In the city

I thought it was going to be a slow day in the greater New York City area. My brother had taken the day off work to do things but was also indulging his off day by sleeping in. I used that time to put in almost five miles on the treadmill in his apartment building's exercise room. How foolish of me. We probably ended up walking close to that over the course of the day.

I've earned a good night's sleep with all this walking, but I'll briefly touch upon the day's travels. After beginning at Penn Station and deciding to turn around (and some early difficulty figuring out how to get to the proper platform when not at the transportation hub), we went to lower Manhattan and unknowingly walked into Tribeca for lunch. Then it was off to Wall Street to see the New York Stock Exchange and the bull. Then it was over to the World Trade Center area and an overview of the site from the World Financial Center. We wandered out of that tower along the Hudson, which is pictured above. Yes, that is the State of Liberty way out there.

From there it was to the Museum of Modern Art and the free Friday evening admission. The floors with paintings impressed with all of the major works that you'd often just stumble upon. The surprise for me was often the size of the works. Oh, there's Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Matisse's Dance I (and so big!) and Dali's The Persistence of Memory (so much smaller than I expected).

There was no real plan after that. We wandered by Radio City Music Hall on the way to Times Square. We were both tired and hungry, but we couldn't really spot anywhere we wanted to eat. A barbecue place that seemed promising was struck from the list of options when we saw the length of the line to get in. Reluctantly we settled for Applebee's. Despite wanting to stay away from chains, I suggested it. My feet were tired, and I needed to eat.

From there we walked back to Penn Station and saw the crowd of Rangers and Canadiens fans walking north from Madison Square Garden. One particularly vocal guy in a Yankees cap kept accosting the Montreal hockey fans and telling them to get out of town. While we generally had good experiences throughout the day, I suppose that's New York City too.