Tuesday – Museum of Natural History and Central Park

This morning I went to the Museum of Natural History. It is huge and it is impossible to take in all the exhibits in 1 visit. I thought I would concentrate on North American stuff and skip the stars, origins of life, rocks, asian animals etc etc. My ticket gave me entrance to a half hour show in their new Planetarium. I listened and looked up for 5 minutes or so when I realised my neck was stiff. The next thing I knew the voice was talking about brown dwarfs and finishing up. Ah well, as long as I donot fall asleep tonight in the performance of War Horse. I wandered round the North American animals for ages. They claim the Alaskan Brown bear is the largest living carnivore weighing up to 1600 lbs.. I had never heard of cacomistles before – similar to a skunk. Female armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets. Good trivia questions.

I then wandered around the section on Northwest Coast Indians. There were some interesting displays of their weaving, clothes, armour, jewelry. By the time I got to the section on the environment of New York State I was getting tired. There were huge numbers of groups of school kids and the noise was quite overpowering. I wandered through a few more exhibits, but mainly to find my way out.

I had lunch at a place, Shake Shack , that had been recommended to me as having the best hamburgers around and what they call concrete – like a frozen custard. Apparently some guy had a food van in Madison Square Park in 2004, made good fresh hamburgers with good beef and his business grew. There are now 7 in NYC, some in about 7 other USA cities and 1 in Dubai. As far as I could tell it is like an upmarket MacDonalds. But maybe that is because I donot care for the soft, sweetish buns they use. The concrete tasted like what it is– frozen custard .

I then went on a walk all around the southern part of Central Park. There are lots of different areas – formal areas with ponds, fountains, paved walkways and lakes with row boats, informal areas with large rock outcrops , almost overgrown bush areas..

Tonight I am going to the play of War Horse.