Technically that's tomorrow, but I'm just getting put on a bus. Well, putting myself on a bus. Anyway, today is my last full day this trip. And it started out sucking! Loud party nearby, vibrating my room to 4:30am. So that was a thing.

I figured I would go to the Met, but when I got to Central Park, the day was *perfect*. I decided the Met is always there while the weather will be changing (sometime...) and I should enjoy the outdoors.

There's an Ancient Playground, which is basically a playgound in "ancient" style. I would have taken a photo but I was self-conscious of photographing lots of kids. And it's easier to link to someone's else's photo anyway.

Then I found myself trapped on the 86th transverse, which is a road, with sidewalk... and no escape for pedestrians. Or if there is one, it was blocked off by police for some big Global Citizens concert, which was disrupting much of the park even when I finally did escape (by walking *all the way through* to the west side.) I'd found the Ravine last time, but it might have been walled off today. Then again...

Central Park keeps confusing me. Lots of twisty paths, few maps, and the maps don't show you where you are on the map. At least the Ramble Path ones don't.

Anyway, I did have fun, but it was annoying too.

So, next. I grew up reading Calvin Trillin's food humor essays, in which he extols Katz's Deli, and Russ and Daughters. He was writing in the 1970s but these are still around! Or things with their names are, anyway. Russ was closed but I went to Katz. It's big! And busy! And... expensive! $23 for a pastrami sandwich! I don't know if their pastrami is supposed to be that good and expensive -- and their roast beef, and their bologna -- or if they're just milking popularity. I let myself be milked.

It was... okay. I'd be hard pressed to imagine a sandwich that I could agree was worth $23 -- wagyu beef, maybe. I'm not sure this was even the best pastrami I've ever had. It was different, almost like chunks of beef, vs. thin sheets or basically shredded. And there was a lot of it. But, eh. It came with two kinds of pickles, I assume the small dark tasty one was kosher dill, don't know about the bigger bright green one.

Oh right. Outside the Met I'd had a hot dog from one of the ubiquitous food stands. Then I saw a Nathan's stand so had a Nathan's dog, plus fries. The hot dog was definitely different -- thinner, firmer, different flavor. Maybe better. The fries were bland and almost wet inside.

Man, this sounds like I'm raining on NYC, or at least its institutions. But I've had fun. The ferry was cheap and fun. Dim sum yesterday was great (good, and also a bunch of things I hadn't seen before). What little I saw of the AMNH was great. I know the Met is good. And probably better on a weekday with fewer people in it...

What I really miss getting to is the Bronx Botanical Garden. But it's like 1.5 hours from where I'm staying -- or an hour via some Harlem train that runs once and hour -- and I didn't feel I left home early enough to make the trek worth it.

Went yesterday.

Biggest zoo in North America, one of the biggest in the world, must be awesome, right? Actually my impression was that it doesn't have more exhibits than other large zoos, but has more space for them. So six giraffes can probably go hide from each other, and there's a big paddock for a breeding herd of Pere David deer, and the House of Birds keeps going though the second floor aviaries aren't actually that big, but there are two of them, plus a separate large aviary for sea birds, and an aquatic bird house...

Wednesday is "suggested admission" day, which probably increased the crowds; that's why I was there! Some things like gorillas and butterflies you need a full ticket for -- *that* was discounted too, down to $15, but I figured there would be enough free material to fill my 3.5 hours, since I left home late.

The Pere David were a soft spot for me. A childhood book was Gerald Durrell's A Bevy of Beasts, and I dimly recall the story of the finding of the Pere David, and of him trying to nurse a deer or something during his apprenticeship at Whipsnade. Deer usually aren't very exciting for me but it was nice to see these, and read about the zoo breeding them, and in fact there were a whole lot, lying together in a pile.

Got a glimpse of a tiger. Hyenas and elephants AWOL. Distant view of African wild dogs, which looked pretty big. Also lions are thugs, stealing from hyenas and wild dogs. A placard claimed lions would steal a dog kill in 8 minutes, which sounds implausibly precise, and that a whole pack of hyenas can't stop a male lion, which matches a video I saw, though in that the hyenas were poaching the lion cubs.

Getting to the zoo was supposed to be 1.5 hours and ended up being longer. After exploring the area for food, I found a faster way back, the 5 instead of the 2. I ended up staying until City Hall; no food there but a busy pathway which turned out to be the Brooklyn Bridge. I walked it to say I had, got to Brooklyn, saw nothing, and took a train back.

Grid Madness

The physical streets are nice grids, but the numbering in Queens is odd. The block south of me is the 400s, whereas mine has addresses like 17-11.

The City That Never Sleeps

Certainly up later than Boston. This residential neighborhood has Crown Chicken and Top Gourmet open at 12:30am, among other things.

Conservatory Scale

I looked up Central Park Conservatory, and found the Conservatory Garden, in NE Central Park. It turns out to just be a formal garden, the only one in the park. It seemed small -- and compared to Central Park, or any proper botanic garden, it is. But it has three fountains and is at least two minutes walk north-south, it would be a sizable city park by itself.

Late note from last night: one of the dishes I ordered was "tiny dumplings". What came out, and I confirmed that this was in fact what I ordered, were dumplings the size of pork buns or larger. 8 of them. No wonder my waiter asked if I was planning to take some home.

Also, while the dim sum dishes were good, the egg rolls/spring rolls were as horrible as Chinese rolls often are. Heavy on greasy dough with some light cabbage inside and little interesting flavor. I ended up sucking out the cabbage for vegetables and left much of the dough. Stick to Vietnamese rolls.

For today, I got up early enough to still have several hours to kill. Explore? Museum? I leaned toward museumy things. AMNH and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens were both half an hour away, the Met closer to 45 minutes or more, I figured future visits were likely to still have easy access to Central Park but maybe be further from Brooklyn, so I picked the garden.

***Tangent***
When I visited NYC in 2001, smartphones were hardly a thing, I didn't even have a cell phone, and I got to struggle with some large Manhattan map, never mind the rest of the city. Well, not that much struggle: most of Manhattan is a very boring grid. Then there was the T.

This visit? Totally relying on Google Maps and directions. I didn't even think to dig up my old Manhattan map, I just phoned it in. The public transit directions were helpful and generally accurate, unless there was a service disruption it didn't know about. And the one thing more complicated than the MTA's system is the service disruptions due to maintenance. But hey, there's an app for that! Literally! Also a bus map app! And an MTA website would tell you how far a bus was from your stop.

OTOH I never found an app to tell me when a particular *train* was coming. Of course, with much of the system not having T-Mobile signal, it wouldn't have helped that much.
***

So yeah, the Garden. I'd expected to pay $10, vs. the "suggested" of AMNH, but apparently Tuesdays were free. Score!
Vistor's Center is a green building, using tricks I read about in 3-2-1 Contact in the 1980s: built into hillside, "living roof", solar overhang... a 400 foot earth tap for temperature control is a bit newer, and stippled? something, glass is even newer: various texture stripes both "reflect heat" and make the glass more visible to birds.

I was aiming for the greenhouses because that's my thing, but got turned around and ended up at a Japanese garden first. That's okay, they're also a thing. No islands or zigzag bridges, but a half-drowned torii, and a pond chock-full of koi and turtles. No waterfowl though, odd. Passed through a Shakespeare garden too, which had a thistle plant taller than I was. No mere ground weed that. It was scary. Pretty tall lettuces, too.

Greenhouses decent, I think Glasgow had much better ones. The bonsai room was something I'd never seen before, lots of bonsais of different styles, and wall placards about bonsai. Not just about trimming the growth above, but keeping the roots fine, so as to trick the plant into making smaller leaves, and you get a true miniature tree, not just a short one.

Aquatic plants room, tropical plants room, desert, warm temperate. The desert one was neat for putting a lot of American and African desert plants side by side, showing the convergent evolution.

Rooms weren't all that big; not much bigger than IU's greenhouse set, I think, maybe smaller than Wellesley or Spokane.

After that, a rather fragrant herb and food plants garden. A rock garden which fooled me -- it had nothing to do with Japanese/Zen rock gardens, and instead was a whole bunch of boulders and the sort of plants that live among boulders, like Swiss mountain pine.

Rose arc pool, and rose garden, but not many smellable roses. Also a bunch of girls (in the non-adult sense) wearing calf-length skirts and uniform black socks or stockings, escorted by women also in long skirts (but showing ankle) with covered hair, talking in a language I couldn't ID. White. I guessed something beyond Eastern Europe, like the Caucasus, but asked a woman, and got told Yiddish. So some variety of Orthodox Jew I'd guess, still raising their kids in Yiddish. That's kind of neat, though OTOH heavy clothes on a hot sunny day. Girls seemed playful enough, though.

En route, I'd left Jay-Metrotech station and seen NYPD apparently searching backpacks of incoming passengers. Later, my MTA alerts app warned the Brooklyn Museum station was being skipped due to "NYPD activity", but that cleared up by the time I got there.

Megabus arrived at 28th and 7th. It leaves from 34th and 11th. Walking from Penn Station to there wasn't much fun, especially as past 10th Avenue there's wide open lots, so the shade I'd been getting went away. I'd showered and changed clothes right before leaving for the bus, and then I wondered why I'd bothered. I'm really inclined to spring for the train next time.

Unlike last time, this time they did have the double-decker they were supposed to, and I got my reserved seat, up front and on top. From there, traffic is *scary*; looked like what I imagined of Grand Theft Auto, nearly running down pedestrians and hitting cars. I suspect most of that is simply the perspective of being up there. OTOH, I did wonder if we had a particularly aggressive driver; later -- much later, it took 50 minutes just to get onto a freeway in the Bronx -- it seemed like he was habitually tailgating cars until they fled to another lane. Not that most other vehicles were obeying 2 second following distance.

Also, it's really shaky up there, especially on Manhattan roads. I figured if I didn't get motion sickness from that, I'm close to immune. Not that I bothered reading, except on my smartphone, and people often say it's reading that sets them off. I listened to music, looked out at my great if sometimes terrifying view, and thought of fanfic relationships.

In the past, with bus rides that were longer than my reading material, I often killed time with various relationship fantasies. This was effective at killing time, though perhaps not mentally healthy, especially when dwelling on real people and things unlikely to happen with them. These days I lack plausible candidates, which is sad, but ficcing does mean entertainment that never has to face a reality check and disappointment. Woo! Of course, in the past I was hardly into fictional character relationships, but these days Nanoha provides a deep well of magic, SF, and yuri, that's of interest to me.

But I got kind of cramped up there. Next time... train.

Finally visiting NYC for the 2nd time. Getting here is cheap by bus, but staying here without friends or family to host me has put me off; I finally bit the bullet.

Megabus: $55 round trip with special reserved seats. Which I didn't get, because instead of the scheduled double-decker with table seats and such they brought out a standard bus. I hope there's a refund in my future. Cramped, erratic A/C, erratic WiFi. Even more cramped than Greyhound? Felt that way, though it's been a long time. Schedule said 4.5 hours, driver said 4-4.5 hours, reality said 5.5 hours; friends were surprised it was only that. Much of the last hour was getting through Manhattan, especially down 9th, up 8th, down 7th again, then waiting for a curbside spot. Whatever Greyhound's problems, at least they go to the Port Authority.

First impression from the bus: "man, these really are inhumanly tall buildings." I felt better on the sidewalk, though also irritated by slow walkers. Transit was mostly good, though there's no placard telling you what standard fares are. I splurged on a $30 weekly pass even though I've here for 4 days; figured I might use it a lot, and anyway I won't have to worry about marginal costs. Train has fancy LCD display of the next dozen stops. Also openable windows, with a sticker saying something like "don't open, we have A/C".

Host is friendly, apartment decent, though room lacks full privacy curtains or a seal on the A/C. Well, it's not my power bill.

Staying on the edge of Chinatown, walked around a bunch. Got out late, 8:45pm, lots of things closed. Was looking for a sweet spot in restaurants, busy enough to be attractive, but not with a line. Hard to find... ended up at a cheap noodle soup place. I noted that all the Vietnamese or Thai places have A sanitary inspection grades, while most of the Chinese ones are B or C.

Found Little Italy. Mulberry street is sealed off from cars, with lots of fancy restaurants with street seating. I had some gelato from a Christmas tree ornament store. o_O Nothing about that sentence makes sense to me, but the gelato was good.

Whole lot of late night Asian "foot rub" places.

I'd heard NYC had a stink in the summer. I thought, surely not. Nope, definitely a trash smell to a lot of Chinatown. If you're unlucky a *really sour* trash smell. Possibly connected to the piles of trash bags out on the sidewalk, despite the rats...