Back from New York

I had an excellent time in New York. I'm somewhat on the tired side just now though, so I think what we're going to get here will just be a nice little list of cool things from the trip.

- Central Park was much warmer and more pleasant than when I was there in February a few years ago.

- I'm bummed that you can't tour the stock exchanges since 9/11 but I had a fun, financial-geeky time in the Museum of American Financial History.

- The World Financial Center has a lot of things besides finance in it, including a wonderful exhibit on African puppets.

- Miriam and I went to a swing dance, but it was the first night there after my red-eye flight, so I didn't last too long. Still fun, though.

- I visited the shoe store where Miriam works and got some nice Moda Lanzo shoes, which will be a nice occasional alternative to dance sneakers.

- Food: Some very good Turkish, Indian and Moroccan restaurants. Also a shakshouka-making experiment with Dan and Roseanne, (and with tech support by phone from Miriam's dad).

- The NY library had a beautiful antique maps exhibit that unfortunately I wasn't allowed to take photographs of. Fascinating to look at, though.

- There's a section of the Berlin wall on 53rd street. For some reason, though, they had to let some artist loose on it, and it looks like it's covered with graffiti, even though it's intentionally that way.

- Miriam magically got some free tickets to a piano recital at Carnegie Hall (well, actually the Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie). Very nice program of Bach, Brahms, Liszt and Ravel.

- The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens are lovely, and have some wonderful flowering cherry trees right now.

- The Children of Uganda show had some fantastic music, drumming, singing and dancing. The youngest kid there was 6, and had both singing and dancing solos, and she was incredible.

- The Natural History Museum requires at least two days to see properly, I think. Half a day per floor. As it was, we were pretty rushed by the time we got to the dinosaurs. Should have started with them.

- The MOMA also could have used some more time, but since modern art is much more hit-and-miss with me, my approach there is to sweep through everything quickly first, and then decide what to go back to.

- I wanted to see Spamalot, but the show times all conflicted with other things that were already planned. I got to see Rent, though, which I hadn't ever seen before, and I enjoyed it.

- I seemed to encounter an inordinate number of books I wanted to read during this trip, even considering the way I usually am with books. I have several sheets of notepaper now that I've been carried around and covering with titles.

- Coming home on the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake was creepy. I was temporarily freaked out when I saw the newspapers reprinting original headlines like "Earthquake and fires leave San Francisco in ruins."

- Photos of the trip are here.