Ci-tay day in the NYC

As part of the moving adventures from the forest of North Carolina to the concrete jungle of New York, sissy and I took a good chunk of Saturday and played tourist in Manhattan so I could indulge in various passions - photographing everything, checking items off a list, and eating really tasty food.  After our morning explorations of Brooklyn, we zipped over to Union Square and emerged from the depths of the subway to find ourselves right in the middle of the Greenmarket, which made both of us pretty happy - fruits and veggies and yummy deliciousness and artsy things and kittens for adoption (squeee, so cute!!) as far as the eye could see.  And you know what else is right there in Union Square?  Whole Foods.  Amanda was happy to find a totally familiar grocery store just a few subway stops from her home.  I also kept hoping for a minor celebrity (to me, anyway) sighting in the form of Smitten Kitchen Deb or Amateur Gourmet Adam, both of whom frequent said Greenmarket in search of star ingredients, but no luck.  I did find some really tasty mint tea, though!

My memory actually served me correctly as to where something was (also, my memory may or may not have been assisted by the magic Google machine I carry around in my purse at all times), and after a little wandering around the pretty food and flowers, we headed in the direction of Strand, prepared for an overwhelming literary selection.  I ♥ books.  We didn't actually buy books, though - just a remarkably handy map (for Amanda - really for both of us this day as we were all over the city) and an adorable stripey bag for me.

By the way, I'm looking through these pictures and realizing just how long my hair was...I chopped a lot of it off in Dallas last week.  Phew.

With the help of our handy little map and my recollections of burger deliciousness, we walked over to Madison Square Park and joined the always-long line for Shake Shack.  A THOUSAND TIMES YUM.  And yes, the line is perpetually lengthy, but we put the time to good use and figured out how to shoot video with my camera, and we got our food before we died of hunger, so all was well.  I mean, just look at that fry joy:

And we continued to enjoy a state of burger/fry/shake-induced bliss on a beautiful spring afternoon...until a dive-bomber pigeon attempted to steal my burger directly out of my hand.  Dis-gus-ting.  Important lesson learned - hold your food in close to protect it from those burger-stealing rats with wings.

There are only about eleventy billion awesome things to do in New York, and since we'd knocked out a lot of biggie tourist things on our sister adventure to the ci-tay about four years earlier, we headed a little off the beaten path to make a stop at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (pretty much only so I could check it off my Smithsonianity list, but then it started looking like the museum would actually be kinda cool).  Now...maybe it's just the D.C. Smithsonian museum part of me that's grown to expect Smithsonian = free...because the Cooper-Hewitt is most definitely not free.  And we didn't want to spend the whole afternoon wandering through this thing - definitely more in the mood for a quick jaunt through the niftiest exhibits.  Which in my mind didn't exactly justify the cost of admission.  So...we spent that quick jaunt going through the gift shop instead, which is kinda like going through the museum...right?

I'm totally counting that as a visit, which means I only have four left - woot woot!

Oh, and in another instance of enjoying a museum's exterior more than the interior, we captured the Guggenheim since it's right there by the Cooper-Hewitt.  Cool building.

A quick stop in Central Park for some lovely views and people watching (and pizza watching - bungee-corded onto a bike basket - very innovative)...

...and we continued with a lovely stroll through the park on a beautiful, beautiful afternoon where we witnessed sunbathers, picnickers, engagement picture takers, players of "the Viking game" Kubb (which we saw again in the park by Amanda's apartment!  never heard of this thing before, but now I really want to play it...perfect summer lawn activity...), sleeping old men (don't worry, parents, not of the homeless variety), remote-control sailboaters, carriage riders, rock climbers, and partiers of the all-white variety (I'm not being racist, promise - they really were having a "white party"...in a park...I see visions of grass stains).

One park bench break with a restorative Diet Coke later and we were off to find sissy's work building...and we found it in the middle of some random street fair that closed off Avenue of the Americas, giving us the opportunity to take some middle-of-the-street shots and wonder why they were selling the same thing block after block after block.

More wandering - Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park, a little coffee pick-me-up, pondering the plethora of flavor options at Rice to Riches but not indulging so we could eat something more closely resembling a real dinner in Little Italy, and coming to end of an exhausting but delightful walk-fest through the streets and parks of the NYC.

Check out the full haul of photo goodness over on Picasa.  As always, more there than you need - feel free to fly right through.  Although if you fly too fast, you might miss our new friends Jim & Joe, saddlebags for little dogs, and the easiest way to move from one apartment to another in the city...so enjoy.  How very city.