Leaving New York's never easy...

This is a poster that I saw in the NY subway: "I'd leave New York but I'd be frightened of missing something".* I guess this sums up the view of pretty much any New Yorker that you speak to.** (I'm now writing this well into my 36th hour of wakefulness - how I hate overnight flights - so please excuse the more-than-usual-rubbishness of this entry...) I mean, there is absolutely everything and anything you could want in this city. For example, we ate in a Japanese restaurant, and were greeted by いらっしゃいませ's a million times, just like in Japan, with real Japanese people making the yakitori (by the way, I got to eat yakionigiri for the first time since leaving Japan~ and it was better than any yakionigiri I'd eaten in Tottori! Oops, except for the ones I used to get from the vending machine at the service station on the way to Osaka...) and all the other customers were Japanese! So it's like having Japan in your own city! Or any other country for that matter... I guess if I lived in NY then I wouldn't want to leave either - why would you want to when everything's at your doorstep? And how can New Yorkers live anywhere else in the world? How can anywhere else compare? I guess they can live other places, but they will always be longing to go back...

So, here I am back in the Olde Yorke. Back to the blog, trying to make it look cool, although I can't figure out still how to make the font a different colour (must be my old fashioned Mac). It's pretty impossible for me to write here everything (and if I did there would be nothing left to talk about with you guys...) I've posted a few pics of things. From the top: Me and Fran on our way to the UN, the UN buliding (worth the visit, but the tour was a little disappointing), the Spamalot sign (yay - we got tickets from eBay. It wasn't Spam-a-not in the end! Oh my god, it was sooooo good!! Tim Curry was brilliant!), Times Square, Grand Central Station, the Empire State Building, some street somewhere near Madison Square Garden, and Katz's Deli (yummy hot dogs). I have tons of pictures, but it would be silly to put them all here. I mean, all 100 of them...

Well, I won't bore you with every last detail of my trip, but here are a few of the highlights for me:

☆ Tenement Museum (preserved nineteenth century apartment block. Fascintating).

☆ Storm King (an outdoor sculpture park outside of the city where we saw works by Roy Litchenstein and Andy Goldsworthy, amongst others...)

☆ cupcakes (the ones we bought for dinner at Kumi's).

☆ Fiddler on the Roof (and how we sat right in the front row!)

☆ Spamalot (fantastic).

☆ Cafe Lalo (where You've Got Mail was filmed...)

☆ Bryant Park (where I wrote all your postcards, you people!)

☆ Bagels for breakfast with Fran and Jonathan.

☆ Walking in Central Park (now suffering with blisters~ silly me, wore the wrong shoes) and reading on the grass...

☆ Fairways (no other market like it!!)

☆ The United Nations (despite the dreary 40's decor, an important place to go. By the way, are there any countries that are not in the UN~~???)

☆ The Guggenheim (actually a little disappointing, given that they were in the middle of installing a new exhibition, but the building itself never fails to impress).

☆ Being anonymous in a big city (isn't it great?!)

☆ Knish (a Jewish snack food that I discovererd - basically a potatoey dumpling)

(In no particular order, by the way.)

I miss the place already!

And why do they not sell Quaker granola anywhere!!!! It's ridiculous!!!

I need to make the blog look better I know with the layout, but I'm cream crackered... I need to sleep...

But, thank you F & J for a great time. I will be back ;)



*Fran, I may have got this wrong - correct me please!
** You might have something to say on this too...