Living it up in New York - Part 1

We arrived in New York City more than 10 days ago. I was a little tense before we left Bangalore. The husband having flown the coop, so to speak, several days earlier (on work), the whole project of packing, cleaning the house, clearing the fridge, and locking up while being on track to catch a 4 am international flight fell to me. Obviously and fortunately, this was something I'd never had to do before and I was a little paranoid that we would land up at the airport at 2 am to find that I'd left our passports behind!! As it turned out, we managed to board the flight in one piece except that as I was checking in at the Emirates Counter, I realized that I'd left my phone behind in the cab! 

Very luckily, the cab driver was someone we knew and I spent most of my waiting time at Bangalore airport trying to contact S through a pay phone so that he could alert the driver about my phone. 

Several hours of snoozing, eating and movie-watching later, we landed in NewYork, passed through immigration and hailed a cab to Manhattan, to the place of a dear friend and college batchmate, J. Day 1 was a light one (by our standards!). I took the kids to Times Square - ToysRUS, the M&M store, the Disney store. We walked around along with the teeming crowds, gawked like all the other tourists, ate lunch and were back in the apartment by afternoon. In the evening, I took the kids across the road to Hudson River Park where we walked by the waterfront, raced against each other and smelt the flowers (quite literally!).

S arrived the next day and it was such a lovely day (sunny and cloudy in turns with a sharp nip to the air) that we decided to spend it outdoors in Central Park. The cherry blossoms were in bloom and to say they were incredibly pretty would be an understatement.

View of the skyline from Central Park

Cherry blossom tree

Blue skies

The turtle pond

That evening, S and I took some rare and much-needed couple time off to catch a Broadway show (my first!) - The Phantom of the Opera. Later, we also walked around Times Square to incredulously take in the flashing neon lights and wonder at the mass of humanity abroad at 11.30 pm :)

Next day's stop was at the American Museum of Natural History. In the interests of accomodating varied interests, S volunteered to take the kids for the day to the museum while I took off with my friends to walk the Brooklyn Bridge and wander through Little Italy and Chinatown, capturing sone of the flavour of this lovely city.

Part II coming up in a day or two :)