After the usual confusion with the incorrect billing for the room (the clerk did not even know how to cancel a charge, she was searching for the -ve button to credit), I left the bags with the clerk and headed midtown to meet my city guide. Now Christopher street was in full party swing. Balloons, radios blaring some songs I never heard before, people with picnic baskets. I decided to take the risk of taking my camera out at the street corner and photographing the Two potatoes restaurant at Christopher and Greenwich (a block from hotel). There were a couple of other guys also hanging around alone at the corner without any partners. I was puzzled till I saw a guy take out his camera on seeing mine and start shooting. Guess he was more afraid than me. Still I did not have the courage to risk my camera even for a couple of guys in thongs and started towards the subway in a hurry.

I made a brief stop at the Penn Central station to find out about the New Jersey Transit train that I had to take in the evening. Then I met Appu at the usual Trailways stop and we headed to the Rockefeller center. It was a really nice and sunny day and surprisingly the humidity was also lower than the day I had arrived. Rockefeller center was just a golden statue and an umbrella studded courtyard to me. We heard more interesting music blaring from the road. I had seen Lionel Richie on TV that morning in a street concert and was excited to hear some similar street concert. We headed over to Fifth Ave.

There are parades and then there are PARADES. What we saw was incredible, funny, exotic, crazy and compelling at the same time. I guess that also actually describes the big apple itself. It was the gay pride parade replete with floats, stars, university groups (NYU, Princeton, NJIT etc.) and drag queens. I am sure even you cannot make out who is who by looking at them. I really had to convince Appu that it was guy rather than a woman. She was not even sure of why someonewould be gay or lesbian.

Given some thought, it is not very difficult to understand someone being gay or lesbian. Not in terms of sexual relationship but with respect to human relationship. It is not a very difficult fact to realize that a guy would understand a guy better and a lady would understand a lady better. (I am not campaigning for the book "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus". :) Why should we be the judge of who is right for another person. My policy towards such issues has mostly been NOMB. I could not imagine how things would be in San Francisco which is known as the gay capital.

One thing to note is that asking gays for directions or living in a gay street would be one of the safest things for any girl to do if she is single. No dirty comments and no sexual harassment. Just for that reason having more gays and lesbians in the office would be a great thing. (Sexual harassment is not about sex, it is about POWER! Yeah, right! and I am from timbuctoo.) I guess they have a problem with gays in army because that is a potential distraction for the soldiers given the predominantly male population in the army.

We hopped into a Chinese place, Wei Min Lou(?), for lunch. Appu said she had wanted to eat there but had missed the last time. Nice cozy place with decently good food. But we ended ordering a lot more than we could eat as each dish turned out to be enough for two persons, than just one. So the rest of the day we carrying around the packed lunch with smell of Chinese food emanating from the bag. Having had a heavy lunch we decided to go for a lazy stroll in Central Park than doing something strenuous.

Central Park in the middle of Manhattan has the same sort look as the green belt in front of IIT in New Delhi. It always surprises me how those real estate sharks can let live such prime land in relative greenery. Los Angeles has its beaches for a Sunday. New York makes do with its central park. There were jazz players, guitar soloists and Rollerblade Dancers. People do rollerblade in New York like Los Angeles, at least in Summer. The sculpted bodies and the skimpy summer dresses are the same but you would be comparing a 27 mile skating track from Malibu to Long Beach with a few miles of track in between pedestrian traffic in Central Park.

In spite of the number of people in the park, people in California and especially Los Angeles are definitely more fitness conscious than New York. I have seen on the average slimmer bodies and less beer bellies. I even saw a beggar who lives on the streets (a regular at Santa Monica beach) doing push-ups and had a very muscular body. Just the year round sun and warmth which prevents from hiding your fat in Winter will do wonders to your fitness regimen.

The Summerfest of free concerts in CP was a nice touch to draw and entertain crowds. There were kids playing in the sand and moms teaching them drawing with sand crayons while the band was playing. The group we listened was very nice with several guys on the violin playing in synch. It sounded very much as pick-me-up synthetic music. The open air stadium with cane chairs was perfect for the loud music they were playing and the small girls doing the line dancing with their moms.

Appu dragged me out of the park saying she had go home and we headed over to my hotel to pickup the luggage. After I picked up my bags we headed to Penn Central for my train. After buying my ticket Appu left for home and I flopped down next to a pillar waiting for the train. The platform on which the train is going to arrive is decided dynamically. As the time for a train gets near the waiting hall gets crowded and everyones eyes are trained on the board announcing the platform. Then there is a mad rush, as is usual everywhere in NY, to the specific escalator.

I was taking the North Jersey Coastline (but I was heading south to increase the confusion). I had some time left for my train but it showed "Connection" instead of "On Time" for others. I chatted up a young lady sitting next to me asking her about it. She expressed lack of any idea what it meant. I gave her the usual line about being from LA and that grabbed her attention. She was a marine and was posted in 29 Palms close to Palm Springs in the past. I could have never guessed that she was a marine from her pink and orange dyed hair. I did not dare to ask her though whether it was allowed. After a few exchanges of polite talk about NY and LA, I strolled over to my train.

The trains are pretty good except for the signs of "Do not put your legs on seats", even in an empty train. The ticket collector in the train grabbed my tickets and left a piece of paper stuck on the seat. I surmised that it tells him whether I have a ticket and where I am supposed to get down. I finished the lemonade picked up in Penn Station and got down to jotting a few notes and reading a book Appu gave me as a gift - "The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy". The train rumbled on with voice prompts reminding every time there was a station and asking us to check our belongings before we leave.

Long Branch station was a shock after NYC. It was deserted and dark even as early as 10:00pm. I walked over to a Jersey Pride (which seemed to be the equivalent of 7-11 in NJ) to call Tejas for the ride home. With my luck riding high, his telephone was supposedly not working and I ended up calling a cab. While I was waiting for the cab I filled out the postcards to home and a few friends and posted them at the postbox on the corner. Tejas luckily decided to check on me and the cab arrived just as we were pulling out of jersey pride. We reached home to a nice apartment and after a brief chat and introduction to Shivang (Devangs cousin from India), gulped the Chinese food I had taken along. Devang had a few movie cassettes lying around so watched Far and Away, a nice Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman movie.

It was a pretty cold night in New Jersey compared to the hot ones in Manhattan. The concrete jungle might be absorbing the heat during the day and not letting the steam out at night. I woke up early enough to see an old oriental gentleman doing oriental calisthenics in the parking lot. That pushed me to my morning crunches and push-ups which I forget half of the week. I grabbed the early morning train from Long Branch and then hopped on the subway to the American Museum of Natural History. I was doing most of trip on the fly and decided on AMNH on the train. One of the things I have to be grateful for is the AAA New York guide which was really written for tourists like me.

One thing true about many museums in New York, including the AMNH, is the size. It was so huge that very few can expect to do a good tour and finish it in one single day. I really did not know what to expect when I go to a natural history museum. The last time I had been to a museum, other than SF MOMA and Columbus Art museum, was the Salarjung Museum in Hyderabad (It is known to be a pretty good one and is the largest collection in the world by a single person). For someone who has not even seen the California Natural History Museum which has been outside my office window, across the road, for about two years, it was a pleasant experience.

I took the whole package deal with entrance fee, audio tour and IMAX movie which was only $11.50 for students. The guy issuing me the cdrom refused to believe that I was the same guy as in my drivers license. Especially with my moustache off! "You look very different", he exclaimed, and added for clarification, "and much better!". I wasn't really impressed with his complement, till his assistant said, "And you have lost weight too, look at the cheeks!". Her, I was going to believe and gushed out, "Yeah! California does that to you".

I started out on the top floor with the dinosaur exhibits. "They are all very huge exhibits and you can see them fast", the guy giving me the CDROM said. The halls are arranged according to evolution as Vertebrate origins, Saurischian Dinosaurs, Ornithischian Dinosaurs, Primitive Mammals and Advanced Mammals. I had never before seen Dinosaur remains except in "Jurassic Park". It was fascinating to read how dinosaurs evolved, adapting to the needs and nature, developing new organs and shedding others. Fossils of footprints with some even supposedly capturing the chase between different species seemed very unreal.

It always baffles me how people take things for granted - either not searching for our roots or actually looking for them. When you look at an exhibit detailing the family tree of species, it is difficult to realize the amount of scientific work that went into it. Darwin had just seen the tip of the iceberg. Man spends so much time, money and effort in enhancing his knowledge of the past. Is it going to foretell the future? Is it going to enhance our life? Will it answer the question of why we are here ? The museum explains how fossils are excavated, studied and analyzed. How the mistakes made in one analysis are corrected by the finds of more fossils. Some exhibits list how the older mounting was done compared to the new one. The tail of one dinosaur was lifted into air after seeing some footprints without any drag marks for the tail behind. The most imposing exhibit, especially after Jurassic Park, is the T-Rex (Tyrannosaurus Rex).

One really wonderful aspect of the museum was the large number of children with their parents in tow running from exhibit to exhibit and reading the descriptions. A day in the museum will definitely be more fun and educative than poring over photographs in the book. I fondly remembered the childhood picnics to the zoos and museums when I was a kid. Seeing and touching a dinosaur bone or a Shark jawbone was a far cry from trying to understand from Crichton's descriptions or seeing Jaws. A very nice exhibit was how the evolution of horses was one of the easiest ways to trace the migration of species and the continental drift. Kids loved the holographic projections of the human body with different views showing the skeleton, organs, and the nervous system (they are tough to capture on film).

The short video on mammals was very informative too. I learnt that the main distinguishing character of the mammals is not giving birth to live offspring but the presence of three bones in the ear.

The biodiversity hall, which was a new exhibit, was one of the fascinating ones in the lower half. A whole room of mind boggling variety of species was so ... mind boggling! There was a screen showing how population growth has been happening for a few centuries and projections up to 2025. One of the guys in the audience had a sly comment on the lack of population in American sub continent till 1500. "All those Incas and Indians might not have been citizens", he said.

After calling Appu and pestering her to meet me after work, I headed over to the IMAX theatre for the movie Amazon. Though it was a very nice movie it lacked enough punch. To make it appealing to the audience, the story is told from the eyes of a couple of doctors - one an Inca village doctor who heads to the plains and one a white man looking for cures in herbal remedies. The photography and locales were superb though, and captured the green world very well. It does leave a message for the audience to preserve what we have.

I headed over to the civilizations section and decided to only finish the Indian and Oriental section due to lack of time. I guess that is one aspect at which museums fail. No Indian (even Chinese too i think) will come back happy with seeing any exhibit about Indian civilization. I feel it is just impossible to cover all aspects of a civilization using a few exhibits. The diversity, especially for someone from that culture, is too wide to capture in a museum. It was a nice introduction though for others who do not know anything about Indian culture. But you shouldn't expect too much from exhibits which spell Ravana as Ravanna. But atleast museums know the distinction between Indian and American Indian art.

A special African exhibit on Kalabari an african dance ritual with steel masks was interesting. A video accompanying the display of various steel masks and dresses explained the background of the exhibit. The dresses and make up reminded me of the elaborate dances of kathakali of southern India.

My neck was very tired at the end of the day with the camera and the audio CDROM hanging down the front. I had spent so much time and was so reluctant to move out finally that the cdrom guy had a worried look on his face. "I thought you wouldn't come back," he said. I stepped out just as they were closing the doors of the museum.

After licking up an icecream cone from the street vendor in front of the museum I headed to walk towards midtown. The ways people earn money! I saw a guy flagging down cabs for ladies coming out of the museum and accepting tips from them. Since I still had some time before meeting Appu I decided to walk a few blocks and then take the subway. While walking down I noticed that the museum had a moorish(?) look from the outside with turrets and ramparts. I ended up at the usual Trailways stop from the subway to meet Appu.

We decided to walk over for dinner outside the station and ended up in Times Square. Olive Garden below the coke bottle sign was the choice for the evening and we luckily ended up eating some nice Italian dinner. The food and the virgin margarita was excellent though the only complaint I had was that the waiter wouldn't hurry our order in spite of telling him that I had to catch a train. Times Square is very crowded and is definitely one place which would remind people from India of their homes. We took the usual tourist photographs in Times Square before walking back to Penn Station. I bought a T-shirt with NY logo as rubber print on it. (I had decided I would do all the touristy things!).

After taking the NJT to Long Branch it was good to snuggle up in bed after being on my feet the whole day.

After daring a couple of snaps without the flash I headed out to meet Rama at MOMA. The building looked pretty small from outside compared to the Natural History Museum. There was a special exhibition of Aleksandr Rodchenko. Most of his designs were for the bolshevik publicity. Article covers, propaganda fliers, military advertising were some the common media of his expression. It wasn't painting but more of graphic design, photocollage etc.

In the staple part of the museum there were the usual Picasso, Matisse paintings and art. It was exciting to see live the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. I would very much understand someone writing a whole thesis on the imagery in Henri Rousseau's The Dream or the cut hair in Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. Rama explained to me the significance of the earth colors in Matisse paintings which were an influence from his African outings.

But the most interesting exhibition that I found was that of Willie Cole. It should have been actually titled An artist in search of a medium. Since Willie Cole needed to find a novel way, he discovered(!) the clothes iron. His art consists of irons used to burn cloth or even Ironing boards. I am sure DaVinci and Van Gogh were turning in their grave at the concept of modern art!

The selection of pop-art was the one I liked best in MOMA. They had a good collection of Pollack, Warhol. Especially the classic Campbell Soups by Warhol. The collections seemed to be similar to the those in SF MOMA. But the best exhibition of Lichtenstein was the one I had seen in Ohio State University campus. Roy is a graduate from OSU and his was one form of pop-art which immediately draws your attention to the inadequacy of the print medium. It seems to sort of echo the aversion I have to seeing pixilated photographs on the web.

The best pieces among the remaining collection were the architectural drawings by Frank L. Wright and Louis Kahn. There was the usual section on chairs, ball bearings and vases. I guess the iMac would soon take its place among the exhibits given the ravings of the journalistic community in the newspapers.

While breaking for a bite at the cafeteria I called up Appu and convinced her to call her parents to the city to go for a Broadway musical. After we finished with the museum me and Rama headed out to Trailways to meet Appu. By now the person at the magazine counter in trailways station had started smiling at me while I browse through the magazines while waiting for Appu. Once her parents arrived all of us walked down to Times Square.

Appu made the choice of Les Miserables for us. She argued that since we knew the story anyway, it wouldn't be a bad experience for us in case we didn't manage to understand what they were singing! We shelled out $40 for each of the $75 tickets at the discount ticket center in Times Square. The unsold tickets for the evening shows go on half-price sale at a couple of locations in NY for those interested in catching some broadway show. Most weekdays you can end up getting tickets for whichever show you want. But it is actually possible to get the $15 tickets if you know in advance which show you want to see. I was not sure of how the $15 seating was though.

We walked over to the Imperial Theater and chatted while waiting for the show. Jekyll and Hyde was playing in the theater opposite and Appu confessed that she had never heard the story. I was tempted to buy the souvenir program that the usherers were selling for $10 a piece. But I realized that it would be one more junk book lying around in my house without any appreciation. So I decided to stick to buying my usual mug to add to the collection.

The musical was a real visual and aural treat. I do not remember the last time I had seen a live play other than on TV and screen. Sitting in front of the stage and listening to people singing with their own voices and dancing without any retakes was a exhilarating experience. Weaving an epic story on a stage of couple of hundred square feet was really an interesting montage. I was really surprised at the management of the rotating stage and the moving props when I couldn't even grasp a single movement at the darkened part. Of course, I guess what was happening at the lighted front was a good distraction! The story itself was no less an interesting facet to the whole experience. Hunger, Passion, Love, Greed, Freedom, Sacrifice, Truth, Crime, etc. - all set in the backdrop of one of the most important events of history, the French revolution. Both the Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert characters really impressed me with their performances. The musical was so entwined with the story that the songs never seemed out of place even though some songs never advanced the story.

After a very satisfactory day we headed back home in the subway. I spent the night in Rama's aptt as it was too late to go back to Eatontown. After a warm bowl of corn soup and munchies I turned in for the night.

The museum was already teeming with people and I waited for the short guided tour. Our wait was rewarded with a beautiful long-legged intern from Columbia with a cute smile. She breezed us through the museum walking us from one corner to the other while giving us a sample of what the museum had. We moved through the Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Chinese art. She explained the influence Chinese art had on the European artists of later generations. After a few expert comments on some 19th and 20th century paintings, a Persian room and an English room exhibit etc. While we were running around with the pretty guide there were a few people relaxing on the floor and enjoying the view leisurely, possibly non-tourists or local student artists. We finished our tour with the stained glass pieces from 16th century. After describing how the colored glass is developed/painted and put together we were released to discover then museum on our own.

One of the nicest things about visiting the world famous museums is getting to see in person great works which you have read or seen in print. Rodin's Thinker was one such piece at the Metropolitan. The 4 pieces of Thinker, Adam, Eve and Martyr together in a single location! Then there was the usual Annenberg collection of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso etc.

Not having too much time I intended not to miss the south asian exhibits. I headed to the second floor past Perseus holding Medusa's cut-off head. The exhibits on Indian temples were really nice. But I was wondering at the same time on how unimportant they were to me in India. The Qutub Minar, the thousand pillar temple in warangal did not even deserve a second glance when in India. They suddenly take much more importance and significance once you see them across the seven seas in the Ny Metropolitan.

Unlike MOMA, Metropolitan also had some descriptive sentences below the title of each painting, sculpture or artifact. It is much more interesting when you can know something other than just who did it! The layout and the arrangement of the pieces was also more interesting. I noticed that I was drawn towards the paintings for a closer observation rather than feeling a stand-off attitude in the arrangement. Alternate pieces were arranged into a depression into the wall and I would unconsciously step closer to them. When you turn towards the next painting its jutting out so everyone being lazy takes fewer steps and are closer to the art than usual. Most photographs, artifacts, paintings are arranged similarly except a few big paintings which have to be seen from far.

The exhibit on Korean culture was recommended to me by Seonil, who had seen it on the weekend before he left for LA. The wing was designed by an award winning architect Kyu Sung Woo. I was really fascinated by the illustrations of the books done in gold similar to the intricate filigree(?) work in Indian art. Buddha does feature prominently in the Asian exhibits including a 2 storey sized stone carving.

The art work in most of the Asian exhibits with some walls plucked off the forts and temples in Asia does affirm that religion plays a significant part in the development of art, music and dance. I could see at least a score of the Nataraja statues. The really interesting thing was also the way the exhibits were displayed using natural light filtering through the roof. There was even a full fledged Jain mandapa reconstructed in one part of the exhibit.

Metropolitan was even larger than the Natural History museum and i suspect that I managed to less than one-sixth of the full museum. But it was closing time and we were being announced out. But they did let me stay for a few extra minutes in the store and I managed to find a really nice replica of a 12th century Chinese mug for my collection.

The sun was shining bright with a cool breeze blowing when I stepped out of the museum. The large number of steps outside the museum were filled with weary tourists giving a rest to their legs. There were wisps of white clouds down the street and there was a guy in front of the museum entertaining the crowd. With a couple of cute teenagers ensnared from the audience, he was doing some acrobatics. It is not very easy to describe the ecstatic feelings on their faces.

I rushed to the subway realizing that I was a little late to meet Appu. But the nice thing about subway is that there is a train you can take whenever you land in the station. We walked from the port authority terminal to the Empire State building intending to go up and get one more sky view of NY.

Empire State building is actually one of the unsuccessful buildings of NYC. Built farther away from the financial wall street district and the World Trade Center, and also farther away from midtown Rockefeller center, it was supposed to attract some of the business to its area. It was not a great success as was evident when we walked around it. Unfortunately the topmost floor was closed and I wasn't interested in just gazing through the glass doors. We abandoned the idea of going up and just munched on some dinner at Taco Bell before heading to Penn Station.

Having become an expert at trains overnight, I was actually giving directions to a long-legged blonde in the train on how to get to her destination, which happened to be same as mine - Long Branch. After we got down at the station and I was waiting for my ride home, she plopped down on the bench too waiting for her friends.

Then in a completely uncharacteristic manner she turned to me, asked me to watch over her bags and strolled away to make a phone call. For people living in Los Angeles who eye every other person in the bus stop as a potential mugger this was a total surprise. I wouldn't even have imagined a NY city person trusting someone alone at the stop with their bags, but reconciled that Long Branch was a small enough village for people to trust others. After some sumptuous dinner which Rupal had prepared we all watched Peacemaker before dozing off to sleep.

We headed over to the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the bridge that many a Yankee had sold to unsuspecting, gullible visitors. It was a nice evening on the bridge with the sun setting behind the city skyline. We hung around chatting till the lights started coming on. There were people rollerblading and biking down the walkway of the bridge. The bridge was a maze of wires and poles with old gas lamp shaped bulbs lighting the way. We sat on a bench and contemplated life for a while before we headed back home.

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