New York the fifteenth

I picked a good day to escape from New York. There's lootings where the power is out, violence in the gas station queues, the distinct smell of garbage piling up - the sanitation services have all been reassigned to storm cleanup duty.

Not to say New York still isn't amazing. It was crisp and sunny, the subway was free, and I had 90 minutes for a final fling.

The Lincoln Centre is a bunch of performing arts venues all together in a huge amazing complex. It's also where the Juilliard School is - you know, that place that people get accepted to and then can't attend because of dramatic reasons.

Lincoln Centre doggie.

The Metropolitan Opera House is currently showing a season of The Tempest. How spookily prescient.

I had no idea Chuck Bass lived on the West Side.

My last view of New York from the cab. The car service I had booked to the airport had to cancel due to no gas. I was super lucky to get a cab, and the driver told me he queued at a gas station from 1am until 6am. I suspected he was exaggerating, until we passed a queue for gas at least a kilometre long. Bloody hell. Needless to say, I tipped like a Rockefeller.

This was scribbled on the back of the driver's seat in my cab. How appropriate.

New York the fourteenth

Mostly shopping today. I only like shopping under two conditions: that I know what I want, and that I know where to get it. Souvenir shopping does not meet either of these requirements - but it's the unspoken price for getting picked up at the airport at the other end.

This is actually yesterday - Halloween cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery. I hope that the storm had thrown them off their game somehow and these are not the cupcakes that built an empire, because the half of one I ate was really really awful. I do like the black cat hiding in the icing though.

Amongst the Ns at the United Nations. Hi Helen!

O...K then.

Oh, this is really cool - the Helmsley Building on Park Ave. It's built over the road and the cars tunnel through it.

Not that I haven't already passed this way several times, but I finally got a photo. Wheeee!

Yikes. Overkill much?

Self portrait, Saks Fifth Avenue window.

Rat sculpture. Tee hee.

The astute reader will have noticed I'm not at the basketball right now. Postponed. Bah. No giant foam finger for Amy.

New York the thirteenth

Hey, my thirteenth day in New York is Halloween! I wonder if this entitles me to a free haunting or face-rip-offening...

I walked right around Central Park today, up the west side and down the east. Central Park West is a bit of an obstacle course of fallen branches and leaf piles, but Upper East Siders seem to have used the power of hired help to clean their side up.

Hey, an Apple store queue. I don't think they're even queueing for anything, it's just something that spontaneously happens around Apple stores.

The Dakota. Imagine...if the park had been open and I'd been able to go to Strawberry Fields.

Freaking avalanche.

Northwest corner of Central Park, Fred Douglass Circle.

Bricked-up windows in Morningside Heights. Some nights you can still hear the screams...

Morningside Park and the Cathedral of St John the Devine. No barbecuing in this area - all religious martyrs must be crucified or beheaded.

The northeast and least impressive corner of the park, but I've caught them all now.

At least with all these closed gates you can get some really cool pictures of gates.

Upper East Side. I could totally stand to live here - even though I think it's actually a dentist's office.

Cute UES flower bed on the footpath.

Louis Armstrong sculpture on the Park Ave median strip.

And finally, books on the windowsill of my hotel's dining room. Smirk.

New York the twelfth

Sorry I don't have a more harrowing tale of how I survived Hurricane-then-no-longer-a-hurricane Sandy. You're welcome to tell people that someone you know was in New York City the night Sandy hit and got a pretty good sleep, aside from being woken up by a phone call from someone wanting to speak to Joan Jones from Australia and who tried to pass on the message anyway because "well, you sound Australian".

Cool story bro.

I walked as far south as 23rd Street this morning to get a misleading-perspective photo of the Flatiron Building. The power is out south of 39th (I was spared darkness by just two blocks!) so the walk down was...well, lacking coffee, but I didn't see any major devastation.

Coming back up 5th I finally thought to take a photo of the Empire State Building. Eh, I'm not really a fan.

I much prefer the Chrysler Building. And that's Grand Central Station on the left.

I was all excited for missing children, but it seems New York milk cartons advertise Broadway musicals.

Central Park is still closed for business, so the most I could do was look longingly and take photos.

Southwest entrance to Central Park. I tell you, there's a lot of perplexed loitering in the city at the moment.

Crane of Dangling Doom. Also, see how that lamp post is missing a lamp? That's because it was lying on the footpath all smashed to crap.

Squiggle Zealand at Columbus Circle.

Pumpkinville, near Times Square.

The Halloween parade, which I was really looking forward to, has been postponed and the status of the basketball game I'm going to on Thursday is pending - but even if it goes ahead the Brooklyn-bound transport situation is looking to be pretty bleak.

Trying not to pout. Bigger picture and all that. But still!

New York the eleventh

Weird day today. No subway, no buses, hardly any shops open, tourists with nowhere to take their money wandering around stupidly. I did spend most of the day out walking, but I stayed pretty close to my hotel in case I needed to recover quickly from saturation, and it's kind of a bummer to be here and not be able to do things.

The sewer mutants will be partying underground tonight!

New York Pubic Library. Wish this had been open, but it's right by my hotel so hopefully I'll get to see inside it at some point.

This is pick and mix, Lego Store style - you grab a small or large cup and fill it with whatever pieces you want. It's so awesome I can't stand it. I've never even seen orange Lego. Lime! Navy! Magenta!

The empty ice and no flags of 30 Rock. I wonder if some poor NBC intern had to take down all the flags.

Because I was there anyway I went and peeped in the window of the Today Show (now that I know where and what it is - NBC studio tour, entertaining and educational), and totally got myself on TV. I'm practically Tina Fey.

Oh. What's up, Atlas?

Back of St Patricks Cathedral. The front is covered with my old nemesis, scaffolding.

The weather has been unextreme in Midtown - no worse than any tempestuous day in Auckland. All that severe stuff on the news is happening on the ocean coasts, of which Manhattan has none. It does have tidal rivers, and the the lower tip of the island may flood when the tide comes in, but up in Midtown it's mostly inconvenienced out-of-towners.

New York the tenth

This morning I knocked off the last of the major museums on my list, the Museum of Modern Art. MOMA. MO-MO-MO-MO-MOMA.

There's some pretty interesting stuff in there, but also an uncomfortably large number of essentially blank canvasses. Oh how I wish I'd been the one to invent the concept of passing that off as art.

OOF!

Starry Night. I quite like this.

The Scream. I don't really care for this, but here it is. Also, what did you think of my "people looking at art" photographic series?

MOMA sculpture garden. Those chairs may well be art.

When I take my glasses off this photo turns into an Impressionist painting.

Picasso's goat.

Trying to take an artful photo of art. Failing.

Later on I sauntered around Greenwich Village and parts adjacent. It's nice.

It's also full of monsters! Muahahahaha!

Not sure what to make of all this storm business. Abbey's already told me to stand back, but it doesn't feel like there's a hurricane coming through. I did buy a couple of bottles of water, partly as a concession to panic, but mostly to use up this endless stack of dollar notes I've been accumulating.