After canceling Australia, we booked a (very!) last minute trip to NYC to ‘save Christmas’. In other words, get my mind off a disappointing event and buy some Xmas gifts at the same time.
We stayed in our usual hotel. The room wasn’t quite as fancy (or expensive) as last time but was still cozy and had a wonderful view, especially at night:
That’s the Bryant Park ice rink, which they set up for a few months every year. The whole park gets a makeover in fact, with lots of temporary shops and restaurants. Here’s a better view of the rink:
Mostly we shopped, and as usual we absolutely filled our days. But we also found time for eating, like delicious mochi donuts (made using rice flour):
Or this mozzarella potato corn dog:
We visited Madame Tussaud’s for the first time ever, which was crazy busy since it was raining and everyone else chose to go as well, but it was fun seeing the incredibly lifelike mannequins:
And to our surprise you could pose with almost all of them:
Of course we went to see the famous Rockefeller Center tree as well, which was dazzling at night:
And – to our surprise – Saks 5th Avenue had a 3.5 minute fully animated light/music show using 700,000 lights over the entire facade of the building:
Oh and the city was mobbed with people. In fact this was maybe the busiest we had ever seen NYC, and certainly the most people I’ve seen since the pandemic began. Of course the unfortunate side of this is that NYC is currently seeing pandemic-record covid numbers (due to the variant which affected my trip…) but it was great to see near-ubiquitous mask usage (even out on the sidewalk) and testing/vaccination tents on every block:
We had a whirlwind trip but a fun one. We packed a lot into 2.5 days and returned with an astonishing amount of goodies. This last photo shows most of what we bought (certain Xmas gifts are omitted). Can you guess which of these will soon inspire a blog post of its own?
