La Vie En Rose for 2005 January 22

Here are some things I did while I was in New York last week:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: There's a whole huge Egyptian temple, complete with 19th century grafitti. Nice. All sorts of cool stuff, such as armour displays, ancient Japanese scrolls, an Africa statue that looks just like demon doggie, and a huge 19th century European art section. I've become a bit jaded, actually, travelling to so many cities and going to so many museums: "Oh, look, a Monet." (Ten points to who gets the reference.) But still, it's nice to see the ones I haven't before, and I owe Madame Bousquet for teaching me all about the french artists. They're so much more interesting when you know what they were all about.

Times Square and a Broadway show: The TKTS booth in NYC is different from the one in London in the following ways: the line is much long, it is MUCH colder, and the tickets are more expensive. And by the time we go to the front, almost everything was sold out. Ended up seeing Democracy, a play about an East German spy in the West German government. It was good, but I felt rather like I was reading for class, and kind of wished I were at a musical.

Greenwich Village: Lots of nice little shops and restaurants. It might have occured to me to want to live there, had I not been so cold.

Lots of yummy food: Seriously. Sushi, Indian, pizza, even the diner food was delicious (and proportinatley more expensive).

Empire State Building (walked by but didn't go up; the wait was an hour--outside) Tiffany's (was closed), Rockafeller Center (watched ice skaters), Toys R Us in Times Square (impressive legos! Leonard would have loved), NY Public Library (if only I had more *time*--and there was a gift shop! in the library!), etc etc.

Next time I go, I hope it's not in the middle of January. I've never been so cold. Ever.

And quite a contrast to LA's annual January heat wave. I saw Phantom of the Opera last night. It was... long. You'd think they'd have cut bits out, but no. And some of the theatrics just didn't transfer well to film. Roaul was especially disappointed--it's like, they couldn't get Ewan McGregor so they just took whoever would do it for free. Other than that, good. But way, way too long.