look on my works ye mighty, and despair

We got back from NYC yesterday, having left on Thursday evening (mm red-eye flights).

The week has gone by in sort of a blur: there's been a lot of food, a lot of shopping, and a decent amount of socialising. We bought boots and underwear and makeup and books and clothes. We wandered around Manhattan neighbourhoods a lot: Greenwich Village, Chinatown, the Upper East Side, Midtown, Tribeca, Times Square. We went to the Met and Chelsea Market and Grand Central Station and Macy's. We spent ages in Saks Fifth Avenue making happy noises at the tailoring and fabrics and cuts for the super-high-end clothing. We browsed artisan jewellery and knick-knacks in The Market in Greenwich. We wandered along the High Line in the sunshine. Our feet ached regularly, and we sought cool places out of the heat and light to rest. We went to Petco and played with the kitties. We sat in Central Park a couple of times and wrote fic in our notebooks. We met up with friends for dinner and drinks and hanging-out.

We ate a lot -- it was the thing Pez most wanted to do on holiday, and NYC has a lot of good food. A lot of our dinners were Japanese (easier to find and cheaper than the equivalent in London) so that made me very happy. I drank a lot of plum wine, which also made me very happy. I also got to eat a lobster for the first time ever (conclusion: that is an unavoidably messy meal), and we had excellent milkshakes and italian food and pastries and ice cream and pancakes. We were often too full for more food, but the food was so tasty we tried to eat more nevertheless.

I will note that people in New York are pro-actively helpful to tourists these days, in a way I don't remember from previous visits. We could barely get out a map without someone offering to give us directions, it was eerie. Since I basically lose all ability to navigate while in Manhattan, it was also very useful.

Also I have wonderful friends, seriously. I didn't get to spend enough time with any of them, but that's okay, there'll be future visits and future visits by them to the UK. There'd better be: not one person we hung out with let us pay for so much as a drink, so I need to start repaying this level of generosity.