"We're going to spend pretty much all of Sunday in Central Park," Older Sister said. For months, she said this. That was the plan. Early church, and then Central Park all day long.
But by Saturday night, Little Sister had come down with the cold. Not a cold--the cold. The cold that had made its run through our entire family over the past few weeks. The cold that I was getting over, and Older Sister was in the midst of, when we boarded the plane on Wednesday night. The cold that now was in the possession of Little Sister.
So for Little Sister's sake, we slept in latish on Sunday morning and then took the subway uptown to the eleven o'clock ward in the Manhattan temple.
After church--Central Park.
First of all, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there aren't any trolls in Central Park. Not that I saw, anyways. I also didn't see any beaming Disney leading ladies singing about love or any Baby-Sitters Club baby-sitters hanging out with their charges.
What I did see was a lot of trees. And grass. And people. AIDS Walk New York was there the same day we were, and they came right into the park. There were also lots of ice cream trucks. Central Park is basically a small wooded country that has been colonized by ice cream trucks.
We wandered around the park for a while. We saw Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial. There were signs everywhere at the memorial requesting that visitors not play music or ride bikes or skateboards. Naturally, no one obeyed those rules, and the entire place looked like a musician, biker, and skateboarder convention.
We saw the Alice in Wonderland statue. There were children all over every inch of that thing and no way to convince them to move long enough to let me climb up on it. Jerks. But I did enjoy the Alice in Wonderland quotes on the ground around the statue.
We saw a man making huge bubbles out of soapy water. We stopped to watch and to let Glory join him in his bubble-making fun.
Unfortunately, we didn't see much else. Within a few hours, Older Sister had grown disenchanted with her plan to spend the day in Central Park. Well, all of us had, but especially Older Sister. She hadn't realized that everything in Central Park was so far apart or that it was all so hard to find. To find anything, we had to use Older Sister's smartphone and its magical capabilities. However, Older Sister's smartphone plan only has so much magic that she can use each month, and she was worried about running out of said magic.
I'm going to make a quick observation, which is that Central Park needs some map kiosks with paper maps, like they have at Disneyland or the zoo. And if Central Park already has maps somewhere within its expansive borders, then there needs to be some other maps leading to those maps.
One thing in the park we did find without too much trouble was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you've ever read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, then you know this museum as the one to which Claudia and Jamie Kincaid ran away.
It is a lovely building, with tons of stone steps at the front. There were tons of Halal food carts around the museum. Lots of people had bought food from the carts and were just sitting on the stone steps, eating casually, as if they weren't just eating lunch on the steps of one of the most famous museums in the world! Well, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, so we bought ourselves some lunch and ate it sitting on the steps of the Met. Like you do.
Then we went inside. Many of the displays were very European, by which I mean that there were lots of paintings and statues of naked people. I saw a lot of this a few years ago in Europe, and I can only conclude that art without clothes was just all the rage in the Renaissance.
While Glory wandered around freely, my sisters and I buzzed around looking at French furniture, entire Egyptian temples, and Faberge eggs that once belonged to the Romanov family. This sounds easy, but it was actually a lot of hard work. When reading From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I used to think that it required a small suspension of disbelief to accept that two children could live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a week without being detected. Well, I'm sorry I doubted you, E. L. Konigsburg, because a small elephant could live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a week without being detected. The building is not only huge, but labyrinthine inside. I could only navigate for us using the paper map that the museum had so thoughtfully provided at the entrance. (Seriously, Central Park. Get your act together.)
After the museum, we walked up and down the length of the park, trying to decide where we wanted to go/figure out where everything else was. This proved fruitless, so somewhat disappointed with our Central Park experience, we walked the 5,000,000 blocks to FAO Schwarz.
Okay, there were not that many blocks. But by this point, we'd been on the go for days, and we were all pretty tired.
However, we all perked up somewhat when we saw the Plaza Hotel, that lodging of the rich, the famous, and little girls named Eloise! We had to go inside, so we did, and immediately became acutely aware of just how poor we are. We snapped some pictures in the elegant lobby, then checked out the hotel shopping. This made us even more acutely aware of our poverty.
Then after the Plaza: FAO Schwarz.
FAO Schwarz is just a toy store in the way that Willy Wonka's is just a candy factory. FAO Schwarz was one of the destination spots I'd insisted that we see, and it was practically worth the trip just to see it.
Little Sister and I were excited. Older Sister and Glory were not very excited, so they collapsed on the floor while Little Sister and I ran around the entire place.
There were musical instruments! Gigantic stuffed animals! Books! Dolls! Candy of all kinds! Legos! Board games and puzzles! Baby clothes! Barbies! Knick knacks! Gryffindor scarves! And the Muppet Whatnot Workshop, which is exclusively at FAO Schwarz! Little Sister and spent several minutes watching new Muppets be made for young Muppet fans (or, I suspect, the uninterested children of not-so-young Muppet fans).
Little Sister and I explored almost the entire store. One of the escalators was down, so we used it at stairs, but then we thought that it was moving and sort of freaked out and actually clutched each other fearfully. Because a moving escalator is terrifying? I don't know. Little Sister was sick and probably somewhat delirious, but there's no excuse for me.
Before we left FAO Schwarz, Older Sister and Glory finally rekindled their inner child enough to actually look around the store. There was even some excitement and wonder in their eyes.
The success of FAO Schwarz, in my opinion, made up for the not-so-great experience in Central Park. I felt very pleased as we took the subway back to Times Square, picked up dinner, and are in our hotel room while watching I Love Lucy. It was still fairly early, but we were beat.
We began to prepare for bed.
"Sweet mother of FAO Schwarz!" Glory cried in some moment of mild distress.
When we laughed at her, she defended her choice of exclamation by saying, "She was a sweet woman!"
Then Older Sister became far more distressed than Glory had been.
"Dr. Godfather just texted me," she said, referring to a family friend who grew up in New York and who had helped us plan our trip. "His best friend's son just arrived in the city, and Dr. Godfather wants us to show him around tomorrow..."
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