NYC Sunday 13/9

We headed out a little bit later on Sunday to a bakery lunch. They do great paninis in New York. Loads of locals were out and about as it was a lovely day. We saw heaps of people as we walked across Central Park. There’s a large lake or reservoir in the middle with a couple of hundred joggers straining their way around it. We were on our way to the Guggenheim Museum on 5th Avenue. It’s a striking building and a large number of people were heading in to have a look at the collection. The usual display was interrupted a bit to make room for a Kandinsky exhibition starting later in the month so we didn’t get to see as much as we would have normally. What we did see was quite good though. Following the Guggenheim we walked towards the East Village and some really cool shops and bars. With the temperature rising we had a drink in a cool bar to rehydrate before checking out the old CBGBs site at 315 the Bowery. This former music venue was a bit of a pilgrimage for us, having been the site of some incredible bands through the 70’s and 80’s. Elements of the original decor have been kept as part of the buildings new lease on life as a fashion store. Original graffiti and posters have been preserved behind glass so that was quite cool to see. The clothes all seemed to be beyond our budget though, way beyond our budget. Perhaps it's where rock stars shop once they've made it. Our next stop was a specialist sneaker store named Dave’s Quality Meat, it was a very cool store to check out. We had more of a walk through East Village, stopping at a great skate shop named Autumn Skateboards, before we had some Sangria at a bar, the Latin Lounge. By dinner time we were pretty hungry from all the walking and we ate at the Buenos Aires restaurant for some great pasta and seafood. Our last stop of the evening was a bar recommended by our travel guide, the Eastern Bloc. What the guide mentioned was that it had cool decor (which it did), but what it didn’t mentioned was that it was a popular East Village gay bar. We had a drink and the barman had a bit of a chat to us. We basically fitted the template of the undercover cops who come in regularly to check that he asks people for I.D. There would normally be a man and a woman, one would drink and the other wouldn’t, we thought it was pretty funny. We caught the subway home again, it’s a pretty easy system to work out and fairly clean which is good.