Tuesday, December 25, 2012

It's Christmas time in the city

Luckily Santa was able to find us this morning, even though we're a long way from home. We've had fun over the last few weeks finding 'small' presents to fit in our travel and we had lots of fun unwrapping them this morning. My Pandora bracelet is now a testament to our trip with charms reflecting each of the cities we've visited :-) We also stuck with our tradition of bacon and eggs for breakfast, even though cooking them created havoc with the smoke detector and meant someone had to continually wave a towel in front of it while Geoff kept cooking!


Around lunchtime we wandered down to the subway with no real plans in mind but to spend the day wandering the city. With most of the shops shut the streets were much quieter, a very strange phenomenon indeed. The quiet ended at the Rockefeller Centre. We thought we might do the Top of the Rock but so did every other tourist in the city! The queues were much longer than normal. Likewise in Central Park where I think Christmas Day might be the busiest day of the year. As for Times Square and the M & M shop...complete chaos.





The homeless are hard to ignore in New York. It's so sad to see so many people doing it tough, especially in the cold weather. Taine has been particularly affected by the cardboard pleas for help and so today he decided to cash a few days of his spending money into dollar bills and we let him give away as many as he wanted. I know it's not possible to donate to every beggar in the city but it felt so much better than our usual head down, walk fast approach and it was gratifying to see so many people being genuinely appreciative of his little presents.

We had delicious salad and pasta at Fresh & Co for lunch and pretty ordinary turkey burgers at the Tick Tock diner tonight. I'm pining for some pork crackling and plum pudding. Maybe we'll have a post Christmas feast when we get home.We met some other Aussies on the train going uptown and coincidentally we ran into them again on the train home. Then we found out they are staying at the same hotel as us. It really is a small world.



Tonight we had pre booked tickets to the movie of 'Les Miserables'. After doing the production with our school kids a few years ago, this musical has been one of our favourites so we were really looking forward to the movie. We certainly weren't disappointed. It was stupendously wonderful.

"To love another person is to see the face of God"

It was the perfect way to end Christmas Day.


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