We arrived late last night on separate flights, me coming from home and them coming from seeing the eclipse in Texas with their dad (they got to see totality; I got to see a partial eclipse from the Denver airport). We took the bus from Laguardia to the subway, got some amazing quesadillas from a taco stand in Queens, and then took the subway to our hotel near Chinatown, arriving near midnight.
My Seattle children have very little street savvy, and a few weeks ago I started worrying about them getting robbed and giving them lessons on how to protect their belongings. Sonya took my lessons very seriously, and was constantly guarding all our belongings. Anytime I let go of my suitcase for second, she grabbed it and yelled at me for letting go. At one point, in a not very crowded subway station, she asked, "What if I dropped a phone on the floor here? Would it immediately be stolen?" I explained that New Yorkers are not actually vultures, and your things don't immediately get stolen every time you set them down. She seemed disappointed and said that she thought we had overwarned them and made it seem worse than it really was.
We slept late this morning and didn't get out the door until noon, leaving not enough time for breakfast and the cruise around Manhattan we had planned, so we skipped the cruise.
My favorite bagel places from 30 years ago don't exist anymore, so I had to find new bagel places. The place I picked this morning, because it was the closest place to our hotel on a list of best bagels in New York, was called Russ and Daughters, and turned out to be a fancy sitdown restaurant, rather than the hole-in-the-wall bagel shop I was hoping for. The bagels were better than Seattle bagels, but not as good as I had hoped for my children's first experience of New York bagels. They said they were good but about the same as Trader Joe's bagels, which I found horrifying.
Then we took a long walk north and saw lots of parks and the Strand, and then went to the top of the Empire State Building, which I had never done before and it was pretty cool.
After that I decided we needed to have New York pizza, so we went to a place called Bravo Pizza, which I picked because it was close to the Empire State Building and looked good. It turned out to be a kosher pizza restaurant, which I thought was cool, and also very convenient because it means all the pizza was vegetarian so we can eat all of it. I don't know any kosher restaurants in Seattle, and it feels very different to be in a place where there are enough Jews that you can just stumble into a random restaurant and it turns out to be kosher. I was a little nervous about my kids' first experience of New York pizza being a place I didn't know, especially after the not phenomenal bagels, but we were hungry and I don't remember any pizza in New York every not being good. It was quite good, and the kids said the garlic twists were the best part of the trip so far, but it was not the best New York pizza.
Then we went to the Public Library with the lions out front, which Lucy was very excited about.
Last night I decided to get us tickets for a Broadway show tonight, and saw that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is now on Broadway. I feel bad supporting J.K. Rowling but I’ve always wanted to see it, so I went for it. The show was absolutely amazing. They had dementors flying over the audience, even up to the balcony, and the magic tricks were all very cool. Lucy and I had both read the book and knew the story well, and I was surprised that they left out a few details, since the book was actually designed to be a play. But it was really well done. The two boys in the show are supposed to be nerdy, but they made them more nerdy than I ever could have imagined, with screechy annoying voices and all, in a way that felt very real. The book got a lot of well-deserved criticism because it seemed like so obviously a love story between the boys all the way up until the end, when one of the boys suddenly has a crush on a girl and then they never address the obvious sexual tension between them. In the show the tension between them was even more obvious, and they left it much more ambiguous, probably as much as they could have possibly gotten away without getting in trouble for changing it too much.
We also enjoyed walking around Times Square late at night. We are having a fabulous time.
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