After yesterday’s musical tour we decided that today should be cultural with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, more commonly known as The Met.
Skipping breakfast, we were still full from yesterday’s meal, we decided to take a leisurely walk through Central Park to get to the museum when it opened at 10.00am. Avoiding all the touts trying to get us to use their taxis, Ubers or tour buses we made our way up West 50th Street towards Broadway. We made a slight detour into Worldwide Plaza for a photo stop….
….and then turned north on Eighth Avenue towards Central Park.
The streets were getting busy with workers scurrying off to their offices, children making their way to school, dog walkers giving their animals some exercise before leaving them for the day and bikes, scooters and lots of cars. Everything seems to move at a frenetic pace in this city and the motorists in particular seem to have no patience at all. Horns are constantly sounded at the slightest hesitation at traffic lights and the canyon like streets echo with their sounds.
It was therefore quite a relief when we reached the quieter sanctuary of Central Park. This oasis of greenery occupies some 843 acres of grass, woodland, lakes and many leisure activities. The winding paths take you past lawns….
…..under bridges,
…..and past many statues and memorials, such as these.
Central Park is not really a pretty park when you compare it with some of the Royal parks in London for instance, but the many joggers and cyclists really enjoy it. We also noticed that this was a regular walking route for the many nannies pushing their charges to the many playgrounds in the park.
We also realised that The Met was further up the park than we had first envisaged and what was initially to be a short walk had now turned into quite a long trek. After a few short stops to take in the sights and to rest our weary limbs we soon spotted the steps of the museum up ahead.
The Met is a massive combination of museum and art gallery that stretches over three levels and contains over two million artefacts ranging from prehistoric times to the modern age. They say that you could spend several days looking at the various objects and just seeing the size of the entrance hall you could understand this.
We strolled through the Eastern hall…
….making our way to an exhibition on musical instruments. These included Ancient gongs…
…..pianos and other keyboards…..
…and even some violas.
They also had a prototype of the original Les Paul guitar.
The American art section contained some superb examples such as Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware”.
We spent a couple of hours walking from exhibition to exhibition displaying ceramics, silverware, in fact almost everything you could think of. After a drink in the cafe and the obligatory perusal of the museum shop we caught a taxi back to the ship.
Everyone on board was looking forward to tonight’s sail away and the upper decks of the ships were lined with passengers with cameras and phones poised.
Unfortunately there had been an issue with the refuelling of the ship which was going to delay the departure by a couple of hours. This meant rather than capturing the skyline in the glorious October sunshine, twilight was upon us as the ship made its way from the berth. We did however get some lovely shots of the skyscrapers in the evening sun.
New York was a great place to visit but we have done more walking in the last two days than we normally do in a week. Tomorrow we will take it easy in Newport, Rhode Island.