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Sunday, 10 March 2013 - West Village

 
After all the snow on Friday, the weekend has been sunny and border-line warm even. So we picked out another one of these random walks we've been doing lately from Lonely Planet, and today it was the West Village. We first met up with Kristina's mate for brunch right in the middle of it at a cafe apparently well-liked by Jennifer Aniston. She must have a thing for pigeons.
 
The West Village is part of the larger Greenwich Village in Manhattan's lower west - neighbourhood of choice for many of Hollywood's rich and famous. It has something of a Notting Hill feel about it.

 
 
As we started walking around the first thing to hit us was the abundance of people out walking their dogs, and eating out at many of the cafes scattered about with their dogs sitting right there with them.
 
Then we found this - a place to get a portrait done of your pet.
 
And right across the street, a place to take him when he's on his last legs or just got smacked by a cab.

 
 
This area is colloquially known as The Village, and just happens to resemble one with its quiet little streets that don't conform to the standard grid pattern found elsewhere in Manhattan. In fact it's easy to get completely disoriented and lost around here.
 
As for the rental properties - they're well out of our price range! :(

 
 
Cafe's everywhere...
 
Random shopping (this here is Steven, by a guy called Steve)...
 
And here's the latest fashion for this season hahaha! (Note the guy in the store giving me bunny ears hehe.)

 
This was the start of the Lonely Planet walk, at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Established in 1924, this small theatre is apparently the city's longest continuously running off-Broadway establishment.

 
 
And this here may look vaguely familiar. It's the apartment block used as the fictional home of the cast of Friends (though the apartment itself was a studio set in Los Angeles). While Central Perk was merely a figment of the writers' imaginations, The Little Owl cafe at the bottom there has featured in at least one movie, or so I heard.
 
Right across the street, this little wooden house is apparently worth a cool $20 million (or so Kristina heard). Due to New York City fire codes, wooden buildings are rare nowadays, but at 191 years old this thing is in good nick! Manhattan as had several major fires throughout its history.
 
Not too far around the corner, this may also look vaguely familiar. It was used as the facade and stoop of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment in Sex and the City. In the show, Carrie lived in the Upper East Side but there aren't as many stoops around there so they used this location for the exterior shots instead. Apparently the Carrie character just had to have a stoop.

 
 
This is the tiny Christopher Park. I forgot to get a shot of it, but across the street to the right (out of shot) is the Stonewall Inn. This was the site of the Stonewall Riots in 1969 where a bunch of pissed-off drag queens fought for their civil rights, signalling the start of what would become the gay revolution.
 
"Stop violence against women everywhere!" I agree.
 
Then we found a puppy shop, and Kristina just couldn't resist. I virtually had to drag her out of there hehe. I want a pup as much as the next person, when I'm settled.

 
This gothic thing is the Jefferson Market Library, now a branch of the New York Public Library. Back in the 19th century this was a courthouse. The tower on the left was used as a fire lookout also. Like I said, Manhattan was no stranger to the hot stuff.
 
Looking up Sixth Avenue, where we called it a day.

 
 
This is a little recycling station tacked on to the side of a local supermarket round the corner from our apartment. It is a constant hive of activity every time we walk past. At $0.05 per item, folk drag huge bags of recyclables here to get a pay-out. You feed the items into the machines, they tally it up and spit out a receipt when you're done, stating how much you're owed. The sign there says the supermarket will only pay out $12 per person per day, and I suspect the people I see queued up here every day pretty much live off that $12. Anyway, we had a bunch of recyclables needing to be taken out, and I wanted to see what we could get for them hehe. The machines scan each item, and only accept those sold by the supermarket. Most of our shit came from elsewhere, so in the end we only earned ourselves a dismal total of $0.35. We gave our receipts to the dude on the left, and he seemed exceedingly grateful.

Tuesday, 12 March 2013 - Schmoozing

 
 
Not sure I've ever copped a $1,000+ restaurant bill before hehe. Including tip it came to $1,300. It's been a while but I took a bunch of my clients out for dinner after work tonight to Del Friscos Double Eagle Steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan (paid for by my employer in the name of schmoozing our clients ;) It was 20oz steaks all round, plenty of wine, random sides and desserts - good stuff!
 
In other news, an extension to my temporary visa has been approved by the US Immigration Department. That sees me through until July, after which we (the lawyers and I) need to figure something else out while the application for a longer-term visa is pending.

Thursday, 14 March 2013 - Perfect day for it, not

 
Yeah there's nothing I crave more on a freezing cold day either than a freezing cold ice cream. Needless to say, folk weren't exactly lining up around the block for this truck hehe.
 

Saturday, 16 March 2013 - Another perfect day for it, not

 
A huge St Patrick's Day parade is taking place in Manhattan at the moment, albeit a day early. Right before I was about to head out the door to go see it, more of the white stuff started bucketing down (an all-too-familiar sight now) so I decided to give it a miss this year. Good thing those Irish are hard people - used to the cold ;)

Sunday, 17 March 2013 - American Museum of Natural History (floor 1)

 
 
Kristina and I were scoping out the city again today, in below-ideal temperatures again hehe. Apparently the transition between winter and summer here is sudden, or so I've been told. Anyway, the first stop of the day was the Humane Society (to those back home, think SPCA). While in college, Kristina and some of her chums would make regular visits to the local Humane Society to play with the dogs. It turns out they don't keep dogs on site here in New York. She was gutted ;)
 
Main stop of the day: the American Museum of Natural History. Employees of my client (UBS) get free entry for themselves and a guest at several museums and the like throughout the city. I'm a contractor as opposed to an employee but I still get the benefits - good stuff! And given how cold and miserable it is outside, we might as well make the most of it. The main foyer of the museum contains two huge cast skeletons of an Allosaurus and a Barosaurus (if you know your dinosaurs). The Barosaurus appears to have been aroused by something.

 
The museum is one of the largest in the world, comprising 25 interconnected buildings plonked on Central Park West opposite Central Park. The museum's collections contain over 32 million specimens, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. Everything is spread across four floors, of which we only managed to cover one today.
 
A lot of the displays include models of various scenes including this one set in current-day Manhattan in 1660, back when its southern tip was known as New Amsterdam - the capital city of New Netherland. It was renamed New York in 1665 in honour of the Duke of York (later James II of England) when English forces seized control of Manhattan along with the rest of the Dutch colony, but that's a whole other story. In this scene, the leader of the local Hackensack tribe brings a gift of tobacco leaves to Pieter Stuyvesant, then-governor of New Netherland. "Here ya go boys, have a toke on this!"

 
 
The first section of the museum we wandered through was the Hall of North American Mammals. More models of everything from bison...
 
...to mountain goats...
 
...to armadillos. I've seen several of these wandering across Kristina's front yard in Texas.

 
 
Wolves hunting in the night...
 
...a skunk about to let one rip...
 
...and beavers. One of my mates at high school had big buck teeth. We all called him Beaver hehe.

 
 
Next up was the Northwest Coast Indians section, housing plenty of indigenous goodies.
 
Their masks would give Venetians a run for their money.
 
From there it was the Hall of Human Origins. Kristina was especially fascinated by all of this.

 
 
Neanderthals are an extinct species closely related to our own species (homo sapiens). We co-existed for a comparatively short period of time before they disappeared (hyotheses here). Be that as it may, Kristina is convinced she's seen a few riding the subway hahaha!
 
Homo sapiens have been around for about 150,000 years, which on the evolutionary scale is very recent (we're the little green line up top on the far-right). And what did we evolve from? This good-looking couple here (and beyond). Before anyone starts jumping up and down about the THEORY of evolution, know this: Evolution is subject to both fact and theory - they are two different things. Think of facts as the data of the world. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. For example, Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced that of Newton's, but apples didn't suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. The fact of gravity remains; the exact mechanism of it remains subject to various theories. Humans did evolve from ape-like ancestors - that much is fact as supported by overwhelming evidence. Whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other that is yet to be discovered is where theory comes into it. Regardless, depending on your religion of choice, you may not buy into any of this jazz. Rather than apes, you may believe we all came from Adam and Eve.

 
 
Theological debate aside, there's no doubting where these things came from! The meteorite in the background there, known as Ahnighito, weighs 34 tonnes and is the largest meteorite on display in any museum. Ahnighto itself is only a fragment of the much larger Cape York meteorite - a 200-ton bohemoth discovered in Greenland at the end of the 1800s.
 
These huge chunks of iron from space contain unique patterns as shown here. They are found only in meteorites and never in iron from Earth.
 
From chunks of iron to chunks of minerals - this is the Hall of Minerals and the Hall of Gems.

 
 
From rocks to beautifully cut stones - impressive stuff!
 
Definitely a hall for the ladies ;)

 
Elsewhere we found this piece of trunk from a huge Californian sequoia tree. This particular one dates back to 550 AD, and was felled in 1890 - over 1,300 years later. Whoa!
 
Then it was into the Hall of Biodiversity, and there was so much crap in here it was almost overwhelming. Diversity indeed.
 
 
We ended the day in the Hall of Ocean Life. The star attraction in here is the 29-metre-long blue whale model suspended from the ceiling. All in all the whole museum is a bloody impressive place, and we've only covered a quarter of it! So, with winter still persisting and our entry admission free, we'll no doubt be back again soon.

Monday, 18 March 2013 - Brisky, brisky, brisky

 
Another ride home in the snow - good fun. At least it would be if we weren't all so bloody sick of it!
 

Wednesday, 20 March 2013 - You'd have to be a New Zealander

 
Marmite - it's a New Zealand staple! However, I think you need to have grown up with it to really appreciate it hehe. The only factory in New Zealand that produces Marmite was damaged in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, leading to shortages dubbed "marmageddon" from early 2012. But, more than two years later, the factory is back online, and Marmite is slowly returning to supermarket shelves - woohoo!
 

Friday, 22 March 2013 - Cinco, cinco, cinco!

 
Kristina came home from work last night saying we needed to watch the news at 11pm on Telemundo - one of several Spanish-language TV channels we get. Apparently they turned up at her office this afternoon to do a travel piece (keep in mind she's a travel agent with Liberty Travel). So here we go, las noticias Españolas (the Spanish news).
 
First up we had Ms. Gonzalez telling us about, well we had no idea - neither of us speak a lot of Spanish hehe.
 
 
Then we had Ricardo telling us about a stabbing in Brooklyn. I only knew what he was on about because I'd seen this on the (English) news earlier.
 
I bet it was this guy ;)
 
 
This dude appeared to be having a yard sale hehe.
 
Then came a hot topic on every illegal immigrant's lips - the government's proposed overhaul of the US visa system.
 
 
Ms. Sanchez here was evidently not happy about the proposals.
 
This señora was even less impressed.
 
 
Now for the weather: scorchio!
 
On a related note, Punxsuwtawney Phil (I think virtually everybody has seen Groundhog Day) was back in the news because his prediction of an early spring this year couldn't have been further off the mark! Parts of the country are still being hammered by winter storms.
 
 
And finally came the big moment.
 
This is Kristina's workmate - probably one of the few in her store who speaks Spanish.
 
 
"Ooooo, you sexy lady!" Kristina was playing the role of a client for the news piece (despite wearing a Liberty Travel shirt).
 
Kristina's five seconds of fame :) We still have no idea what the point of the story was.

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