Monday entailed lots and lots of walking. We got up around 9:30, got some breakfast in the lounge, and set out to find our destiny. Or, at least, the Museum of Natural History.
We descended into the first subway station we found and consulted a map to figure out how to best get there. I say consulted, but the more accurate description would be more along the lines of “stared in wonderment at all the myriad colored lines crisscrossing the city.” We finally figured out how to read the thing, discovered that particular station didn’t have the trains we needed, and we headed back above ground.
We walked a couple blocks to the appropriate station, purchased our 7-day passes, and continued to the platform. We guessed at a train, not really knowing if we needed to go “uptown” or “downtown,” as we had no idea what those meant in relation to ourselves, but fortunately, we guessed correctly, and in short order, we found ourselves in front of the museum, just across the street from Central Park.
We entered the museum, and were immediately met by two equally terrifying things: Three dinosaur skeletons, toothy grins, erected there just before us, and a school field trip. Younglings, bedecked in coats and construction paper signs prominently displaying their names and the school what owned them. I briefly prayed the dino-fossils would come alive and complete the nightmare, but they just stood there, grinning, earless and eyeless to my plight.
In any case, the museum was interesting. We walked all over, laughing and giggling at the human history sections, largely because we’re still seven-years-old, and find boobies and penises scandalously funny still.
After that, we headed over into Central Park where we deigned to find somewhere to dine, but the park is huge, and we had minimal luck, so we went back to the street vendor in front of the museum and had a couple “dogs” (to use the vernacular). These were scrumptious.
We then hopped back on the subway, headed downtown to try our hand at an equally (if not more-so) phallic museum. (Yes, that pun was intended, thank you.) Downtown, on fifth avenue is a smallish, discrete building bearing the name “Museum of Sex.” We heard about it on the website of the museum/attraction passes we bought, and it sounded interesting enough. The first floor was an exhibit on the sexual habits of animals. To our surprise, there’s rather a lot of homosexuality, masturbation, and all sorts of other sexual acts of the animal world. Who knew there was documented homosexuality in koalas?
In any case, this was where the interesting part of the museum ended. The second floor of the museum was pretty much gratuitous pornography, although the exhibit on the history of sex toys was sort of interesting, too. (Remember the old egg beaters? With the whisk on the end of a device that you turned with a crank? Well, they pretty much used the same idea for period vibrators)
After that, we’d walked up and down countless flights of stairs, across countless city blocks, and through countless museum rooms, and we were tired, so we hopped a cab back to the hotel, where we rested up a while before heading out to see a bit of the night-life in Times Square. We walked all over, and took some time to stop in at the public ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza. The time we took was not so much to quit walking as it was to watch people bust it on the ice. Good times. We were pretty tired, so we grabbed some dinner and turned in. It was a pretty good day, I’d say.
