falling in love with a skyline

So I think I've recovered enough from jet-lag, post-holiday stupor and complete inability to choose between which photos to post, to tell you a little bit about my trip to New York. I fell for Manhattan completely. I have the symptoms I used to get with a new infatuation with somebody - everything reminds me of them, a song, a movie, an image. Except that being New York, everything actually does remind me of it, because it is everywhere in movies, songs and imagery. The thing I loved most about it was the way you could be just walking along the street, watching your footing or looking in a shop window, when suddenly you'd look up and see this breathtaking skyline. From every angle and in every light it would look different, but it was beautiful in a way I hadn't really thought a city could be.


I travelled with a friend, C, who I've known the last 5 years at church. She shares with me a slightly irreverent sense of humour (important to have in church friends), and an ability to get excited about simple things. Like pancakes for breakfast, yellow cabs, rude joggers, cool pyjamas, seeing a spot from a film, every time we saw the Empire State Building, getting our makeup done at Bloomingdales, posing for stupid photos, getting dressed up... The list could go on. We were over-excited about everything, and kept making a new plan to fit everything into our days.

We shopped til we almost literally dropped in Macy's, Bloomies, Tiffanys, Victorias Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch, and cool little vintage and boutique-y type shops. We went out to see Les Miserables on Broadway, to 55 Bar in the Village, where we listened to live jazz and pretended we were cool, we saw a bit of the Halloween Parade, and a bit of the marathon going past. We saw a lot of the obvious sights - the Empire State, the Statue of Liberty, Grand Central Station, the Rockefeller Centre, the Brooklyn Bridge and a few of the less obvious ones, like the original Winnie-the-Pooh, the reading room at the New York Public Library, the Strawberry Fields garden for John Lennon, and the Guggenheim.

Some of the most memorable moments were just from seeing people living their normal lives, like stumbling across a kid's ice hockey game, overhearing couples arguing or walkers swearing at joggers in an uninhibited New York way, chatting to taxi drivers, watching a wheelchair athlete repair his bent wheel in the middle of the marathon or watching a family take a photo shoot of their kid on the Alice in Wonderland statue in the park.







I can't wait to go back and see the things we didn't manage to do. I'd like to go with mr me and see things in a different way. It was lovely to have a girly holiday, and shop without feeling guilty and annoying, and watch Breakfast at Tiffany's and When Harry met Sally as research, and get unreasonably excited about everything. But it's always wonderful to come home.