Sunday in NYC

We started off Sunday morning with a trip to the Guggenheim Museum.

A.           1.  I don’t have as much appreciation for museums in general as I should.

B.                   2. The building is REALLY cool.

C.                  3.Free audio tour.

D.                 4. Lots of art (generally with bright colors and pretty shapes)

E.                  5. Van Gogh painting—this one was awesome.

The combination of all these things brought around a mostly pleasant experience. Frank Lloyd Wright always does a knock out job of designing buildings with purpose and grace and beautiful external presence (among the skyscrapers).  

As we headed back out into the sunny NY weather we decided it was time for lunch—this time at a classic NY hotdog joint called Papaya. This place was obviously popular and for good reason. The hot dogs were delicious and the freshly made smoothies were to die for. With a little delay, I also got the highly coveted curly fries. They’re only highly coveted because everytime I get the craving for some curly fries (say, on a roadtrip home) we’re always one exit too late or the fryer has just been shut off. You may say this is a sign I shouldn’t indulge in the greasy mess of potato goodness, but I was determined to get them…and SUCCESS! 

Post lunch meant a trip to the Empire State Building (we really take the term tourist to heart in this family). The number of velvet ropes and stands gave me an idea of how long you could actually wait to go up the 80 some floors, but luckily our longest wait was about 5 minutes. We hung out on the observation deck for quite awhile and saw the city from…well all angles.  

Just bein' a lil artistic I suppose

Surprise, food time…again! We headed to Mario Batali’s “Eataly”—combination grocery store and 5 restaurant-ish counters.  Walking through the doors is basically stepping into an Italian Sam’s Club—except with pricey samples and everything imported straight from Italy. The idea is you can sit down at any of the restaurants and enjoy pizza, pasta, paninis, salads, gelato, espresso, wine, fresh pasta yadda yadda yadda—and then you can go buy the ingredients to make the stuff at home. Awesome. So we got paninis, some fancy Italian pop, and then assorted dessert things (many more visits to this locale in the next few days...). 

Check out that DESSERT!

After Eataly we went to visit a family from the summer camp I work at who lives on Park Ave in a very impressive apartment. It was fun to visit them and talk about summer (which will probably be here far sooner than I realize). 

Rene and I at the fancy schmancy Park Ave apartment

Then we jumped on the subway downtown to see “Avenue Q.” This is an off broadway production which is a take off on sesame street with puppets etc. The theme is about graduating college and thinking you’ll make it big right away, only to find the world just isn’t so nice once you leave the comfy confines of campus. Hmmm…maybe I should slow down with that hurry to get to graduation?? The story was really cute and there were some seriously raunchy scenes/songs, but definitely worth seeing.  

After what felt like ten miles of walking on this gorgeous day, we FINALLY made it back to the apartment and I’m pretty sure it only took me a few minutes to fall asleep on the couch to get ready for another crazy day in NYC.