Although we used to be members at the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue on New York’s East Side, it just wouldn’t have been right not to pay it another visit. We were lured in, too, by an exhibition on artefacts that had been excavated in Petra, in Jordan — which we’ve been to — and…
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I’m afraid I’m way behind the travel programme and in the meanwhile Hirsh has been keeping you well versed on our movements and well entertained with our food extravaganzas (3 a.m.! lordy, lordy), so I’m hoping you aren’t going to be saying, Been there, done that. Central Park has been going since 1857 when work…
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So there was a striking African-style head sculpture we hadn’t quite got to see when we first visited the Highline, and we decided to wind our way back to the Hudson Yards to find it. All over again we were knocked off our feet by how much development is going on in the city. When…
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What strikes you about New Yorkers is the yadda-yadda-yadda. It’s constant. Everyone walks around with a white golf tee hanging out their ear; everyone is hustling or in the throes of clinching a deal. They bark into their phones — held horizontally like Kim Kardashian — or they talk to themselves (they have an earpiece) or…
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This is before even getting to the Whitney, wall decoration in the Meatpacking District. Our interest was piqued by an exhibition at the Whitney Museum — artists of the 1960s and 1970s who used bold, saturated, hallucinatory colour to stimulate perceptions. It was at that time that acrylic paint became newly available, with a greater…
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The prints on the underside of our feet are disappearing we’re doing so much walking in the city. But the good thing is there’s no shortage of exercise. And some quality time in the lower precincts of Manhattan always delivers a few good photo opportunities, so here, a day in the life of . ….
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There’s someone on a park bench reading a book titled Antisocial, Borderline, Narcissistic & Histrionic Workbook. In a subway car two diminutive kids, who couldn’t be more than 7 or 8, are having a serious discussion on exploding cheeks and the use of laughing gas. Then a Black American guy boards, thrusts his chin into…
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It constantly amazes me that an abandoned, derelict series of railway tracks can be so utterly transformed that it has set into motion its own building boom. In the meanwhile it draws a constant pitter-patter of hundreds of thousands of feet across its concrete plinths, whatever the time of day, whatever the weather. (Don’t think…
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We’d forgotten just how noisy the Big Apple is. The incessant reverberation of grumbling helicopters and growling jet planes trawling the skies; the plangent blare of car horns; the howl and wail of sirens; the hiss and sigh of buses’ pneumatic brakes; the beep-beep-beep of reversing trucks; the trundle and echo of trolleys pushed backwards…
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Long-distance flying is not pretty. Our 11-hour yowling baby-marathon is almost a distant memory. Not quite, but almost. Then there was the serious body odour (across the aisle, not ours) on the second leg. So not much sleep across our 24-hour journey. And then, finally in the Big Apple, we also didn’t factor into the…
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