New York: Day 3

Four words. Metropolitan Museum of Art. This gargantuan museum is situated in Central Park at 82nd Street and 5th Avenue, a convenient twenty-minute stroll from Luvshack's shack.

The Met, as this museum is popularly known, houses collections from ancient Egypt through to the modern day. Unfortunately, it was something of a letdown for me, since I had been expecting something more along the lines of the Art Institute of Chicago, which consists predominantly of paintings and sculptures. The Met is, as its name implies, a museum rather than an art gallery – with more artifacts and less art than I would have liked. While the Egyptian exhibit was quite fascinating (as my trigger-happy friend and I will testify), I didn’t find anything else particularly exciting until I reached the nineteenth century paintings section on the second floor. There I spent a happy three hours staring at Gauguin, Degas, Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Renoir and Rodin. In doing so I realized that my fascination for the Impressionist period only grows stronger with each new museum I visit. I also realized, to my surprise and pleasure, that I had begun to be able to identify different periods of art by their style, from the twelfth through to the early twentieth centuries.

Although the Met is open till 9 pm on Fridays, I had to leave earlier to get to Carnegie Hall at 57th Street and 7th Avenue for a New York Pops concert at 8 pm. I had serendipitously obtained two tickets to this show the previous week via an online miles auction on the Continental Airlines website while looking for cheap tickets to New York.

The concert, consisting of popular American film themes, was decent. The guest conductor and pianist, Michel Legrand, theme music from “Lentl” and a song called “The Windmills Of Your Mind” from The Thomas Crown Affair were particularly memorable and I would probably have enjoyed the evening more had it not been for the fact that the main singer, Monica Mancini, Henry Mancini’s daughter, was insufferably arrogant and annoying and that Carnegie Hall, for all its hype and amazing acoustics, is more cramped than the average subway train. Still, being there and (again serendipitously) attending the same performance as former astronaut and current senator John Glenn was a fairly unique experience!

That night, Luvshack and I did the unimaginably geeky thing of playing Unreal Tournament online till 5 am.