Exploring neighborhoods

Time was flying. Friday to Sunday we spent exclusively in Manhattan's neighborhoods, in the Village (Greenwich or West and in the East Village), in Midtown, but we also we explored a little more of Harlem (picture of the mural was taken on 125th St.) and revisited a couple of museums in the Upper East Side along the so-called Museum Mile.




One of them was the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, which was just reopened after an extensive renovation. This museum is well-worth being visited, always shows great exhibitions in an unusual ambience. The art collection was founded in 1896 by the Hewitt sisters and it is located in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion, a gorgeous Georgian-style mansion built from 1899 to 1902 with 64 (!) rooms. With the renovation they also introduced top-notch electronic equipment, fancy electronic pens, with which you can play around on computerized tables, design patterns and, also, it's possible to scan information and later load it down in a personalized version by using the code on the ticket.


Afterwards we stopped by at the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim (see pics) and then jumped on a bus (for lack of a subway line on the western edge of Central Park). It took forever to get down to the Village in the dense traffic of Manhattan.

The Village, our next stop, has changed considerably since our first visit and is still changing. This formerly hippie/gay/a little weird neighborhood is nowadays much more "settled" and appears "renewed" and a bit sterile. Old institutions, restaurants and shops, are gone and there are only spots (like St. Mark's Square) where the old colorful and screwed-up feeling is still there.

At Washington Square (pic) with its famous huge arch (pic) and street performers every day, we enjoyed a short break in the sun before we had lunch in a hole in the wall called "Arepa Factory", serving arepas and cachapas, both venezuelan street food, here in an excellent fresh and creative variety.

Fifth Ave. was packed (pic), and, so was the department store Macy's (which is famous for it's eleborate, always changing window decorations, this year, scenes from the Peanuts, see pic). The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the time when most people shop for good deals. Even around and in St. Patrick's Cathedral (see pic) huge crowds were gathering and it was especially hard to get close to the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree (pic).