Weekend in NY City

Too busy all week to write about this, but last weekend we went on a family trip to NYC. Old-timers here may remember that we took the kids there two years ago, so they were eager to visit again. We spent four days there, flying JetBlue (always happy with their service), and generally having great fun. We did touristy things, mainly whatever the kids wanted to do. No online access at all!

So we shopped at F.A.O.Schwartz and at Macy's:

We ate a chocolate-based lunch at Max Brenner:

We traveled by Underground, where I tried to do what Grrrl does and took pictures of the subway art:

We took a Bus Tour criss-crossing Manhattan from Central Park down to Battery Park:

We saw acrobatic dancers at one of the Subway stations:

We saw "Young Frankenstein" at Hilton Theater on Broadway and it was brilliant and very funny. Scenography and special effects were amazing. I was worried when I saw the pictures that I would be dissappointed in Igor, but he was played by John Patrick Walker instead of Christopher Fitzgerald and, if anyone can do a better impersonation of Marty Feldman, I still have to see that. Now we have to rent the movie so the kids can see it, too.

We had dinner at Hard Rock Cafe on Times Square:

We saw the ballet Le Bayadere, performed by the American Ballet Theatre at the Lincoln Center. Gillian Murphy was great as Nikiya and David Halberg was amazing as Solor. I was a little underwhelmed by Yuriko Kajiya as Gamzatti (she danced the role in place of Michele Wiles), but perhaps it has something to do with the role - Nikiya has much more emotion to depict through dance than Gamzatti, so technical perfection of Kajiya was in the shadow of what Murphy could do to convey all those emotions through dance. Arron Scott received the greatest applause from the audience, mainly due to his exceptional athleticism in the role of the Bronze Idol in the Third Act. But for me, the most breath-taking part was Act II, Solor's opium-induced dream, in which 24 Shades danced, slowly onto and the down the stage in a very long sequence. Their torsos and legs were darker, somewhat merging with the dark background of the set. The tutus were bright white, in contrast. If one stopped looking at individual dancers and took in the scene as a whole, the sequence of visual patterns displayed by the 24 white tutus was astonishing - perfect coordination and one could see how the choreographer and the scenographer worked together to hypnotize us into melding and meshing those 24 bodies into a single big body of smoke, slowly entering and filling the stage! Brilliant!

We went to Rockefeller Center:

And saw the Gay Pride Parade walk by:

We saw a real live rat in the middle of the day (which means that the population is huge underground), and also an inflated animal symbol of the City:

...and, for the last meal before rushing off to JFK airport, kids wanted the familiarity of McDonalds (I am holding a toy of the snake warrior from Kung Fu Panda):

Luckily for us, the kids are now big enough to be locked up in their hotel room for an hour on their own, so Mrs.Coturnix and I could go downstairs and have some good beer:

If you want to see more pictures (and there are far too many to post them all on the blog), you can see them on Flickr (as well as on Facebook if you look at my Profile and then look at my Pictures).