A New York Christmas
Knox and I decided to spend Christmas weekend in New York City. While we took the cheap Greyhound to get there, we splurged on a king-bed suite at the Murray Hill East Suites. We walked a lot around the city. Sight-seeing highlights included:
The New York Public Library, where we saw “The Splendor of the Word” exhibit on illuminated medieval manuscripts; the detailed workmanship is just amazing. We also saw the “I am with you” exhibit celebrating the sesquicentennial of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
The Sea, Air, and Space Museum on the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Intrepid, where I got to meander the flight deck and to walk through a British Airways Concorde. To be honest, the rest of the museum was too martial for my taste
Bodies: The Exhibition at the South Street Seaport Complex, one of several corpse shows making the rounds where we got to see plastified real corpses with various systems, organs, diseases, and malformations clearly displayed. Most ethereal of all were the displays of the human circulatory system: the blood vessels were preserved while the surrounding tissue was removed chemically, creating ghostlike impressions of human beings.
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where we saw the exhibit “Fashion in Colors,” in which every room was dedicated to examples of a given color in fashion. We also saw a smaller exhibit, “Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection,” which included new pieces by Shonibare in his signature style depciting two of the museum’s founders.
The American Folk Art Museum whose permanent collection of art-by-the-masses has some curious and touching pieces. Most eye-catching, I thought, were the anonymous painted and ornamented insects made out of soda cans, which the museum picked up at a yard sale; a crocheted rug made entirely out of Wonder Bread bags and found in an old woman’s house upon her death; and a quilt made out of condom containers. One of the temporary exhibits, “Obsessive Drawing”, consists of works by people dealing with traumatic life events or just their own OCD.
We had excellent food as well (not even counting street vendors!):
- A fancy meal at Le Bateau Ivre, a delightful little French restaurant
- A Christmas Eve dinner at a wonderful Mexican place, Zarela, where the dulce de leche pancakes were to die for
- A fancy organic lunch at Le Pain Quotidien
- A wee bit of European-style hot chocolate at our most favorite haunt of all, Marie Belle
