Tag Archives: Usa

Today started with the mammoth task of packing. Since I arrived with only 8kg including my suitcase, and proceeded to shop my way around NYC on behalf of myself and quite a few Perthites, it looked like it might not quite happen. It’s okay though, I did buy a second bag.

With a couple of re-jigs, I managed to save enough space that I was able to revisit Fluevog Shoes to pick up a pair at the last minute for Miz D. Success!

After heading uptown to also revisit Dylan’s Candy Store, this time with K in tow, we popped into Bloomingdales (nowhere near as impressive as Macy’s – my new favourite store) and grabbed a hot chocolate and a cake from the Magnolia Bakery to munch on in Central Park.

Central Park was full of the usual suspects: dog walkers, families, nannies, and of course Big Bird. On that note, we decided it was time to head home.

Time to part ways. K was heading off to Washington then to South Carolina before hitting South America, and time for me to head home in time to start work again next week. Sigh.

I have to say, JFK airport really doesn’t live up to the rest of NYC I the shopping department – there’s barely any shops and hardly any duty free! Good thing I’m transiting through Dubai: shopping central.

See you next time!

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Location:Terminal 5,New York,United States

We decided to split up again today, and since I was heading to the garment district to indulge my love of fabric, I wouldn’t want to force that on anyone else who wasn’t similarly focused!

My efforts in this area were confined to only four or five shops, and I only bought fabric at two of them! At Spandex House I acquired some lovely stretch glittered leopard print velvet (yum!) and then at Spandex World I added to the mix some brown/green and some red/black tie dye stretch velvets. I’d ordered from House before, as they have pretty reasonable shipping prices to Oz, but only ever drooled at World – they have a slightly larger range but shipping prices are ridiculous.

I also trawled through a couple of trim stores, but decided I should keep to ebay for that!

I was drawn in to Lane Bryant as well, and picked up a couple of cute tees which do double duty as souvenirs – they have blingy apples in hotfix crystals on them!

JCPenney was also on my list – they have a Sephora store there and I was looking for makeup requests from friends at home, so I checked out their clothes after getting makeup (a letdown after the huge Woman section at Macy’s!)

By this time the Fashion and Technology exhibit at the museum at FIT was open, so I wandered through the clumps of fashion students running around trying to complete an assignment (“have you seen the Kitchen Sink dress? Is it actually called that? I’m sure I haven’t seen it. Is that the 1920s hat? Do we submit this online or hand it in?”) and people getting told off in stentorian tones for taking photos (probably the same disorganised students). The actual exhibit was as good as the people watching – focused on changes in technology and how that has influenced fashion: the spinning Jenny making cotton the most easily available textile; the jacquard and zigzag knitting machines revolutionising fabrics; the zipper; the advent of polyester and “wash’n’wear”; right up to heat-moulding fabrics, digital inkjet printing and 3D printing of whole garments. Wow!

While on this fashion bender, KW reminded me of the Project Runway episode where the designers had to use candy to make their designs, so I trundled up to Dylan’s Candy Store to have a bit of a gander. They had a couple of the dresses in the window… Hope they treated them with something as they would have been made over a year ago! They do have some great stuff there, like the signature lollipops, but also themed chocolate for each decade of the 20th century!

I met K down at Washington Square to do some people watching and then headed down to Bleeker Street to get dinner at Risotteria, a predominantly gluten free place. On the way we popped in at Bleeker Street Records, and saw a quite rotund kitty cat who was obviously the boss!

Risotteria was amazing – we sat down and they brought us fresh from the oven GF breadsticks as a matter of course, and they were SO tasty! I had pizza (of course), and so did K, then we were presented with the dessert menu. Unable to decide, I had an eclair (yum!) and asked for a choc-peanut butter cupcake to take away for later. Even yummier! The food wasn’t cheap, but that was mainly because of the exorbitant price of wine here – a so-so bottle of rose cost the same as the Veuve we had the other night!

Rolling our way home up Bleeker Street, we happened to pass a tea shop with the most delicious smelling tea blends, so of course we had to try some… And walked out half an hour later with multiple teas (‘glitter and gold’ smelled awesome AND has little gold flecks in it! How could I resist??) T2 teas are good, but this place was even better!

We also passed the Christian Louboutin shop… Luckily for us in the suggestive state we were in, the shop was closed! Gorgeous shoes in the window though…

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Location:8th Ave,New York,United States

Our first stop was Grand Central Station. Very grand, and quite central! After seeing it in so many movies, it seemed very normal and everyday, especially with an Apple Store taking up one iconic end!

Once we’d seen this monument, we split up for the day, as K was heading to the UN, and I was seeking retail sanctuary as I needed to find a few more pressies for the family, and continuing my search for the perfect pair of jeans, which the three Levi’s stores I’d tried, couldn’t provide!

My first stop was the Museum of Modern Art. The queue to get into the museum proper must have been 400 people long – it snaked out of the building, down the street and around the corner! Rather than wait (and wait and wait…) I just headed into the gift shop and picked up some cool things for people back home.

Next stop: Macy’s. I’d heard about the 10% off ‘Visitor card’ out of towners can pick up, and when I popped by the Visitors’ Desk, they gave me a 25% off card valid for today only! Woohoo!

The problem with having a discount card and a credit card burning a hole in your pocket is that you then are guaranteed to not find what you want. I did however, pick up a few things, and found clothing success in the Macy’s Woman section. After trying on 10 pairs of jeans, I narrowed them down to a pair of Jessica Simpson brand (oh the humanity!!) and a pair of Silver. After trawling the rest of the section and trying on items from Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors (ooh-eer) I found out that the jeans were both on sale, so with my discount card I was a very happy camper!

I hunted down the MAC cosmetics counter, and while unfortunately I couldn’t use my trusty discount, at least they had everything I wanted, which was pretty unheard of in Australia!

After a quick stop at Soapology up the road from the guest house for some luxurious hand made products, I settled in for a quiet night, fortified by a tasty spinach omelette from the diner next door.

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Location:8th Ave,New York,United States

Today ended up being a very arty, garden-y day.

We started off exploring the Highline, which was an amazing mix of industrial design and the softness of gardens. What a great idea to transform this old freight tracks to a shared garden space. Urban renewal to the nth degree!

Our next ‘destination’ was The Metropolitan Museum of Art, so we walked leisurely through Central Park again. Just as busy as yesterday, with cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, families, picnickers, kids’ birthday parties etc… We saw the lakes this time, which looked pretty idyllic with rowing boats and water fowl floating around.

The Met was pretty amazing, as expected. Unbelievably, my bad luck with costume exhibits continued (does everyone remember my ill-fated trip to the V&A costume department last year? I certainly hadn’t forgotten, but I don’t expect it to happen again!) and the Costume Institute was closed. Sigh. Nevertheless, as we were about to leave, we stumbled across a series of talks about one of the combined exhibits, ‘Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity’, which featured a talk about corsetry from Valerie Steele, author of ‘The Corset: a cultural history’ which I have on my bookshelf. Great discussions, and it renewed my intention of finding the exhibit in the maze of partially connected rooms at the Met!

The exhibit was great – some beautiful specimens of dresses, accessories and men’s clothing, accompanied by glorious art from the period featuring more delicious fashions.

As we were running out of time by this point, we didn’t go into the Guggenheim, apart from popping in to grab a pressie for Mum.

Then it was time to head down to Broadway to catch ‘Chicago’. Great show, if you get the chance! We were in the mezzanine level, and I would’ve thought that $100/ticket would bought a little more elbow room – we were packed in like sardines! Great view though, and the songs and choreographies were fantastic! Then we walked down Broadway to Times Square and caught the subway home. Whew!

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Location:8th Ave,New York,United States

After dropping more than $150 on taxis in the past couple of days, we thought we’d try the public transport route when arriving in NYC, especially as it only needed two different trains and a very short walk.

The AirTrain was easy enough to navigate, but we couldn’t work out how to buy tickets, as I’d forgotten you pay at the other end when transferring to the subway.

The subway itself was fine – we got on the train at the beginning of the line, so found seats easily. The train filled up a lot before we hit 14th Street though, which was our stop. The stairs were the biggest issue, so it’s a good thing we have strong arms!

The Incentra Village is lovely – right on Eighth Ave, so very convenient, with a yummy smelling cafe next door, a liquor shop across the road and lots of subway stations within a couple of blocks. The room itself is reached by some very narrow, steep stairs which were tricky to navigate with all our bags! The room has two beds – a double ensemble and a futon mattress on the sleeping loft (rock hard, so be prepared!) a teeny triangular bathroom and a little kitchenette (very handy, with fridge-ette, kettle, microwave, toaster and sink). The room is ‘character’, with old-fashioned furnishings, which makes it quite homey. The bathroom looks like it’s been reno’d recently, too.

Once we arrived and threw our stuff down, we headed out for a quick explore. We decided to wander up to Mood Fabrics, high on my list of places to see. The Friday afternoon rush hour was just beginning, so quite a few people around. A few people helpfully pointed us on our way, and we made our way up to the third floor if the correct building without mishap.

Although the place was filled to the brim with all sorts of amazing fabrics and trim, I managed to keep myself restrained to only getting some sparkly brooch/appliqués, which will be great for a costume. I even stayed away from the $100/piece ones! Also saw Swatch the dog, and bought some Mood merch for the fans back home.

Next up was a much-needed visit to Whole Foods – gourmet and health food emporium – to fill the cupboard. They have a nice range of GF products, including GF cinnamon raisin bagels! (Guess what I’m having for brekky?)

After an early night, we got up early to catch some of the touristy things, hopefully before they got too busy.

First up was Wall St, to gaze on the Stock Exchange (and to pretend to have ‘breakfast at Tiffany’s’) on our way down to Battery Park. We also went past the Native American Museum. Battery Park, like so many of the attractions at Niagara, was mainly closed for renovation/construction, but the boat trips out to the Statue of Liberty were still running, even though landing at the islands is still off because of storm damage from Sandy.

The boat took us up the side of Manhattan island to view the new World Trade building and to see the skyline and Brooklyn, before turning to go past Ellis island and her Libertyness. I was glad we were on the earliest boat – everyone rushed to one side of the boat to take pictures, and while its obviously built to not tip, there was a definite list to one side! I can’t imagine how it would go with a full boat!

Then we went along the other side of Manhattan to view Brooklyn Bridge, an amazing feat of engineering. It’s pretty spectacular.

Once off the boat, we headed north again, past the Bull of the financial district and another gorgeous spring flowering garden (The Bowling Green?) which was mass-planted with red tulips. Wow! I certainly need to add some tulips to my garden now!

On our way to the 9/11 memorial, we found a juice/smoothie van which had spinach on his list! I’d been missing my morning green smoothies so I grabbed a banana, spinach and beet one. The beet did take over the flavor a bit, but it was still tasty, and yay veggies!

We hadn’t booked tickets got the 9/11 memorial, but just wanted to walk past it. There were queues of thousands of people! Don’t know how much quiet reflection happens with that sort of crowd…

Next stop was in Nolita for the John Fluevog shoe shop. Ohhhh the Mecca of shoes! I hadn’t experienced the wonder of comfort and style that makes these shoes so amazing, but I’d perused D’s collection and had been told in no uncertain terms by both D and K that we were going there! With this in mind, I knew we were in for some intense retail therapy.

After narrowing my choices down to four, I ended up with a gorgeous pair of Pilgrim winklepickers and a Kitschy Kitschy Boom Boom Liz (they had my name *on* them – how could I resist??). Unfortunately neither my bank balance nor my luggage would have been happy with more, even if I would have been ecstatic! K also bought two, so it was a well-retail-therapied pair who headed back on the subway uptown to the Empire State Building.

Now I’ve never professed to be a fan of heights, so the very aggressive up sellers here were pretty close to turning me off the whole thing, but I’m glad Miz K was so keen – it was amazing! Once you got past the many many queues and “would you like upgrade for xyz at only $$$” x100, the building itself is a marvel of Deco gorgeousness, and the view from the observation gallery on the 86th floor was breathtaking. Wow.

And then please exit through the gift shop, where you can buy overpriced merch, like the bargain of the day, a $20 snow globe. No, thanks.

We had lunch at a Mexican version of Macca’s, Chipotle, which do yummy burrito-in-a-bowl type food. Tasty!

Next stop – the frenzied colour that is Times Square. Another wow moment – and it felt like we’d been transported back to Vegas with all the flashing lights and huge crowds of people. We found the TKTS booth eventually, but the queue was horrendous, so we resolved to look for tickets online (which we did successfully later on) and to head further north to find some peace and quiet at Central Park.

Not that Central Park was at all peaceful or quiet! First there’s the gauntlet of bicycle renters and carriage rides to get through, and then it seemed as if half of Manhattan was there enjoying the weather (it probably was, actually!) the park itself was lovely, and we sat on the grass to soak up the atmosphere (and might have had a nap in the sun) but there were so many people around it wasn’t really relaxing.

Since we’d heard some good news from home about R winning a prize, we decided we needed some bubbles to celebrate. The shop across the road from the Incentra didn’t have a large range of chilled bubbles, so when we saw a reasonably priced bottle of Veuve, my fave bubbles, we decided we should celebrate in style!

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Location:8th Ave,New York,United States