Location: New York City, NY, USA

Today we started the day off like I imagine most New Yorkers do: with a commute! I also imagine people aren’t normally excited about that idea but we were on our way to Grand Central Station so I was pretty happy. We hopped off the train and beelined for the main concourse. It is one of those sights that you feel as though you’ve seen a million times in movies or on TV, but is not at all disappointing when you finally get to see it in real life. The biggest shock was the ceiling: it is completely turquoise/teal with delicate gold constellations and little pinpricks of light coming through some of the ‘stars’. Neither of us knew it had a ceiling like that, but coupling that with the huge white marble columns, grand staircases, and balconies? Amazing.

We hopped back on the train and went to Yorkville, just above the Upper East Side, for some New York bagels at ‘Pick a Bagel’ on Lexington Avenue. They were as delicious as expected, but came with about 7 times as much cream cheese as we thought they would, I swear the cream cheese layer was as thick as the bagel itself.

Bellies full and finally caffeinated, we walked down the street towards our plan for the whole day: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Met day! We got our tickets and maps and headed into the fray. I knew the Met was big, but I really didn’t expect it to be THAT big. My favourite pieces were the impressionist paintings by Van Gogh and Monet. It’s not hard to see why they’re so famous. I still can’t believe Van Gogh didn’t sell a single painting in his lifetime and now they’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. I also loved the arms and armour room, though it was more medieval style than what I’ve worn.

A few hours in I was starting to get tired and would think ‘okay I think that’s enough’ but then we’d walk into another room completely full of Monet’s or Renoir’s and be like ‘oh damn alright guess we’re not leaving yet gotta see this!’ TWO AND A HALF HOURS LATER WE’D BEEN THERE FOR 6 AND A HALF HOURS. All around amazing and glad we spent so much time there, but we were starving and tired of being on our feet.

We mosey’d over to an Italian pizza place called ‘San Matteo’ and had dinner, dessert and espresso, all while chatting away about the stuff we’d seen today. I was really impressed with the the Met building itself, there was a lot of history about the building and I enjoyed it almost as much as the art. The original entry-way was now just a huge wall in a courtyard with a ton of beautiful statues in it.

They had a temporary exhibit on called ‘Heavenly Bodies’ which was a bunch of religiously inspired dresses by brands like Yves-Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana and Moschino, among many others. The dresses were either insanely detailed and stitched with stuff like real gold thread, or alternatively were nun habits but you know, the Versace version.

Kat had a skype date planned with her boyfriend Matt and was tired, so she headed home and I skipped over to the Crocodile Lounge for trivia night with Gordy. As always the evening was filled with great banter, and the trivia was hilarious but really hard. We got 10th out of 20 teams or so. With your first drink they give you a little pink ticket that gets you a free pizza from the kitchen. Who doesn’t like free pizza and trivia?!

Sav