Day 441

Monday update!

The day started with breakfast.  Our hostess made us fruit bowls and juice to start.  I think the fruit bowl alone would have filled Kimmy up.  Then she brought us eggs and hash browns and bread.  It was all really good.  Over breakfast I asked her how she ended up in New York.  So she explained how she's started in Poland in the 40s, then she and her husband snuck out to Austria where they were able to get visas and come to the states.  She went to the embassy and they set up an interview for her doing interior design.  She then worked her way up and ended up doing some architecture work, including one of Donald Trump's first buildings.  Eventually she wound up buying some homes and renting them out.... then she opened an antique store... and now she's running a bed and breakfast!  It was fun to talk with her.

After breakfast we got ready for the day and made a plan for our traveling.  We drove to the ferry, took the ferry to Manhattan, then took the subway north so that we could go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  It was pretty cool.  The first exhibit was my favorite because it was a collection of designs for solving problems that are either present or will be in the near future.  For instance: an emergency living structure (basically a specifically designed plastic bag) that was made to go over a building's heat/air conditioning vent.  This provides a homeless person with protection from the elements and heat/cold air.  Another one was a way to enhance the human digestive system in the event that all usable food runs out and we are forced to eat things that our systems cannot currently handle.

These were ways to save space in an over-populated city.  It's a bed/living room/closet all in one!  There were a lot of other exhibits, but those were more of Kimmy's thing.  They were fine, but I think that it would have been hard to top the first exhibit (for me).

After MoMA we went to dinner!  Sunday's place was called Ray's pizza.  Monday's was called the Little Italy Pizza Kitchen... or something like that.

Big pizza!

After dinner we walked through Time Square... and I took another picture!

There was so much going on.  People were dressed up as all sorts of different characters..... I think I saw Elmo, Cookie Monster, Hello Kitty, Sponge Bob, Woody, and some others.  Kimmy got a picture of the Naked Cowboy.  He was funny.  After leaving Time Square we went to the High Line.

The High Line (I believe) used to be a train system, similar to Chicago's L system.  It has since been abandoned and is now an elevated walking path.  It was really cool.  We got some neat pictures, which I will now show you.

I liked this last one because there wasn't anything going on here.... people were just sitting and watching.  Not watching anything in particular, just watching.  We also saw a billboard (which we did not document) which something like "NYC: accepting of your beliefs, judgmental of your shoes."  It was funny.  We also got some gellato!  We left the High Line around 8:30 and then went back to the subway and ferry.  We did a lot of walking/standing yesterday.... it was about 2 miles from MoMA to the beginning of the High Line, then another mile and a half along the High Line.  And then another half mile to a mile to the subway.  Along with 2 hours of walking through MoMA.  I was quite ready to sit down and not wear shoes at the end.