With nothing really left to see but shops and museums, we retrode our paths to the Empire State Building and up Broadway towards Times Square. We stop by at Planet Hollywood for lunch. The Stallone/Willis/Schwartznegger owned chain is part resturant/part movie museum, and amongst thye memorabilia in the New York branch is THE REAL DEATHSTAR FROM STAR WARS! Oh, and the Predator head too :)
Anyway, I have quite a delicious Lasagne which I can't quite finish and an amazing Strawberry & Banana smoothie (JC opts for a fat BBQ burger since he's been good enough to stear clear of them all week thus far). Planet Hollywood ends up taking a significant portion of the day, but we soon up and leave for the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), which is actually JCs decision (for a change).
MOMA turns out to be quite cool. I've very recently run out of space on my camera's 256mb memory stick, but JC was happily snapping away at the various sculptures and paintings. I just have loads of different wallpapers for my phone now :( - hopefully some of them will come out OK on the PC. We wonder around the place until my legs take tremoundous amounts of force to work. Am I tired? Or is it just the sum total of all my hangovers this week?
After MOMA, we head back to the hotel down Lexington Avenue via Midtown Comics, where I manage to lose $100 in about 10 minutes. How?
A massive double compendium of the American Splendour comic
A Frank Miller 'Robocop' Graphic Novel.
The first edition of the new Battlestar Galactica comic
&
Action figures of Jay & Silent Bob.
I am my own worst enemy as far as buying pointless crap goes. Oh yeah - I saw what all the new Tranformers look like. Prime looks amazing, but they seem to have made Megatron look like some kind of alien made of crystals. Wierd. I'm sure the movie will rule anyway... It's Michael Bay after all.... um... :S
Anyway, in the evening we head back to some of the Bars we tried out earlier in the week around Alphabet City and Lower East Side. After warming up at 2 places, we head further downtown only to be sheperded into this underground bar where they have rappers freestyling around some kind built in Art Exhibition (How much Art can you have in one day?). It was OK, but we eventually wind up in a place called the Lakeside Lounge, which contains an old school photo booth that takes a strip of four different* pictures like in the olden days. We finish the night at 5am in pursuit of food. We go to a hotdog place on the corner of a road (somewhere?) and order the same as a chatty local who (suprise, suprise) remarks about our english accents.
We sit down with the chap and indulge in some idle banter as the sun begins to rise and before long find ourselves on the subject of 9/11. I wish I could remember the guys name, but anyway... he goes to give us his own account of what happened on that day and how it affected him. I didn't mean to provoke him, but I thanked him for sharing his experiences and he seemed pretty cool with it all.
And that, I believe, almost nails what it is I've enjoyed about this trip so much: The People. They've been courteous, helpful, friendly and entertaining in almost every instance. They just seem to want to get on, with us foreigners, as well as each other. It made the whole place a lot more intimidating than it could so easily have been (walking down some of those streets on the Lower East Side shit me up good and proper) and I'm sure - in time - it will be what makes me return...
*As opposed to four identical, which seems the norm in 21st century photo booths.
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