Noo Yawk

It seems everywhere we go we need new superlatives to explain the things we have seen. It is quite possible that the Americans have the most incredible city on earth. An honourable mention to Istanbul, but this place is pretty special.

We could bang on about the buildings, the stories of personal endeavour, the shopping, the sites - and we will at nauseating length when we get back - but perhaps the most incredible thing is how people interact with each other. Even the Indian residents are nice to each other. People here speak their mind. If they see something they like in a shop, they will walk up to the shopkeeper, exclaim how beautiful it is, and then keep going. Strangers chat to each other everywhere. They are polite, friendly and interested. Do that in a magical setting and you are on a winner.

Here are the highlights of the first couple of days.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not quite the Louvre, but not far off, either. They have a magnificent pharaonic Egypt collection, and we now know where all the good bits that were missing from the temples have gone - the Upper East Side.

This will upset some people, but the Met's Egyptian rooms are quite frankly significantly more impressive than any museum exhibit in Egypt. It leaves the Egyptian Museum (the national museum in Cairo) for dead, both on curation and quality of exhibits. Go to the Met.

It also has excellent Americana exhibits. New York seems to have been built largely thanks to a view visionary politicians and a gaggle of super rich industrialists who funded the great artistic projects. Many of those families also donated rooms of their palatial homes' furniture and there is a wing of recreated rooms, mostly from the Upper East Side again.

And they have Henry VIII's ceremonial armour, and various other cool military bits and pieces.

And if that doesn't have your attention, Central Park is full of these awesome little squirrels!

We spent a lot of time in Central Park, sometimes just wandering around aimlessly admiring everything. Apartments overlooking it are only $3 - $4 million. Or $10m in a famous building. Bargain.

Matt likes this photo. The second turtle tried its luck and got pushed back into the water, but in turtle-slow-mo. Magical stuff.

John Lennon was shot just a few metres from here, if anyone is interested.

And, as you do, the locals have put in an Alice in Wonderland statue. Apart from donating to museums, when a grande dame of society dies, her diligent sons tend to have interesting bronze statues erected in her honour, so there are lots of things like this scattered around town.

It will come as no surprise that we have given the local food a good going over. This is a hot dog bought from a trailer outside the Met. The sauce came out of a big tub from a ladle, and was the colour of the taxis. It even tasted like taxi. Incredible place.

And it's nice to find a place that really understands pizza. This is just up the road from Katz's deli, made famous by the When Harry met Sally orgasm scene. We just couldn't afford $20 for a pastrami on rye, at least not for lunch, so we got pizza from a Mexican.

We have also had ravioli cooked by Mexicans, and Asian cooked by Mexicans. The Romanian food we had was thanks to Romanians, and the only food served by cauco New Yorkers was some tragic Mexican we had last night.

There is a great toyshop called FAO Schwarz, which is where Tom Hanks played the giant piano in "Big". They have 7ft lego displays, three storey dolls houses, and a shelf of different Monopoly games, including, wait for it, the John Deere Tractors edition.

You can also use a computer terminal to dress barbies on a catwalk, and a staff member then runs commentary for your very own Barbie fashion show.

We of course went up the Empire State. That is the financial district off in the distance.

And we went on a tour of the UN. Here is the UN General Assembly room, the best place in the city of anti-semitic rants.

The building is full of art, and it is really special. When a country offers to donate something to the UN, it can hardly refuse, can it? Imagine a 192 country vote on bad taste? That lack of elbow makes this sort of thing possible - it's a tapestry donated by Belarus. Yes, a tapestry. It depicts nuclear fallout.

And Thailand gave this. It is a gold dome, the sort that you find all over Bangkok, but it contains a bit of Buddha. That makes a lot of sense. It is much less likely to get raided by disgruntled students in the UN foyer than it is in any Bangkok public building. Could Buddha ever having imagined bits of him ending up there? How would the clairvoyant even begin to explain that?

These are cool. When government breaks down in some dust-ridden hell hole in Africa, one of the things the UN does is send in "School in a Box" and "Sport in a Box", so schooling can continue / heating.

We also went to the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The less said about the Guggenheim the better, frankly. MOMA made us a little bit agro. Here are some of the pieces.

These are bits of coloured paper in frames.

This is a Picasso, a rare highlight.

This is a pile of bricks - yes, an exhibit, or an "installation" to use the parlance.

This is a painted bit of wood.

By touching the floor, it is meant to remind the viewer of their connection with the physical world, trees, dirt, etc, and by touching the wall one is drawn to think of the spiritual world. What we in fact thought was that while this unacceptable rubbish is being paid for and displayed in prime real estate, children are starving on the street. We both rushed outside for organic soup in non-biodegradable containers to make ourselves feel better about the yuppy waste.

Oh, how could we forget, here is some cutting edge lint.

The Museum of Natural History is seriously good fun. There are dinosaurs ...

Giant deer (not to be confused the the Monopoly set, above) ...

And models of giant whales. What more could you want?

So, our hotel / hostel / sleeping quarters.

Positives first, it is in an interesting and bohemian location.

It is near Katz's deli, and we met Mr Katz, and Ann Hathaway walked past us just outside yesterday.

Now descending into complaints, because we are living a tough life at the moment. It's certainly the smallest room we have ever had, particularly for $100 per night. About 3m x 2m, with high beds so our bags fit underneath. The windows are sealed shut, and the floor was once a large warehouse and parquetry partitions divide the beds. The mad rooters next door have now progressed to mad farting, and you hear every fart or squeek within about 50m. And there is some sort of biting animal in the beds. It likes Matt's blood, not Penny's, so despite having spent time in the jungles of Laos and Cambodia, and darkest India, the only place on this trip that the tropical-death-strength bug repellant has been used has been Mahattan. This is all just in aid of Matt complaining about the big welts on his feet and ankles. Sympathy is certainly not expected. We are usually out of the room by about 6:45am, and not back until 9pm, so it is not really a problem anyway. We are just worried that the bugs will be in our bags so no one tell Customs.

More to follow. (No one we have come across is coughing, incidentally, and there are no pigs anywhere.)