Crowds of tourists are the reason that I have never been to Times Square. I have never been to the Empire State Building. I avoid other tourist traps like the plague, generally, because I can't stand the crush of other tourists all trying to look at the same thing. I hate standing in line. I hate those people who push through crowds with their enormous baby strollers that come equipped with an even larger sense of entitlement. I hate going through the motions of all that nonsense.
Give me a building full of people who want to quietly examine the art. Put me among people who want to sit in a cafe and have a quiet chat or read a book. Give me a huge, bustling city at dawn or at three a.m. (Someone suggested that the only reasonable time to go to Times Square is in the middle of the night when there are still tons of people there, but it is much calmer, which sounds about right.)
But day three was devoted to the American Museum of Natural History.
We arrived by taxi, of course. Which was a good thing to do because it gave me the chance to see a tiny bit of Central Park. It was from the window of a taxi on the way to the museum, but that's fine. I'm generally okay with seeing parks that way.
There's one little tiny piece of Central Park, as seen from the fourth floor of the museum. But I'm getting ahead of myself, no?
Tickets to the Natural History Museum varied in price depending on what you wanted to see. We bought the $33 tickets, which included one presentation (we chose a 1:00 p.m. showing of "Dark Space," which was showing in the planetarium).
Then we made our way into the museum. The first rooms are the iconic habitat dioramas of taxidermied animals collected throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are beautiful and disturbing.
Like this herd of elephants, many of which were shot at different times, in different places.
It's strange for me to be among these lifelike dead things, many of which have been dead for a hundred years or more.
And it's not just because now we can see many of these animals live, in zoos. (I have a problem with zoos also.) Just writing about this stuff creeps me out.
We hopped around the museum for several hours, had coffee, had lunch, then went back to look some more.
We were pelted with facts about evolutionary history. Tyrannosaurus Rex likely balanced more horizontally, like a bird, than vertically, like a human. People coexisted with giant sloths (giant sloths, like nine foot tall sloths) and woolly mammoths. Whales evolved from dog or bear-like creatures that went back to the sea. Bear ancestors had long tails, like wolves. Lungfishes are our most closely related "fishy" relatives.
People also offer up their own unintentional information, of course. I was sitting on a bench, looking at a display of amazing costumes from all over Africa. They were made for special purposes, like rite-of-passage ceremonies, or to depict devils, for example. Some were made of grass that covered the wearer from head to toe. Some where made of thousands of seashells that rattled when the wearer moved. A woman came up to the display and, ignoring the parts of the costumes that were made of intricately woven clothes, said to her friends, "It's always so interesting to me, like, how people dressed themselves before they could make clothes." (I had to practically run and tell David--he was off examining displays of instruments--about this. And we had to mock that poor woman, saying things like, can you imagine having to collect and string together thousands of seashells just to make a shirt for yourself?)
We spent about six hours there altogether--but of course you can never spend enough time in any large museum.
By the end of the day, I was getting a bit testy. (Actually, I was ready to start punting people with their huge strollers.) It seemed like a good time to bail.
We taxied back to the hotel, of course.
We had a bit of a rest and talked about where to go for dinner. Our hotel was in the garment district, which has a lot of interesting restaurants, but we were also only a block or so away from Broadway and near 5th Avenue, where there are a ton of restaurants. (Actually, turns out that there are a ton of interesting restaurants all over New York City. Who knew?) Out of all the fancy-shmancy places we could have gone, I asked Dave if he wanted to go to Shake Shack, New York City's local, homegrown burger joint (that are now all over the east coast). There was a location a few blocks away from us in the theater district. He agreed, so that's where we went.
I had a double hamburger with everything and Dave had a SmokeShack (with cheese, bacon and cherry peppers).
We shared an order of fries and Dave got a chocolate malt (I had a few sips). When we polished all that off, Dave was still hungry so he went back for a Shack-cago dog (a hot dog with relish, onion, cucumber, tomatoes, peppers, mustard and celery salt).
YUM!
After we ate, we vacated pretty quickly as there were tons of people waiting for a table. Dave had been bugging me to do some shoe shopping (I've been unsuccessfully looking for a new pair of decent shoes for awhile), so we went to the Dr. Marten's shop next door to Shake Shack and I picked up a pair of boots, black Ember Westfields. I am very pleased with them, though I know that they are going to require a decent break-in period. (I used to wear Docs all the time, but my old pair of boots need to be resoled and I just haven't bothered.)
With our evening shopping done, we walked back to the hotel. It must have been a shoe day, because while we were gone, housekeeping had come in and turned down the beds and put out slippers for us.
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