The first time we came to New York, we didn’t have a lot of time to take in the general ambiance of the city, as it were, since we spent most of our 22 hours sleeping, talking to people in cafes, and madly rushing between cafes. (And visiting Ground Zero. That’s about it.) This time we could slow down a little.
But only a little, because slowing down in New York will get you run over – by pedestrians or cars, take your pick. It’s a very intense experience, that’s for sure. Even outside areas like Times Square – which are visually overstimulating in a very serious way – there are ads, colour, sound, everywhere.
Well, not quite everywhere. We finally managed a walk through Central Park to get from the Met to our subway stop at the AMNH. The park isn’t what I’d call quiet – it’s very well-used, and there are people walking dogs absolutely everywhere – but compared to the rest of the city it’s positively restful, and full of cute little hills and surprises; just on that walk we passed an ampitheatre and a castle. I know there’s a zoo, further down, and several ponds and lakes as well as the main reservoir. I’m not sure how much of the park’s terrain is original and how much is landscaped – given its location, my money would be on landscaped – but it’s a stunning addition to such a large city. Christchurch actually boasts the third-largest center-city park in the world, after Central Park and Hyde Park, but let’s be honest, Hagley is mostly sports fields. (And the Botanic Gardens, and the Avon, but mostly: rugby and cricket.)

There was a sort of peace at the start of the morning, too, with the sun pouring down between the buildings and the streets quiet, but it was more like a pause.
You’d think a walk through Central Park wouldn’t be a particularly attractive proposition in late February, but remember that whole lack-of-winter thing we’ve been having? Also in New York. We strolled past green lawns and a decent number of daffodils. It was all rather unseasonable, frankly, but hugely to our advantage.

And an enormous statue of a medieval Polish king, because that's...probably totally logical in some way I am unaware of. Yep.
As I mentioned in my last post, one of the things we were going to try and do in New York was eat food that we can’t get up in Western Mass without a) great effort, b) making it ourselves, or c) both, like, for example, pies. Which lose some of their fat-laden convenience-food gloriousness when you have to simmer your meat filling for two hours on the stove first. (Don’t get me wrong, they still taste good and have the bonus of containing actual meat, but it’s not like popping down to the dairy and grabbing one.)
We pretty much failed on the “eat interesting food” front, because we were so busy dashing from place to place that we ended up eating whatever was closest to us at the time, which had a definite bias towards pizza. Not that New York is a bad place to be eating pizza, mind you, we had some very excellent examples of the dish, but it isn’t like we’ve been deprived of the stuff since we got to America, and pizza is, ultimately, pizza.
The one place we did manage to get to was A Salt And Battery, a fish and chip shop in Greenwich Village run by actual British people. I’d love to tell you it was amazing and satisfied eighteen months of pent-up fish-and-chip cravings in a single bite, but I can’t, because while the fish was excellent, the chips were exceedingly mediocre. (My guess would be cold oil; it was a very small shop doing a very brisk trade, and their fryers didn’t look large enough to handle the volume. Mike’s mother worked in fish and chip shops for some of his childhood, so I have been well-educated in the causes of the mediocre chip.) I ended up going online afterwards to moodily check whether our favourite fish and chip shop in Christchurch had been scheduled for demolition. It hadn’t. If I do one thing in Christchurch that isn’t catching up with people, it will be visiting that shop.
In particular, we ended up eating very quickly on the Saturday night, because we had a pretty short break in between returning from stocking up at Lush (my sister hooked me when she worked there and got 50% off on everything years ago, and I haven’t been able to kick the habit) and heading out to Broadway. I figured if we were going to do the whole New York thing, it should definitely include a Broadway musical. We were staying at a hotel about ten minutes’ walk away from most of the main theatres, so it was easy to do. We debated for some time about what to go see, but ended up settling on The Phantom of the Opera, because it was very nearly the only thing that wasn’t booked out for months in advance, not very interesting, or The Lion King. And, okay, because I’ve sort of wanted to go see it in the theatre for the better part of a decade. We had a terrible shock when we got to the theatre because there was a line halfway ’round the block; turned out that theatres are small enough in New York that there’s actually nowhere to put the audience when they aren’t sitting down. The line was for people who’d already bought tickets, to get into the theatre and be seated.
Broadway, being basically the same area as Times Square, has a similar overpreponderance of Lights! and Theatre! and Advertisements! and People!. And then you get ushered inside this theatre – I don’t know about the rest, but ours was pretty tiny – where everything is quiet and dark except for the rustling of people checking their programmes, and the occasional siren from outside, because, let’s face it, it’s New York and the soundproofing isn’t that good. We had seats about half-way down the Gods, because I didn’t fancy paying twice as much to be a few metres closer to the stage, but it didn’t matter; the show was spectacular. It’s a little paradoxical, places like that, coming to a major city to go to shows that try and take you away from where you are, but I suppose it’s the only way to get that critical mass of performers and audiences in the same place. Phantom had it’s 10,000th performance a week before we saw it, and I can only imagine how many more it’ll have, because it really was just a great show.
And that’s the thing about New York, all in all; I don’t think I could live there, or that I’d want to, not like some of the other big American cities I’ve visited – Boston or Seattle, for example – but for a weekend or a week, it’s a great show. We’ll be giving it an encore or two sometime, I’m sure.















