New York, Day 2, Part Two: Dying of Laughter

My mission was successfully completed, in so far as I could control. The rest is up to the U.S. Postal Service to ensure that the envelopes get to their intended recipients. It was out of my hands. With most of the day left to kill, so to speak, I headed out to Fifth Ave. It was a beautiful day, and warranted a walk. I figured that I could walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was on 33rd, and I needed to get to 81st. 47 blocks. No sweat.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day. There was a cool breeze, and the sun was warm. Not a cloud in the sky. Now, for some of you 47 blocks might seem like a bit much. It's really not. That might be because I walk to work and back every day.

For those of you who are unaware, Fifth Ave. is beautiful. It's nice and wide, so you don't feel so closed in, and there are some really beautiful churches along that route. I decided to take a smap of a couple of the sights that caught my eye.

These are the doors to St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Ave. The Cathedral itself was under renovations, so there was scaffolding everywhere. Still pretty, non?









The Church of St. Thomas.












This was my favourite part of the walk up Fifth Ave. To my immediate left, Central Park. These trees over the footpath like that were just gorgeous. I love trees.









And then, there was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By far my most favourite thing about New York.









I made it to the Met. in just under and hour, so it was roughly the same distance from my house to my work back in Ottawa. The walk was so wonderful, and early enough in the morning that there weren't that many people about, that I was utterly relaxed before I even stepped foot inside the building.

Deciding that I deserved a short break, and more food, I sat on the stairs of the Met. and soaked up some sunshine while I ate my riceworks chip things. No sooner had I sat down than this musical group of five (four singers and a bassist) began to entertain the crowd with some lovely singing. I stayed fro the entire length of their first son (my girl), before deciding that the crowd they were drawing was getting too large for my tastes. I retired to bliss inside the Met.

I took so many photos of things, it isn't funny. However, there were two things that caught my eye, and made me laugh. The first thing was more of a quite giggle and my own geekiness (new word. If Shakespear can do it, I can). For those of you who are Stargate fans, this ought to tickle you too:



The images say all the words I want to.






This next one was far too funny not too share. It had me laughing for almost a full half hour. Sure, the loud laughter was only five minutes, but for a long time afterwards, and in galleries far, far away, I would think back and giggle. I'm going to let you guess why I found this so funny:

Hint: (If you hold Ctrl while scrolling the mouse wheel, you can zoom in and out).

There were tonnes more photos, but I didn't have room to put them all here. If you want to see more of what I saw, click here to view my Picasa album.

After wandering through the Met. until about 2:30pm, I wandered outside to listen to music and ended up spying my Kung Fu brothers K.C. and M.F. I ran down to greet them and we all sat in the shade and listened to a man play classical guitar beautifully before we decided to wander through Central Park as the tour bus was very, very late. New York traffic, you understand. It was roughly 5:00pm before we were all back on the bus and headed into Flushing to meet with another Kung Fu uncle in the Chinatown there and have dinner.

By 8:30pm, the time when we all met the bus to return to our hotel, I was exhausted. Needless to say, the day was wonderful, and, being so closed in with people the whole trip, getting out on my own was lovely and very much needed!

To be continued...