he’s thrilled not to have to share a room with his sisters.

The four of us headed back out for a brief afternoon walk after Josie asked us all to leave.  (“I feel better when the apartment is really quiet.”)  We walked over to see the Flatiron Building.  The city was way more crowded at 3:00 p.m. than it was earlier in the day.  Most of the stores along Broadway were open, as well.

Isabella and Holden posing …

… which led to a “king of the hill” situation on the big rock …

… and Holden emerged victorious. Isabella’s response to losing:  “You cheated by being bigger and stronger than me.”  Holden:  “YEP.”

Once again we are near the Empire State Building.  We keep intending to go inside, but still haven’t found a convenient time.  It was around now that Josie texted “I’m feeling really horrible” and we knew it was time to head home.

Christmas evening we ate leftover pizza while Josie nibbled on watermelon bits and drank Gatorade.  We didn’t feel up to watching a movie that required much attention, so we just watched several episodes of 30 Rock instead, and headed to bed around 8:00 p.m.  Hopefully tomorrow Josie will feel better.  We have tickets to see The Lion King that we bought months ago and can’t change.

Monday, 26 Dec 2016

6:00 a.m.  Day 2 of our big disappointment begins.  Josie is feeling much better, but now Isabella is down for the count.  She is devastated because she wanted to see The Lion King more than the rest of us combined. After her first puke at 6:00 a.m., she emerged from the bathroom and announced, “I’ll be better by this afternoon.  I’m still going to The Lion King today.”   I looked into changing the tickets for another day but it isn’t possible.

10:17 a.m.  She’s now on puke #7 and has given up all hope of making a 2:00 p.m. showing.  We’re really feeling the pinch in only having one bathroom, too.  Thankfully the grocery stores are all open again today.  Adam and I were able to load up on more Gatorade, disinfectant spray and disinfectant wipes, toilet paper, ginger ale, and (for some reason that I don’t really understand) watermelon.  Who eats watermelon when they are sick?  My kids do, I guess.  It’s the only thing they want.

It’s pretty clear we’re dealing with a virus now and not random food poisoning.  Josie’s been blaming some sushi she ate from Trader Joe’s and went so far as to declare she was off sushi for the rest of her life.  Now she has to grudgingly admit that the sushi was probably innocent and that the poor people of Trader Joe’s didn’t deserve the curses she put on them.

I disinfected the entire apartment, although it’s probably way too late.  Adam, Holden and I will just have to wait and see what the future has in store for us.  Either our immune systems will fight off the virus, or we will join Isabella in the bathroom.  I think our fates are sealed one way or the other by this point.

In the meantime, Josie is starving after not eating anything but a few pieces of watermelon yesterday.  She wants to go to that Korean BBQ place we tried to go to yesterday without her, but then skipped when the wait was too long.  The short duration of her illness (roughly 24 hours) is at least a small comfort.

12:28 p.m.  We didn’t feel like walking back to Koreatown, so we went to a Greek place near our apartment.  Adam and I loved it, Holden hated it, and Josie suddenly started feeling a little green around the gills after her first bite.  The food was a bit too flavorful and rich for her delicate stomach.  I tried to get her to stay home and eat bland foods instead (banana, rice, watermelon, a bagel, maybe a hard-boiled egg) but she wanted something fancier.  That turned out to be a mistake, but luckily a small one.  We had her food boxed up to bring home and someone else can eat it for dinner.

Meanwhile, Isabella is significantly sicker than Josie was yesterday.  We walked into the apartment after lunch to the sound of retching.  She no longer has the energy to make it to the bathroom and is instead laying in bed with a large saucepan.  She said she was feeling slightly better while we were gone and ate one piece of watermelon and one strawberry, then almost instantly regretted it.  She’s back on Gatorade and ginger ale.

1:00 p.m.  We leave for The Lion King.  Josie was feeling a bit sick and decided to stay home.  When Holden, Adam and I got to the street, she texted us that she changed her mind and wanted to come after all.

4:30 p.m. The Lion King was fantastic.

8:00 p.m.  Holden is now sick.

11:29 p.m.  Adam is now sick.

11:43 p.m.  Josie is sick again.  We are in hell and it only has one bathroom.

Tuesday 27 Dec 2016

Final score:  Virus 5, Mayses 0.  I got sick in the wee hours of the morning.  Today was spent with all of us trying to fall asleep in between mad dashes to the bathroom.  Misery.

Adam had to cancel a business meeting set for this morning and reschedule it for Thursday.  With all these lost days, we are running out of time to do everything on our list.

On the bright side, there is a deli across the street that serves several different kinds of soup.  All five of us are on a liquid diet.

Wednesday 28 Dec 2016

Today the world is looking a little brighter.  Our original plan was to visit the Statue of Liberty today, but we decided that was a bit ambitious and we should probably stay within walking distance of the apartment.  We also figured it would be prudent to do things that were free in case we needed to leave in a hurry.

Holden getting ready to leave the apartment for the first time in two days.

The famous New York Library is near our place.  You can almost feel the excitement of the kids.

Outside in the library’s courtyard.  Adam calls this one “Sleeping Man, Sleeping Pigeon.”

Bryant Park is around the corner from the library.  They have a winter market set up here similar to the ones in Vienna.  This is the other ice skating venue in the city and it was really crowded today.

People in line to skate.  It doesn’t even look like a line.

Isabella and Josie checking out one of the jewelry stalls.

This shop (below) specialized in items hand carved out of tagua nuts from a type of palm tree found in Ecuador.  The seeds are known as “vegetable ivory.”  It really does look like ivory or bone.  I bought a little hummingbird.

Josie loved this curved building and asked Adam to get a photo of it.

The Chrysler building. We entered the lobby, which is art deco gorgeous, but couldn’t go any further without an ID badge.  They don’t want looky-loos traipsing through their building.

The kids are fascinated with how many steam grates there are in New York.  This one was undergoing repairs.

Another angle of the Chrysler Building.

We walked by Grand Central Station again…

… and eventually ended up by the UN.  This place is heavily guarded and nobody is getting in without proper credentials.  They do have tours for the public down on one end, but the line was long and we were tired and hungry.

We thought there would be a nice selection of international restaurants near the UN, but there wasn’t.  Instead we saw this …

… so we hiked back to Madison Ave to find a decent place to get some more chicken soup.

(Below) In front of UNIQLO.  They had a fire scare that turned out to be a false alarm.  The firemen then let little kids sit on the front of the fire truck to get their pictures taken.

It’s hard to see in the photo below, but if you look closely you can see the lit-up cougars on the Cartier building.  It was really pretty.

This sculpture is one of the establishing shots used in the show 30 Rock, so we felt compelled to copy it.

We walked a total of 8.2 miles today.  It feels like a major victory after the past few days.

The second half of our trip will be continued in the next post.  Hopefully it will not contain any illnesses.  Fingers crossed!