New York, New Yooooooork!

You guys, I feel like I had an iconic New York City kind of day today.  Seriously, I was just a step away from donning my tap shoes and singing through the streets, a la Frank Sinatra.  Let me break it down for you: I started off the day by meeting my dad for brunch (otherwise known as the AWESOME meal) at his hotel, which happened to be situated directly across the street from the south side of Central Park [New York icon #1].  I even walked past all those cheesy horse-drawn carriages [NY icon #2] that sit outside the entrance to the park, in the hopes to convince some tourist couple to spend a gazillion dollars to sit directly behind a smelly bag of horse poop and pretend that it's a romantic thing to do.

[ahem] where was I?  Ok, so I had brunch with my dad, then walked over to the nearest Duane Reade pharmacy [NY icon #3] to pick up some shampoo.  And as I left the drug store, I figured, what the hell--it's a pain in the ass to get from the west side to the east side of the city, so I may as well enjoy it while I'm here.  So, I decided to walk 25 blocks to the Met [NY icon #4].

I should probably note that in the past two days, I have been to more art museums than I've visited in the last 6 years (yesterday my dad and brother went with me to the MoMA), so I'm a little out of practice.  I went into it worried about going too fast through the exhibits (and therefore showing my lack of interest and/or artistic taste), but also thinking that I would feel stupid if I stood in front of a painting and stared for too long (causing people to wonder what the hell I'm doing looking at a solid block of color for half an hour).  Anyway, it turns out that I loved both of my museum trips.  Yesterday's trip to the MoMA with my family was great, in that we could talk about the different paintings and sculptures that we saw.

While I was at the MoMA, I picked the poster of this
Picasso painting as my first addition to the bare walls of my
dorm room.   I'm telling you, it's a million times more
powerful in person.  It seriously took my breath away.

But today was wonderful, too, in a different way.  When I walked into the Met, I slipped my headphones into my ears and let my random mix of classical music drown out the sounds of all the other people in the museum.  Now, I have to say that I preferred the MoMA to the Met, only because I don't have that much interest in old paintings of upper class Europeans.  But there was still some amazing stuff.  And holy crap, is that place huge.  I definitely got turned around multiple times during my visit, but who cares?  What better place to get lost than a museum?  No matter where you go, you're going to see interesting things.

I picked a print of this Van Gogh painting as my souvenir from
 the Met.  Again, it's a painting that has more impact in person.

All in all, it was a great day.  I swear, all I needed was to walk down 5th Avenue and window shop at Tiffany's and I would morph into Audrey Hepburn.  I should start wearing pearls and full-sleeve gloves...