In a New York Minute...

...ooo-woooo-eeee-oooo!
Etcetera.
Too many songs and cheesy references, so many sights and only 4 days; a challenge even for such superficial tourists as ourselves, but we rose to it.
A 20 hour flight with a bit of time travel thrown in brought us to JFK via LAX before we had actually left Auckland, and despite the poor quality entertainment system on Qantas aircraft I managed to get through nearly four films as well as the usual feed fest on board. Emerging into the NY evening, the cold hit us hard...I was still wearing flip flops to be fair but still. We bundled into the shuttle bus and spent the next 2 hours on a tour of the city's traffic lights in the honking and shoving traffic with our effusive driver. He dropped all and sundry off before he made it to our lodgings, the home of my one-time colleague and friend George, who lives with his madre on "West 91st St, between Amsterdam and Broadway" (best said in a strong yankee accent I find!).
The beautiful apartment is packed full of his family's 800 year history and we were immediately made at home even at that late hour. After we chatted, declining all offers of food and had gone to bed, our body clocks forced us up 2 hours later to raid the fridge...great potato salad!
The first thing to do was get our bearings, and the highest place in the city to do that was obviously the Empire State Building. It was a cold and windy but beautiful day so, sticking on our vagabond shoes and wearing all our clothes, we grabbed a couple of hats and scarves, braved the lift, shared an audio guide and huddled up to listen to "Tony" our guide describe the sights. So far so good, down we came to walk the streets and find the Rockefeller Centre and Grand Central Station. Thinking that would do for the day, we wandered through Central Park and found ourselves at the skating rink...with an hour to kill, why not?! Ravel's Balero it was not, but we both remembered how to do it, neither of us fell and we were only a bit late meeting George in Greenwich at the White Horse...
A few too many pints in the pub where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death was not the best way to deal with our jet lag, and supper in china town hardly soaked it up so we were both awake at dawn and feeling pretty rubbish after our second night's sleep; time to slow down.
The only thing on the agenda in day 2 was a wander round the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we exploited the "recommended" entry fee clause to the max and wandered in like the pikeys we are, only found out we should pay when I asked a guard where the bathrooms were...but by then we were leaving! The museum is huge and contains the usual Egyptian collection but we concentrated dutifully on the Barcelona and Spanish section (Mrs Suarez has met Picasso and Dali so we thought we ought) and hunted down the thousands of George Washington portraits including him crossing the Delaware. We only got lost a couple of times, including a sticky situation in the Musical Instrument section...
Lunch was calling and next on the list was a traditional diner; we struck gold with a place on Amsterdam, where Napolitan yankees served us spaghetti and meatballs (accent required again) and a glass of cold milk! After a rest in the apartment we followed the lights for an evening on Broadway; just the trick, we had managed to grab tickets for the Lion King and loved every minute of the costumes, spectacle and the ever-so-American audience participation.
The weather closed in for our last full day but still we jumped on the Staten Island ferry to go past Lady Liberty (for free, our kinda way!) and then wander the sobering Ground Zero Memorial...those barrow boys at NYSE have stopped allowing the public to view the trading at the stock exchange (probably to stop us seeing the insider dealing) so we cut our losses and headed back to Rancho Suarez for his mum's rice and chorizo...with the promise of a little paella even?!