A hell of a town

I haven't had time to update my blog since we got back from New York last week, but I wanted to add a few photos. Not sure if anyone still checks in here anymore, but for my own sake it's nice to at least post about trips. I've frequently found myself referencing this blog in the past to see when we did certain things or went various places.

Anyway, last weekend we were in New York for the wedding of some dear friends from back in Astoria. The wedding itself was at a cool studio in Long Island City, so we ended up staying in an AirBnB in the neighborhood. It was fun having an apartment there again, although we both agreed, it didn't really feel like home since Dinah wasn't there to greet us.

Most of our time in town was spent either going to the wedding or meeting up with friends and family for copious amounts of food. We never did get to sate Sam's craving for Korean food, but we did managed to get Rice to Riches. The first day we were there, it was cold and rainy and all our friends were at work, so we thought we'd go to a museum. There was an hour long line to get into the Guggenheim, presumably because we were not the only ones to want to go museuming on a rainy day in the city. We mulled over it for a while, and tried to check their website to see if the exhibit was even worth going to, but alas their website was having issues. In the end, we toughed it out, and were sort of underwhelmed:

Sam amidst the art

 The other big attraction was an exhibit called "America" that is actually just a solid gold toilet that apparently cost $1.5 million and was installed in the fifth floor bathroom. The exhibit is participatory in nature, meaning you can actually use said toilet. Naturally, there was a two hour line for that as well, so we demurred. I'm satisfied spending my life without ever peeing in a solid gold toilet in the name of art, and the rest of the Guggenheim's bathrooms were delightfully line free. For posterities sake, I did get a photo of the line though:

I imagine having people wait 2 hours to sit on a gold toilet when porcelain ones are available no waiting is all part of the artistic message. 

 Once the rain stopped we took the long way down to happy hour by walking through Central Park. The leaves haven't quite changed yet (apparently it's been unseasonably warm there as well), but it was still lovely as always.

Autum in New York and Sam.

 I ended up putting most of the pictures of friends on Facebook, but here's one of Sam and Adam in a tiny British cafe in the West Village.

Sam and Adam

 We'd held off on going to the Met on our first museum day because we'd wanted to see the roof exhibit, which is closed when its raining. This is said exhibit: a reproduction of the house from Psycho. From this photo, it looks like a complete building, but the back was open so that you could see it was just a shell.

Beautiful day for a murder house.

 After the Psycho house, we mostly explored the new Asian wing, but we did stop briefly in the Egyptian area. It's definitely one of the most iconic parts of the museum for a reason.

Almost looks like proper fall here.

This was in the Japanese art section. It's an actual taxedermied dear under there. 

Okay, I think that about covers the trip. I realized now that we didn't actually get any photos of our time in Astoria. I guess that's part of it though. We don't really feel like tourists there, so I don't really think to take pictures. I did at least make a concerted effort to get photos of friends though. It was definitely fun to visit our old life and to see all the people we miss. We were talking while we were there about how we don't know when we'll next be back, which is kind of sad. But I know we'll meet again someday, Astoria. After all, I still haven't won Hamilton tickets.