So our first full day in New York (as an engaged couple!) started off with a complementary and tasty breakfast in the hotel in their library/dining area. It’s really a great place to come in the morning, lots of windows, tasty coffee, quiet music, so a nice and low-key ways to start off the day.
I had never been to the Museum of Modern Art so we decided that would be our destination for the day. We left the hotel around 9:30, but the museum didn’t open until 10:30 so we opted to walk there to kill some time. We stopped by Rockefeller Plaza, looked around the Lego store (they didn’t have any good girl-with-glasses Lego heads otherwise I totally would’ve come out of there with a mini Lego-me), along with Cole Hahn (where the sales guy followed us around the store the whole time, a bit disconcerting), and Banana Republic (this was by far the largest store I’d ever been in) before heading to the museum.
If you have never been to MoMA, it is huge! And plan to spend pretty much the entire day there. We started on the top (6th) floor and worked our way down through famous paintings like Van Gough’s “Starry Night”, and Monet’s huge “Water Lilly” paintings along with more eclectic video art pieces, an exhibition on fonts and consumer design (they even had a Vespa), and even an exhibit on “serious video games” used for military training.
We stopped at the third floor around 1pm for a lunch break (as long as you keep your ticket you can come in and out all day). We were thwarted at the first place we picked (Burger Joint, was highly recommended on Yelp and Foursquare but was totally packed), so we went across the street to Angelo’s Pizza (also courtesy of some social media outlet). At Angelo’s we enjoyed a fried zucchini and eggplant appetizer (the veggies were cut into chips and deep fried then arranged in an orderly circular tower, really good and excellent crispy texture with just enough flavor from both the batter, salt and the veggies) served with a garlic yogurt, then we split a “small” (aka 14″) coal oven-baked prosciutto and basil pizza.
Now we are killing a bit of time before dinner reservations at Spice Market at 7:30 and then finding some clear river view of the Hudson for the fireworks at 9:20, should be fun 🙂