This, being our last day in NY, was the day dedicated to Other Things We Haven't Quite Had Time To Do. In this case: checking out 5th Avenue.
We went by the Great Glass Cube that is the Apple flagship store and then popped into FAO Schwartz, the mega toy store to investigate the life-sized Chewbacca made out of legos. Up and down 5th Avenue we went, peering into windows and pushing our way through crowds, until we ended up at Rockefeller Center. (Somewhere in there we went into one of those teen clothing stores where everyone is ultra-hip and tragically cool and jeans cost roughly $80,000 a pair and where, by the way, there is absolutely no place to sit down but instead you have to lean in a fashionable way against a rack of Style, smothered by the incessant and booming house dance music while your brain melts from your ears.)
Right at four o'clock, we headed straightway to the MoMA where it was free admission until eight. And as soon as we arrived we immediately saw that we were not alone with our free museum plan: the line to get into the museum went out the door, down the block, and around the corner. Well, let me rephrase that. The line to get the free tickets stretched that far. Apparently you need a free ticket to get into the museum (we thought you'd simply walk in - we were ruined by the Smithsonian). So Colleen, Megan, Alex, and I hiked to the back of the line while Suzanne checked the backpack at the luggage desk (another long line for her there).
I was surprised at how quickly the line moved, and we were back in the museum in no time (Megan, being sneaky, had grabbed two tickets - one for her and one for Suzanne - even though they were only giving out one ticket per person in line).
The crummy thing about free ticket night is that all the solitude and philosophical consideration you would normally give to interesting art immediately disappears, jostled away by the magnitude of the crowd around you. So even though it was great to sneak some peeks of this or this or even this, it was tough to get a shoulder in edgewise for the more popular pieces.
Still,it's great to open the museum's collection to the world, at least for a few hours, on a Friday evening.
Dinner tonight: pizza. We started our tour of NY with pizza and ended it the same way. Tomorrow, due to the vagaries of frequent flier mile use, we'll hop the train back to DC, spending some of the 4th of July in NY, some On The Way, and some in DC, our own patriotic way of ending this particular summer tour.
