Two top views, museums, and Comedy Central shows...

Have been doing so much lately I can hardly keep track of when we did what! Let's see how well I can recall it without also looking through the photos at the same time...

The night before last we went up the Empire State Building, the original plan was to go up at near-twilight and then stay for the sunset and also night view. Unfortunately, the crush of tourists (even at 8, 9pm) combined with the slow security check meant it was fully dark by the time we got up there. Nevermind, still a lovely view and we got some great photos. We went up Top of the Rock the following night and by contrast it was very spacious and relaxed, heaps less people, and much better views actually - a full vista of Central Park and also a great view of the Empire State Building itself. If you only had the chance to go up one of these in NY, I'd definitely recommend the latter.

Museum-wise we've now been to The Met(tropolitan Museum of Art) and also the Guggenheim, which was actually really interesting because they had a special exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright himself. The Met had your usual array of Byzantium, Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian stuff, etc, so we didn't actually spend as long there. Also made our first foray into Central Park which was as massive as we'd expected. On the great lawn we witnessed some sort of bizzare version of American baseball played with a dodgeball and instead of swinging with a bat you kicked with your feet. Didn't seem that fun to play or to watch...

Food-wise I've finally achieved my goal of going to Katz's deli for a pastrami sandwich - at US$14.95 a sandwich it wasn't cheap, but James & I shared that between the two of us and it was as delicious as I expected, so I think it was worth the trip! For dinner last night we went to Sip Sak, a Turkish place, which was probably some of the best Turkish food we've both had, and tonight we had some empanadas and arepas at a place on 9th Ave, again, really good... Too bad I then nearly made myself sick on ice cream at the Cold Stone Creamery, but I guess I have yet to learn from my mistakes...

This morning we went to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, which is basically an old aircraft carrier converted into a giant tourist attraction - really worth it, especially being able to go into a submarine! After that we took our 2 hour Circle Line cruise from the NY Pass, had a tour guide with an awesome NY accent and found out some interesting tidbits about the city.

Probably the most exciting thing today was NEARLY getting the chance to be in the audience of The Colbert Report, we were #7 & 8 on the standby list, but alas they only had one spare seat... Which is a shame since we spent probably two and a half hours in total around the studio, waiting, but... we weren't alone, that was for sure!

Well, I better let someone else use the computer now, tomorrow we're planning to go to the Statue of Liberty (finally) and also MoMA.

Two tours and our first celeb sighting!

After dropping our laundry off at a place around the block, we made our way to Rockefeller Plaza where we did the Radio City Music Hall and NBC Studio tours back-t0-back. We had a pretty good guide and a relatively small group of eight for the Radio City one so it was pretty good, the Art Deco interiors and design were cool, and we even got to go on the stage and meet a 'Rockette', one of two hundred dancing girls who perform regularly there (and around the country), though the one we met seemed almost... robotic in the way she recited her spiel and then offered to take photos with us.

The NBC tour was by contrast extremely packed, there were quite a few school groups going through and the pages doing the guiding were obviously quite numb to the constant flow of visitors. We got taken to Brian William's news studio, the Football in America studio, and finally the Saturday Night Live studio. The highlight of the tour though was definitely being given a chance to see Jimmy Fallon rehearse his jokes for tonight's Late Night show! We even got to talk to him 'directly' because he asked if there were any visitors from outside America, when James said 'New Zild' he responded 'England?', then I had to correct him by loudly enounciating 'New ZEEland'. Anyway, he had quite a few jokes mostly revolving around the Iran election, LA Lakers, etc. Most of them were good, except for one that nobody laughed at, and then we all laughed because nobody laughed... We'll be sure to catch tonight's show to see what made the cut!