I awoke from a night of extremely lucid dreams, signalling that my body had finally recognised that I was on holiday and was beginning the process of unwinding the tangled mess of my brain that I had built up over the past year. It was a good feeling and something I had been waiting for ever since I landed in the US but I had never imagined it would’ve taken this long to occur. Still flush with a small victory I roused Rebecca from our slumber and set about preparing for the day ahead. It was shaping up to be a wallet draining affair.
I hit up Yelp again to find a breakfast place that was close by. Narrowing the search down I honed in on a cafe inside a hotel not far from us, the Cafe Edison. The menu was a simple affair, a welcome change from the massive menus we’d become accustomed to over the past week or so. We ordered ourselves up a hearty breakfast whilst basking in the rustic architecture, figuring out where we’d head to first. Whilst I had always known that I wanted to visit Nintendo World when I came to New York we had past it the night before on our hunt for the dinner place I had tracked down and had to refrain from going in there prematurely, but today it we would be making a bee line for it.
A short walk later saw us at our destination, the 2 story store entirely dedicated to the world of Nintendo. The bottom floor was almost completely dedicated to the DS with dozens of the handheld consoles dotting the show room floor. I fiddled around with the comically large DSi XL for a while before catching up with Rebecca who’d started looking over the wall of Pokemon figurines plastering an entire wall. There wasn’t much more for us on this level so we headed upstairs to the Wii/merchandise/history area and instantly I knew this is what I was looking for. There was an entire section dedicated to all sorts of Nintendo memorabilia including a working Famicon (the console before the NES). I spent a good half hour ogling the various things before shifting my gaze to the merchandise, eventually leaving there $100 poorer with several bits of swag in tow:
We’d also noticed that there was a Lego store not too far away so we wandered over there to have a look. It was patently obvious that this place was far more popular than the Nintendo store we had just come from with space being at a premium as you were trying to move around it. The audience was however a generation younger with the majority of the people in there being under 12. There were some impressive Lego sculptures in every section of the store but apart from that it was pretty much just your run of the mill retail store which was a little disappointing. I left there with my wallet in tact, but with a good dozen pictures to remind me of the short time I spent in there.
Just for kicks we decided to make our way to the Apple flagship store next to Central Park. Rebecca wanted to see if she could get a new case for her iPhone but realistically we just wanted to see the spectacle that is the giant glass cube protruding out of the underbelly of gotham city. Walking up to it I was impressed by how clean they’d managed to keep it in this pollution ridden city but that was instantly overtaken by the swarm of people coming in and out of the store. We made our way down and were instantly greeted by a swarm of people the likes of which I’ve never seen before, with nearly every display item being fondled by a potential customer and every employee either helping someone or frantically running around the store. I had wondered about the lack of Apple advertising in this giant metropolis and this provided the answer, they just don’t need it. With Rebecca coming up empty for a suitable replacement case for her iPhone we left the Apple store and started ambling towards Central Park.
We were initially going to go into Central Park Zoo but it was going to close no less than an hour after we arrived there. On advice from our recently returned from the US friends, Nick and Dannae, we started making a beeline for our closest retailer of the New York City Ticket. It’s basically a collection of tickets for local attractions at a discounted rate and can be purchased at each of the attractions themselves. Since we were in Central Park the closest one was American Museum of Natural History so we headed over there. The attendant had told us that the last show for the day in the planetarium had just started so she gave us a second set of tickets to come back to catch it another day. With that in mind we did a quick tour of the 2nd level before the museum closed for the day, sending us home.
Tomorrow is set to be filled with more shopping and sight seeing although hopefully more streamlined than we did today. My foot has been giving me trouble again and whilst it was fine for most of the day the walk home flared it up to the point of being properly painful. Thankfully it seems to get better rapidly so hopefully a day of light walking won’t set it off again and I can continue to enjoy the numerous sites this metropolis has to offer.
