For our last full day in New York, we decided to head east across Central Park. We stopped at two playgrounds along the way, saw the outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saw a little bit of the Upper East Side, had a rather bad dinner, then in a big loop southwards to get home on the subway, going via Grand Central Station.
First playground of the day, the Mariners Playground.
Today’s motivation was to go and visit the Google office in New York. As always, we crawled out of the hotel room shortly before noon with the children suffering from acute cabin fever, and Finnur from football/soccer fever. The subway ride went well, but when we got to the address in question we didn’t see a Google sign anywhere. We ended up asking a clothing store clerk where the Google office was and he told us it was in the building, but that we had to ask the security guard where to go.
Sure enough, once we were out of the elevator, the Google logo was everywhere. For some reason we’d gotten the address of the “satellite” office, so we moved across the street to the “real thing” (also not marked anywhere) and had lunch on the engineering floor. Bjarki sort of lost his mind in the cafeteria, he kept going back to the drink coolers to stroke the gleaming cans of Mountain Dew and Ginger Ale, and he was overall pretty unable to focus on eating. We’re not sure if his appetite is still so poor because of the pneumonia (thankfully, his crazy coughing fits seem to have vanished, except after he’s been running around) but he’s eating a lot less these days than usual.
Finnur asked for the location of one of his coworkers that he knew from New York, and he told us the really fancy cafeteria was on the 8th floor. So we headed up there, and boy was I glad we didn’t eat up there. Turns out there is a balcony there which I’m sure is great for eating, but the railing was not nearly high enough to stop parental heart-attacks.
Yes, I'm aware that it looks like Finnur and the kids are standing in front of a painted background picture, but no, this is the view from the Google cafeteria balcony.
I’m guessing you’ve noticed that we’ve started blogging in English. Will this be a permanent feature? Perhaps! It seems only fair since we used to blog in Icelandic when we lived far away from Iceland and were blogging for our friends and family there. Now we’re mooooving so it feels like we’re blogging for ourRead more
Today was really toasty. We headed out into the world shortly before noon (aw, shucks, Finnur missed the last few minutes of the last World Cup game!) and settled for sandwiches for lunch. Then we tried out a new playground in Central Park, where the kids had a great time playing in sand and water. Somewhat surprisingly (to us anyway) we ran into yet another Icelandic mom with a kid in tow (Ásta, wife of Kjartan). She told us that the Upper West Side is home to quite a few Icelandic families, and then we proceeded to name all the people we knew in common (which included a large percentage of the Icelanders living around Stanford). It’s a small small world.
Yet another playground in Central Park with a water-feature!
In light of Bjarki’s pneumonia diagnosis, we decided to keep day four calm and quiet and make sure that Bjarki got his first afternoon nap in a long while. We exited the hotel somewhere between 10 and 11 am, and I made my way to the Riverside playground by the Hudson river, while Finnur wheeledRead more
We’re still mostly running on California time, which suits us well when traveling. This means that the kids go to bed late, and wake up late – well, sort of late-ish. Funnily enough, Finnur’s been getting up at 7am in the morning to watch World Cup football (‘soccer’ for the Americans) and since the games don’t end until around noon, that’s when we’ve been exiting the hotel for the day.
Today’s out-and-about was driven by a desire to get Bjarki to a doctor at some point during the day. Last Monday, we all (except Finnur) came down with a cold, but Bjarki was the only one that got a fever. Like any good parent that doesn’t feel like changing airline and hotel reservations, we gave him some ibuprofen and he was basically fine on the airplane over.
As the week progressed however, he seemed to be running a mild temperature (we’re travelling so we’re not measuring!) and last night his cough got worse so we figured it was time to have him checked out. We found that one of the drug-stores has “walk-in clinics” in a few of its stores, so that’s where we headed. We arrived down at 50th street only to find out that their doctors can’t see children younger than four. Instead we got directions to a nearby hospital, and were told that the emergency room runs a parallel “fast track service” for non-urgent cases.
Since we were already down on 50th street, we decided to use the opportunity to walk to the Rockefeller building and visit the observation deck.
Across from the Radio City Music Hall. Tonight's act were the New Kids on the Block (or NKOTB). My teenage self squeed a little.
New York is a weird place. It’s hard to discern why places are busy. Is it all tourism? Or are the locals all out and about during the day? Having lived in suburbia for the past 10 years (and a glorified fishing village before that, no offence meant!) I’m finding New York a bit claustrophobic. The houses are so tall and so close, and there are people everywhere. Somewhat bizarrely we find that the city is littered with drug stores, somewhat akin to how California is littered with gas stations. But it’s got good food, which is non-trivial!
I’m also inclined to whine about the subway system. Yes, it has trains, and they get you from point A to B. But travelling with a stroller is a major headache. Every time we want to check into a station, we must take Bjarki out of the stroller, fold it, and somehow get it past the gate-posts. We then haul the stroller up and down stairs because very few stations appear to have elevators or even escalators. It is perhaps no wonder that we appear to be the only people crazy enough to be using the subway with a stroller in tow.
I can also happily report to Londoners and Parisians and Tokyoeans that their subway systems are in much better shape than the system we’ve seen here. There are no notifications on how long it is until the next train arrives, and stations are inconsistently marked (we got off early one time because scaffolding was hiding the markings and I panicked). Most of the stations look grungy and dirty, although they seem to be working on sprucing up some of them. We did get lucky one time and got on a new train which had a fancy “this is where you are, and here are the next stops” on a fancy screen, so perhaps there is a bright future ahead, but it seems a long way off.
Speaking of scaffolding, it would appear New York is Under Construction. Almost every single block has a bit of scaffolding covering up the first floor of some building. It’s a little bit amazing! Even the fancy buildings in the financial sector had lots of scaffolding, not to mention a good portion of Times Square.
So what is there to like? Well, I can see how people can really enjoy living here. It’s The City in the US if you like city living, and Central Park is just a stroke of genius. So, assuming you have tons of money, and can afford a big place with a good climate control (we keep the AC in the hotel off most of the time because it’s just so darn loud) next to Central Park, then you’ve probably got it made. (Did I mention that most of the big grocery stores deliver to your door?!?)
Anyway, today’s out-and-about was set off by a desire to see the Statue of Liberty. So we rode the subway pretty much as far down south on Manhattan as we could and then walked around.
Policemen on horses. Anna wanted to ride one too. Erm… no.
We didn’t run the noisy AC during the night, so the room was very toasty when we finally crawled out of bed around 10:30am (7:30am body-clock time). We visited the diner next door, had a kinda-ok breakfast, except I made the mistake of giving Bjarki one of my walnuts, which was so thoroughly rejected that he refused to eat anything whatsoever afterwards.
Then we walked to Central Park and stopped at the first playground we found. It didn’t take long before we determined that another Icelandic family was at the park (what are the chances?!) so we chatted with them for a long while. The kids played and played and played, and we didn’t leave the playground until it was well past 1pm. Then we headed south towards the Natural History Museum but by that time both kids were delirious with hunger so we headed to the Shake Shack for some really yummy burgers and shakes.
Having mostly regained our sanity, we headed into the American Natural History Museum where we managed to spend just over an hour before Bjarki blew his top and we had to leave. Anna really enjoyed the visit though, and we can envision a time where Bjarki will too. The dinosaur bones were most impressive. Anna also puzzled over a human skeleton on display (the pelvic bone was a big mystery, so were the huge eye sockets).
To give the adult legs a break, we then headed for a second playgound on the edge of Central Park that we had seen while walking south. While there I needed directions to the nearest restroom (thank you Anna), and approached a lady that seemed to be corralling a few kids of “I-need-to-go-to-the-toilet-NOW” age. The man she had been speaking to turned as I spoke to her and gosh-darnit, it was somebody I’m pretty darn sure is a famous actor (wearing glasses and a baseball cap). Very, very famous actor. Last name very close to Demon. First name same as Deirdre’s husband. Which totally makes sense since actors would have the free time on a Wednesday afternoon to hang out at the park with their kid. I tried not to flinch, but I’m sure I did.
Anyway, off to the toilet we went. Afterwards, Bjarki (by then also known as Mr. Hungry-and-Tired-and-Off-by-Three-Hours Grumpy) managed to bring the daughter of the aforementioned actor to mild tears, which prompted an exchange of a few words. I’ll be sure to let him know what he did if said daughter ever becomes famous. At some point Bjarki almost got a lift up to a platform from the weirdly familiar person but he looked around for me to give permission but I was so close that I just lifted him myself. Bottom line: It’s weird weird weird bumping into people that you feel you ‘know’ but really don’t. And it must be equally weird being that person everybody thinks they know – and know that they do.
At the end of the day we took the subway north again, stopped by at a Whole Foods (where Bjarki lost it again). Then Finnur took the kids to the hotel for a bath while I waited on a pizza. Getting the kids to fall asleep with us all in the same room continues to be a bit of a challenge but we managed except that Anna woke up again and discovered I was on the computer (did you notice my blog updates below?!?) and couldn’t fall asleep until it was almost midnight. I’m sure that will make for an interesting tomorrow.
As I’m writing this it’s a little past 1am New York time (10pm my body-clock time) and it’s just started raining outside. The weather forecast is pretty scorching for the next few days, but hopefully we can work around that. Oh, and we plan to bring snacks for the kids unlike today. Rookie mistake! 🙂
At the diner next door.
Departure day. We woke up around 6am, ran around a little like headless chicken, but somehow managed to pack the car and be at the airport well before the departure of our flight. Embarrassingly, we didn’t get a family photo of our gracious hosts, Sarah and Augusto, mostly because of the headless-chicken thing. Jason woke up just in time for our departure so we got to wave him and his cheeky grin goodbye. Yes, sniffles. Bucket-loads of sniffles.
At a cafe at the airport, having gone through security with an obscene amount of hand-luggage. JetBlue flies out of the International Terminal at San Francisco, so the food was a wee-bit more upscale than what is usually available at the domestic terminal, but I must stress the 'wee'.
On the last day before our departure we settled our affairs with our landlord, and then paid a last visit to Bjarki’s daycare. We visited the various classrooms to say goodbye to Anna’s old teachers as well as Bjarki’s old teachers. When it was time to visit his current classroom, we discovered that all the kids had gone outside to bike so Bjarki biked too while we chatted a bit. Then it was time for final hugs.
Bjarki bikes off after his friend.