NYC - Part 6

It's the day after visiting museums I most notice how much good the crutch did me. Usually I'd hardly be able to limp around the hotel room after using 4'ish hours in a museum, but today I woke up just fine! Why didn't I discover this years ago? I'll definitely have to look into how much it would cost to buy one for myself.

Today Lars and I went our separate ways again. He to go off train-spotting, me to meet up with my very first e-mail penpal! Jen and I have been corresponding on and off since 1993 or 1994, but had never met. She lives in CT, so when she heard I was coming to NYC, she offered to come down, if I had time to meet up. That's the beauty of Lars wanting to go off on his own on vacations - I generally do have time, so finally, after more than 15 years, we got to meet :)

Jen and I met at the hotel lobby and headed out to have lunch at a rather nice deli. I had a roastbeef sandwich which turned out to have more roastbeef than bread! I like roastbeef just fine, but everything in moderation please! It was really delicious after I'd taken out 75% of the meat though ;)

We had no plans other than general sightseeing, so we decided to cross over to 5th Avenue and then walk as far down that as we felt like... which ended up being around 40 blocks in total! We walked past the Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building (the lobby is beautiful, but a trip to the top cost $35 so we decided to skip that, Flatiron Building and - most importantly ;) - a bookstore! :-D Jen is almost as big a bookworm as I am, so we had a great time suggesting books for each other. I ended up only buying one of them, but wrote the others down to look up on GoodReads, and managed to convince her that she should sign up there as well! I love talking books with friends, and GoodReads is a great place for it :)


By the time we reached 14th Street and Union Square my feet were killing me, so we found a Starbucks and brought our drinks over to Union Square Park to sit in the shade and talk for awhile. It was really brilliant to have this time to catch up on each other's lives, and get all the details that you don't think of to write about in e-mails. I had such a good time together with her! The picture blow was taken by a police man who sat next to us in the park. Jen wasn't sure about asking him, but I figured I could play the "clueless tourist" card and not get in trouble ;) Guess the crutch worked as a sympathy card as well ;) (an aside - people were SO kind to me, standing up for me in the subway, picking up stuff I'd dropped and apologising for bumping into me even if I had been the one to bump into them. I almost felt like a fraud for walking around with a crutch when I didn't really need it... on the other hand, the general good state of my leg proved that I DID need it - to remain functional I mean).


At 5:30pm we went back to Central Station, so Jen could get her train home, and I could find my way back to the hotel to shower and rest for awhile before Lars came back. Dinner tonight was at Subway which we do have in Denmark (something very close to it anyway), but Lars had had a craving for it all day, and promised that I would get first picks of where to go for dinner tomorrow so I'll live ;)