rotwang and I had visited Manhattan before - though, as it happens, not together - and had individually done some sightseeing then.)Given that we were warned about the heat and humidity in New York in July, this may seem like a fairly ambitious schedule.
Lane Bryant was relatively straightforward to find, though a warmish five or six blocks from the subway. (An aside: the subway system came close to driving me crazy. I'm used to stations with the same name being, broadly, in the same place, not several blocks apart. The way in which there might be two or more stations bearing the same name, on different lines, and several blocks apart, is desperately confusing to the non-native - and I am a native Londoner, so it's not actually any lack of familiarity with the concept of an underground railway system.) The bead shop, likewise, wasn't too tricky to track down. The NYPL shop almost turned out to be a no-go, since the library itself was closed that day and, more to the point, something or other was being filmed outside it. We wandered off disconsolately, as we would have expected the gift shop to be inside the library, and then found the shop itself over the road....
By this point we were laden with bags. Okay, okay,
rotwang was laden with bags. We therefore abandoned Macy's for the moment, with a thought of going out again later on that evening to see what they might have in store, but apathy and the desire to snuggle up close and personal with the air conditioner killed that thought pretty much as soon as we got back to the hotel.We did, however, venture out to take an evening tour round the harbour. I question NY Waterways' attitude that one must show up 30 minutes beforehand, especially since their bus service seemed not to run later than about an hour beforehand for our area, but it was a pleasant enough evening that it didn't matter much. We wound up standing at the front of the boat, enjoying the evening breeze, and listening to a tour guide who actually gave the impression of not having done the same commentary every evening since before the dawn of time.
