Sigh… time is flying past so quickly here, I can’t believe I’m writing in day 8 already! It won’t be long before I’m back at work. That’s going to be a crash down into reality; I haven’t worked yet this month! Well, we’ve already covered a lot of what we wanted to see here in New York, so we’re just ‘mopping up’ the last bits. We went to MOMA today (the Museum of Modern Art), mainly to see Johanna’s favourite painting, ‘Starry Night’. Typically, that was the only painting that was currently out on tour. It’s still a good gallery though; it’s a lot easier to deal with than the absolute marathon ones we’ve been to already. Being a gallery of modern art, there’s a lot of shit to wade through, but there’s some great stuff in there. One of the best sections is the design and architecture one; it’s full of weird chairs and lights, and is quite fascinating. There’s also currently an exhibit on about home design, so there was an old post-war prefab house set up on the top floor. It was ace!
We left there after a couple of hours to get back to the hotel, as I wasn’t feeling too great. Johanna is convinced it was the Chicken, Jalapeno and Tabasco sauce sandwich that I ate after it’d been sat out in 100° heat for 24 hours. I’m not convinced.
Anyway, after reconvening at the hotel for a few hours, we had to go out again – mainly because I’d got up to volume 9 of Death Note, and that’s the only one of the twelve that Forbidden Planet had sold out of, and thus the only one I’m missing. So we set off to take a wander up to Virgin, with me under strict instructions that I was allowed 20 minutes in there, no more. We popped into Toys ‘R’ Us on the way there again, and picked up an EVE to accompany Wall.E. They interact and everything, you just set one off and the other starts talking back. They carry on until you switch them off, too. It was cute for about 10 minutes. They’re both ace though, can’t wait to get them home and unpack them properly.
Well, Virgin had everything but volume 9, so I persuaded Johanna to walk down to Kinokuniya bookstores to see if they had it. On the way, we went down a street that had a sign reading ‘No Horn - $350 penalty’. That must kill New Yorkers. They love nothing more than beeping at everything. Hell, we’ve even seen bicycles here that have their own air horn. Anyway, turns out Kinokuniya also had all the volumes except volume 9. Well, they had volume 9 in Japanese, but that ain’t much good to me. It seems that everyone in New York got to volume 9 the same time I did. Well, after a walk back to the hotel, I noticed that there was a Barnes & Noble on the block next to us, and yes, they had it – so our 10-block trek around midtown was slightly in vain. Ah well, we bought some good presents on our trails!
We went out again later to grab a bite to eat. We decided to head to Times Square, as we haven’t seen it at night yet. It’s crazy, there’s so much light pollution that it doesn’t ever get dark! I was also entertained by the dodgy streethawks that come out at night – there was a guy there with a big bag of bootleg DVDs – Dark Knight, Hancock, Wall.E, Wanted… I haven’t seen anything like that since the guys down The Moor in Sheffield, who you used to see legging it down the road with a crate full of knock-off films while the coppers cased them. My burger cravings kicked in, so we tried the Hard Rock café – only to discover there was a queue to get in at 10:30pm! We got to see some cool memorabilia in there though, including the suits the Beatles wore when they first arrived in America. We ended up in TGI Fridays across the road, as I can’t get enough of that Jack Daniels sauce.
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