On Thursday I went to the downtown area, and specifically Battery Park City and Tribeca. Tribeca is a chichi area full of designer shops and expensive restaurants, though I did also track down the fire station that was used as the headquarters in Ghostbusters, which I got a little overexcited about.
Battery Park City is built on land reclaimed from the river by the use of landfill (a lot of which was dug up while making the World Trade Centre), and is a promenade of massive skyscrapers and gardens curving round the botttom part of Manhattan. It was all quite awe-inspiring, really, though the hole at Ground Zero was omni-present. Still, a beautiful and peaceful place, only marred by running into a big crowd of Spurs fans 'singing' chants outside a Starbucks. I walked quickly past and temporarily pretended not to be able to understand what they were saying.
Friday was another stormy day (it seems to be a trend at the moment) so I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side. Wow. You are supposed to give a suggested $20 donation but I walked through without anyone stopping me (I'll give money next time, I promise). It's fantastic stuff. I spent about four hours in there (admittedly taking my time) and did maybe a third of one of the two and a half floors. So I only saw the ancient Byzantine (lots of gold), European pre-renaissance (lots of gold and scarily adult-like baby Jesuses) and the armor and arms sections. I ran through the American sections to find the cafe and the ladies. Apparently, their modern art collection is really special, and there is a huge bamboo sculpture on the roof that you can climb up, so I will definitely go back for at least seconds, if not thirds.
On Saturday, I tried to go for a free walking tour around Wall Street, but my guidebook was out of date and it was no longer running. However, I started talking to a helpful girl who rang them and we arranged to go on a different tour later in the day. Big Onion do loads of tours around the city, all lead by post-graduate history students. Ours was called Andrew, and I would have considered him attractive had he not mimicked my accent any time I asked a question. Grr. Anyway, we covered the stock exchange, loads of the history of Wall Street and the history of the evolution of New York into a major trading port, through the Dutch and English colonial times through to the present day. Very interesting, though half the names were lost on me, so I really must brush up on my American history.
Today seemed like it was going to be a nice day, so I went up to Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. When I got there, however, I discovered that it was free entry on Tuesdays (instead of $8 today) so instead I went to Green-Wood Cemetery. This is a huge cemetery full of famous Brooklynites. It was beautiful and sombre and peaceful. That is, until a huge thunderstorm started and I found myself at the wrong end of the cemetery to get out. So I huddled in the doorway of a family tomb as my white summer dress got more and more see-through and I tried to convince myself that neither a zombie apocalypse nor an axe-murderer were about the round the corner and get me. Don't worry, they didn't.
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