NYC - Day 3

Hi! Welcome back? Is anyone still here? This will - unfortunately - be another long one. If you start nodding off, just scroll down really quickly. Although Donna, you are NOT allowed to scroll down fast. I've got one in here just for you! *huge grin*

Day 3 was a Saturday. A few of us had decided to go do a session at the Manhattan Temple. In order to fit it in with other engagements, we had to attend the 7:45 am session. EEEK! This was indeed a great sacrifice because, you know, anything-that-starts-with-a-6-in-the-A.M and I are not friends. But I suppressed my natural man, got up at the crack of dawn, and had a great experience!

(Yes, I'm wearing the same dress as the night before. No, I'm not packing 2 dresses for 1 trip. Gotta save room in the suitcase to bring back all the purses - duh!)

Sadly, I've only been to sessions in 2 temples before. None of them being in areas like this! Some HUGE differences I noticed: every single worker I saw appeared to be under 30 years old. *WOW* Usually here they are at least triple that, no? There were 15 women and 3 men in our session. Imagine that!? The rooms were beautiful but MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller. Everything moved so fast. Nice. It was a wonderful place, and what a refuge from all the filth, smoke, crowds and noise that typically surround you there.


After the temple and, ahem, another nap for me...... I met up with most of the group at the MET. (Mom and Kim went back to Chinatown instead!) To get there I walked about 12 blocks in the opposite direction looking for a specific shop with Wicked t-shirts because I decided I just HAD to have one. Never found the stinkin' place! Then I rode 2 subway lines ALL ALONE, then walked about another 12 blocks to get there. Ohhhh little Amy was hurting by the time I arrived! My lovely comrades were nice enough to let me take a quick break, hit up the hot dog stand nearby, and I was ready to go. The MET is short for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Isn't it phenomenal? That's just the outside.

What? You want to see the inside? Well here ya go.

AAAAA-Mazing.

Now comes all the cool art that I saw. If you're not really into this, sorry. (Truth be told, I'm not crazy into art myself, but it's so famous that you just have to say you did it once!) So I got to see.....

Rembrandt




The Death of Socrates

Monet!

Some Van Gogh's.... with a person that wouldn't move out of my picture.

more Van Gogh

AND DRUM ROLL PLEASE............

(scroll down a little more! I had to make it a big reveal!)

Van Gogh's self portrait with my foot!

Just for you Donna!

Side story: I searched the whole place for the most famous painting I could think of so that it would be just right for this picture. I had to have Lindsey hold my camera so I could HEFT my leg up that high then try to hold it still in mid-air! This thing was pretty far off the ground! Note: I am NOT flexible! So I pulled some major hamstring trying this, and it still didn't get very close to the painting! HAHAHAHAHA! That's as good as it was going to get!!!

(For those of you who are confused, click on Donna's blog on my sidebar and start reading under her "My Foot" label. Or just know that she has a little tradition of doing this and I find it utterly, awesomely hilarious.)

Moving right along...

Seurat

a stupid mammoth Jackson Pollack - sorry Pollack fans, my baby can make this with his dinner!

But don't we all love Andy Warhol? This one is called "Nine Jackies"

But I think I prefer the other one called "Eight Jackies and an Amy!"

That's really me standing in front of the painting, not photo-shopped!

Are you laughing yet???

Georgia O'Keefe

(don't read too much into it! hahahaha)

And last.....

I know how she feels.

By the time we finished here, I think a good description of me would be: wasted. I needed food, insulin, and elevated feet. I planned to hit my bed early and revel in the goodness thereof. It was another loooong combination of subway and walking home. We stopped by Times Square only to find out that Mom and Kim bought me and Janice tickets to an off-Broadway show that night. After some initial frustration with the surprise (although it was a kindly-intended one), we decided to make the best of it. I was pretty grouchy as I fought my way through a quick, crappy dinner and FINALLY got to rest just a few minutes before the show.

The 4 of us saw The Marvelous Wonderettes. It was a musical showcase of music from the 50's and 60's shown through a group of 4 women who amused us with little side stories and antics. It was silly. I laughed. At least I was off my feet. Lori and Janalee saw Phantom that night, and Lindsey, Jeri, and Diana saw The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Fun fun.

So even in my state of exhaustion, as we got back to the hotel once again (8 blocks), I was still itching for that Wicked t-shirt. Kim offered to go out with me to retrace her steps and find the elusive place! (I kept telling them it must be like a Harry Potter staircase. One minute it's there, the next minute it's all different!) Wouldn't ya know it, we found it. 12 minutes after they closed up for the night. I literally shook the doors and did a slow-motion "NOOOOOOOO!" like in the movies. I almost cried.

Kim took my picture in Times Square all lit up at night. It's about 11:30pm and I don't know how I'm still standing.

We gave up and went back to the hotel - again. Oh no, it doesn't end yet! Before we went to sleep (and BOY were we all ready to sleep at this point) Kim wants to take a purse picture. This is a picture of all the purses we bought piled together on one bed and we lie in the middle of them, beaming. It's fun, trust me. So I run back into my room quickly, grab my purchases, turn around to run back out our door. Thud. Try again, THUD. Try turning the lock, won't move. Um, did someone just lock the door right after I came in 2 seconds ago? No. THUD, THUD. Um.... we're locked IN our room! How can you be locked IN your own hotel room? Yes folks, it happened to us. We called the front desk, they sent the "engineer" which I think was just a glorified man-with-a-screwdriver. After a long conversation of shouting through the door, he was getting us nowhere. Eventually more people came and it was decided that the only choice was to drill the lock off the door. They made plans to move us to a new room so we started packing. At 1:00 in the morning. Here's 28 seconds of what that was like:




As you can imagine, all of our lovely hotel "neighbors" were greatly upset by the rude awakening of that drill. I'm sure the front desk had LOTS of apologizing to do. We got our room free that night! hee hee


Here's the picture I took RIGHT after they got the lock off and the door open. That's 3 people in our group right across the hall celebrating our liberation.

This is what the door looked like.

He ended up putting a whole new mechanism on the door in just a few minutes, so we didn't have to move rooms after all - WHEW. And I didn't even mention that we had an illegal 5th person in our room whom we had to HIDE knowing that soon they would get that door open and half the hotel staff is on the other side!!!!!

It was nearly 2 in the morning before we settled back down for lights out. OH. MY. GOODNESS. What a day.