Christmas in the City

Following our early afternoon jaunt to Washington Crossing, we did something that appealed far more to the boys – we headed into the city to soak up some of the festive atmosphere.  I must confess that I am rather short of seasonal sparkle this year.  I think November arrived quickly and caught me off guard and I have felt like I have been playing catch up ever since.  I have also been very distracted by other things that have required my focus so I have had little time to think about Christmas.  That is all on top of the fact that for me the holiday season brings with it additional chores, tasks and errands to be ploughed through.  I am not feeling all bah humbug about it but nor am I excited and enthused about Christmas yet.  I was hoping, therefore, that a trip into Philadelphia to see the market and the lights would start to sprinkle me with glitter.

Our first port of call was the Christmas Village.  I learned that Philly had a Christmas market by reading a blog article on Phoodie and the Beast but maybe all of my distractions have led me to overlook promotion for it.  Sited in Love Park, it is quite a bit smaller than the European markets it is clearly emulating but the compact nature probably suited us best as there is only so much perusing of wares my kids will tolerate.  Swirling around a central Christmas tree, the little wooden shacks were selling all sorts of things.  There were lots of stalls that would interest if one was seeking handcrafted jewellery.  There were also lots of stalls selling lovely Christmas ornaments.  I rather liked wooden Santas, carved in Russia and Ukraine, but they were very much out of my price range.  We also liked a stall bedecked in blown glass baubles but I resisted temptation as I have found that glass baubles and small boys do not mix.  The boys were captivated by a stall selling puppets.  I think had they had deeper pockets, they could have spent a lot of pocket money at that stall.

It has been a few years since I was last at a Christmas market – the last one being in Glasgow – and I rather liked the experience.  There was enough to see and do without it being a time consuming slog or another episode of “dragging whining kids somewhere against their will”.  The atmosphere was friendly and warm, with plenty of people milling around, lots of glistening lights, and the smells of delicious foods filling the area and making my stomach rumble despite the fact I was still stuffed full from a late lunch / early dinner.  While the compact nature of this Christmas village was helpful to us as parents, it did mean that all the people milling about were like sardines.  I don’t like crowds because I do not like physical contact with random people so that was another reason we did not malinger too long in the market.  We did stay long enough to let the boys pick out two little Germanic houses that emit a charming glow when a candle is placed inside.

After the visit to the Christmas market, a hop, skip and a jump brought us to the Comcast Centre where – at the top of each hour – a “Holiday Spectacular” is broadcast on their gigantic screens in the entrance foyer.  We arrived with ten minutes to spare which was just as well as it fairly filled up after our arrival and the kids would not have gotten such a good view.  The show is broadcast on the vast LED screens in amazing high definition.  I am no technology junkie.  My husband might marvel at developments in TVs and such like but it is all lost on me.  However, as one might anticipate from a telecoms giant, the technology was incredible.  The figures on the screen looked entirely three dimensional.  There were snowy scenes, penguins, the Twelve Days of Christmas, The Nutcracker, giant piano keys, Dickensian London, and aerial scenes of central Philly.  It lasted about 15 minutes and my kids were spellbound throughout.  Nobody moaned about standing or about being hemmed in by other people.  That there is a Christmas miracle.  The whole presentation was very polished and actually quite enchanting.

Darkness had fallen completely while we were in the Comcast Centre but the air was still warm.  We are experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures in PA this December and are apparently on track for a record warm Christmas Day.  T-shirt weather in December!  The kids were loving it so we let them run around outside the building where there were spotlit trees and twinkly lights in branches to entertain them.  I disrupted their play to try and get a festive photo of all four of them together.  That did not go down well.

Next stop was Macy’s where I had heard there was a holiday light show at the top of each hour.  We made it on time by the skin of our teeth but finding a position on the shop floor that afforded us decent views was impossible.  The kids lost interest within minutes.  It was also uncomfortably hot because of the combined body heat of all those people crammed together indoors.  Frankly, the light show was also rather lacklustre compared to the broadcast we had just seen.  We, therefore, left after a few short minutes.  The kids were far more taken with the Macy’s window displays out on the street, a few of which were on a Peanuts theme.

We had not intended another stop off on our trip into Philly.  However, as we strolled past the Municipal Buildings Plaza, my kids were overtaken with a fit of nostalgia.  They had spent a lot of time playing in this plaza during our first ever trip into Philadelphia.  Their rosy glow was ironic given that that particular trip was a horrendous fail.  My husband having to take a lengthy work phone call combined with the kids pitching fits at every opportunity made it an incredibly stressful trip.  Apparently, however, they had fostered fond memories for this place.  The plaza is the location of a collection of sculptures depicting gigantic gaming pieces, dominoes, Monopoly markers.  A group of teenagers were using it as a skateboarding park but they were soon pushed to the edges by my mob who were excitedly running and climbing and leaping all over the place.  It was a fun conclusion to a fun evening.  I might even have felt the first twinkles of festive spirit stirring in my soul.

Three have Fun in Manhattan – Day 2 – Central Park and Brooklyn by Night

Waking early, we strolled across the street and popped into the Moonstruck Diner for breakfast.  The whole place had the feel of a retro diner but with modern decorative flourishes such as tables covered in petrol iridescent mosaic tiles.  The service was great, the menu was good and the prices were pretty fair by Manhattan standards.  I had a bowl of oatmeal with fresh fruit which was good fuel for the day which was useful because it was an absolutely freezing cold day, complete with flurries of snow and wind that whipped and chapped our skin and chilled us to our marrows.

We walked up through Times Square, already starting to bustle even that early in the morning.  We popped into the M&M store partly to show M and A the bizarreness of a store dedicated to just one single type of candy but also partly for some respite from the outdoor temperatures.  Three floors of nothing but M&M merchandise and a whole wall covered in tubes of different coloured chocolate sweeties, the shop is completely and utterly bonkers but impressively so.

Thawed out, we emerged back onto the streets and headed up into Central Park because you absolutely cannot visit New York City without a visit to Central Park.  We walked up through the centre of the park as far as Bethesda Terrace.  Unfortunately the fountain was not running, presumably because of the low temperatures but the angel was still appealing.  We then cut east past lots of sculptures.  We stopped to study the charming Alice in Wonderland statue just in time because a massive group of teenagers on a school trip then clambered all over it.  Then we popped out onto the Museum Mile section of Fifth Avenue.  Snow was falling by this point and it felt like we had to walk much further than a mile to reach our eventual destination: the Museum of the City of New York.

Tickets for the Museum had been part of the package that came with our bus tour tickets.  Given the temperatures, we would otherwise have chosen to visit a much closer museum.  We were welcomed by a lovely lady who explained what the current exhibitions were in enthusiastic detail when all we desperately wanted to know were where the restrooms were.  Having availed ourselves of the facilities, we then sought out a place to rest our weary legs and view a permanent exhibition, a short film named Timescapes.  Narrated by Stanley Tucci, it told the story of the city from pre-European settlement through to the present day.  A particularly successful element of the film was the use of maps to illustrate the expansion of the city and its development.  Another memorable element was the juxtaposition, across the three screens, of photos showing the lives of wealthy residents contrasted with those of the poorest residents.  Both of those aspects of the film drove the message of New York being a city of contrasts and of constant change.

The other exhibit we spent time in was a section devoted to the city’s history of social activism: abolitionists, suffragettes, gay rights activists, environmentalists, social justice campaigners, the Civil Rights movement , cycle safety and bang up to date with the controversy over the siting of the Park51 Islamic community centre.   All these examples of activism were represented in the exhibition space and illustrated with various artifacts, photographs, film footage and audio excerpts.  The slave irons were poignant but the section that I found most evocative was the revolving gallery of photographs by Jacob Riis depicting the city’s slums, impoverished residents and criminals.  The artifact I enjoyed most, however, was a plastic doll – a bit like Barbie’s boyfriend Ken – who was named “Gay Bob” and whose box read “Come out of the closet with Gay Bob”.  I thought the disarming wit of that item was fantastic and demonstrated a another approach to activism, differing from all the debating, arguing and rage.

The wind was blasting and the snow was whirling when we stepped back out onto Fifth Avenue so we were glad to be able to catch the tour bus to take us back down to Times Square.  The journey on the bus did nothing to warm us up but our plan was to stay out of the cold as much as possible by popping in and out of shops.  There were various items that M and A wanted to purchase so that was our mission for the afternoon.  Our first pit stop – after a quick bite to eat in a cafe – was Macy’s.  Macy’s bills itself as the world’s largest department store and it is certainly a bit of a warren inside, a maze of escalators and elevators and half floors.  The store was absolutely thronging too.  In addition to people who were there to shop, of which there were masses, there were also people who were visiting in order to apparently see all of the flowers that were on display.  Apparently Macy’s hold an annual floral exhibition and that event had apparently attracted a whole horde of people.  They were taking photos of flowers, standing around discussing botanical species and posing with the floral displays to have their photos taken.  Navigating the heaving crowds certainly helped warm us up.  I was determined to show A and M the wooden escalators in the store.  Most of the escalators have the original wooden sides but with modern metal steps but I really wanted them to see the flight of escalators that still have wooden treads.  That was my nerdy mission.  I was over the moon when I finally found them.  I suspect A and M were underwhelmed.  We wandered in and out of a few more stores so that my friends could buy all of the things they wanted to get and buy souvenirs to take back to Scotland and then it was time to wander back up into the theatre district to catch the bus for the night tour.

The night tour was the only bus ride we had with a female guide.  It would have been quite useful to have encountered her earlier in the trip as she was obsessed with toilets and was able to tell us which were the cleanest ladies’ loos in the midtown area.  As a female traveller, that type of intel is golden.  The three of us plus a lady from Florida elected to sit right at the back of the upper deck.  This was because the rear section of the perspex roof had been removed and we could get a better view and better photographs.  Any warmth we had accumulated from our jaunts in and out of shops immediately dissipated with the breeze whipping in through the back of the bus.  We also had to inhale exhaust fumes ever so often.  We all refused to budge, however, even though the seats were also too high for us which meant we all shuttled forwards any time the bus came to a jolting stop, which it did frequently.  We thought unimpaired views and better photographs made it worthwhile.  The tour took us past all the usual suspect sites but it also took us over the Manhattan Bridge onto Brooklyn – affording us a decent view of the Brooklyn Bridge – and then along the side of the East River so that we could see another view of downtown Manhattan before taking us back over the river to complete the circuit.

Temperatures had fallen to subzero (centigrade) while we were on our bus tour so we decided to just scurry back to home base which we did as quickly as possible but via a wine shop.  We chilled out in the living room of my hotel room, drinking wine, chatting and giggling until the wee small hours of Sunday morning because this trip was about reuniting with friends as well as exploring the city and that was our last evening together.

New York, You Nork – Day 1: Comic Books and Ripley’s

We decided that our first family mini-vacation in America should be to New York City.  This was partly because, at under two hours away, it was an easy city break to accomplish and plan for and partly because one of the first things our boys asked when they learned we were emigrating to the States was, “Can we go up the Empire State Building?” closely followed by, “Can we see the Statue of Liberty?”  New York is, of course, also of historic significance in many an immigrant story but that was not a factor in our decision making.

 It’s been an arduous six months for us all as a family.  We were separated, of course, when Mr Pict moved to America in advance of the kids and I following and then the whole process of settling into some sort of normal life and routine has been a bit of a strain at times, not to mention the ups and downs of trying to adjust to a new way of life in a new country.  Mr Pict and I also felt that it was important for the boys to gain a better understanding of the geography of and the expanse that is America by experiencing some travel.

 We aimed to leave the house before 8am and, thanks to our kids being pretty well seasoned travellers and Mr Pict and I being experienced packers, we managed to leave just shortly after 7.  Just under two hours later – including a pit stop in New Jersey – we were in the centre of New York City.  It was an incredibly easy journey in, a pretty straightforward route that took us through the Lincoln Tunnel and straight into midtown Manhattan.  We parked up the car – or rather a valet did, something that always freaks me out about US multi-storey car parks – and headed along 42^nd Street to do some exploring.

 The boys were instantly enthralled by the sights and sounds: electronic billboards, neon signs, yellow taxi cabs, skyscrapers, honking horns, theatre posters, music; it was a sensory overload.  Although they have been to major cities in Britain, including London, I don’t think they had ever experienced anything quite like it.  From 42^nd Street, we headed down Broadway – passing en route the office building that Mr Pict works from when he is in New York, a bit of personal sight seeing – and headed towards the Empire State Building. 

 First stop was a comic book store spread across two floors.  Mr Pict and I are unabashed and avid geeks in lots of areas of obscure knowledge – things like ancient Rome for him and plagues for me – so it is not surprising at all that our children have all turned out to be wee geeks.  However, neither he nor I have any connection to superheroes or comic books yet our sons are somewhat obsessed with them.  Our oldest son loves to pore over the comic books whenever we are in a comic book store – and we are delighted that we have a great one not ten minutes drive from our house – and the other three love the comics and the merchandise, the cult bits and bobs, just the idea of collecting.  So we spent a good 40 minutes in there as they oohed and aahed at the cases of books, shelves of comics and displays of models and figures and toys.

 We emerged from the comic store as the snow began to fall, just tiny flakes at first but then getting chunkier.  The ground was quite wet from the thaw of the previous snow fall and the air temperature relatively mild, however, so the snow was not settling on the ground.  That was when the boys decided they were peckish so Mr Pict stopped at a food cart and bought a hot dog for the littlest one and pretzels for the other three boys.  So they stood, the four of them, huddled in the snow against the side of a bank, chomping their way through NYC street food.  I think they had it on their checklists all along that they wanted to eat food from a street cart as part of their tourist itinerary.

 Ultimately, just as we arrived at the entrance to the Empire State Building, we decided to jettison the whole plan.  The snow had made the sky murky grey and the visibility was so reduced we would have been spending money on a limited view and seriously reducing the impact of the entire experience for the boys.  So we turned heel and headed back the way we came.  However, we took a diversion through Macy’s, just so we could say we had been through what was until 2009 the world’s largest department store and – much more importantly – to have some respite from the biting wind. 

Our 8 year old, the family magpie, loved all the displays of bling and I had to tell him to stop touching brightly coloured leather bags as he walked past them.  He was entranced by the chandeliers in the jewellery section of the store, one that fell like sparkling raindrops from an oval in the ceiling and one that was a combination of crystals and white feathers – like the debris from an angel.  You can tell our kids have grown up in the sticks by the way they behave around escalators: to them escalators hold the same allure as amusement park rides.  It’s sweetly sad really.  So we had an excursion up one set of escalators just so we could immediately come back down again.  Even I, however, got excited when I spotted some escalators that led to the basement level.  So excited in fact that I shouted my husband and kids back.  The cause of my excitement was that the escalators were wooden.  Presumably they were the original escalators from the shop’s opening.  I had never, in my whole life, seen let alone been on wooden escalators.  It had to be done.  So the six of us were transported downstairs on a set of wooden escalators to then immediately return to the ground floor on the companion set.  I can’t imagine where the kids get it from.  It seriously stands as one of the highlights of this trip that I can now say I have been on wooden escalators.

 We popped out the other side of Macy’s and it was then a brief but bracing walk from there – past a whole legion of yellow taxi cabs – back to 42^nd Street.  We had had a discussion about which indoor activity to do with the kids as we walked, presenting them with a choice of either Madam Tussaud’s or Ripley’s Believe It or Not.  In Madam Tussaud’s favour was the fact that they had a whole display about the Avengers – which my little comic book nerds loved the idea of – but against it was the fact there would be a whole host of models, sports stars being the obvious example, that really only my husband would recognise.  In Ripley’s favour was the fact it was going to be a varied collection of exhibits, rather than just room after room of looky-likey wax models, but against it was the fact that the boys might just find it a bit too obscure or maybe even grotesque in parts.  I personally was rooting for Ripley’s.  One of my geeky interests is the history of sideshows.  I am intrigued by society’s relationship with what is categorised as and perceived to be weird and abnormal.  I find it a fascinating and absorbing topic and have read all the books I have ever found on the topic of sideshows, including histories and biographies of famous “freaks” and of PT Barnum.  I find the whole idea of exploiting human difference and disability for entertainment morally repellent but, on the other hand, in a bygone era when many of these people might have been outcasts or at best dependent on others for their welfare, they were able to support themselves financially by being employed as sideshow acts.  It’s that ethical dichotomy that I find so interesting as well as the light it casts on social mores and attitudes of the time and also of our understanding of either obscure or misunderstood medical conditions and physical phenomenon. So that is another reason why Ripley’s was very much my cup of tea.  I was glad, therefore, when the decision was taken that that was where we would go.

 We had not even reached the head of the queue to buy tickets when our 8 year old was overcome with excitement seeing a Perspex case containing some swirling water because he seems to be obsessed with the word vortex.  I meanwhile was excited to see a two-headed calf in a glass case and our 4 year old loved a small glass case in which some stuffed ferrets, dressed in their gladrags, were having a dinner party.

 On entering the Odditorium, the first display was of some incredible metal armour for an elephant which the boys thought was cool.  That was opposite a stuffed six-legged cow and the world’s largest hairball.  That is just a little indication of how varied this “museum” was.  I loved it!  Weird and random is so up my street.  Happily, as well as being little geeks, my kids are also fans of the random and strange so they also scuttled from exhibit to exhibit to see what fascinating weirdness there was to find there.  There were lots of taxidermies of animals with additional limbs or heads and also an albino giraffe.  There were also models of some famous sideshow acts such as Robert Wadlow, the giant, and Johnny Eck, who was often billed as the “amazing half-boy”. 

The youngest two boys loved the fact there was a bookcase that slid away from the wall to reveal another room, and every new room in fact contained a plethora of diverting, intriguing and fascinating items.  That is another reason why the visit worked so well: whereas a visit to a less eclectic exhibition might lead the kids to get bored (and even I admit to being thoroughly sick of Minoan libation cups after seeing the umpteenth display of them in the Heraklion Museum), the very diversity and randomness of this collection of oddities meant that every room could be relied upon to have something for everyone.  Our oldest son, for instance, finds scientific things interesting so he thought it was cool to see a knobbly shard of glass that had formed when lightning struck sand; our second son likes creativity so he loved a display, showcased beneath a glass platform floor, of the Spanish Armada made entirely from matchsticks, a feat of human patience and fine motor dexterity; our 6 year old likes anything rude or gross so both he and I were amused by a club made out of walrus penis; and our youngest loves animals so was captivated by the calves with extra heads and the chickens with extra legs or the length of the stuffed anaconda or the wine in a bottle filled with snakes.  My poor husband really doesn’t get the appeal of freaky stuff so was just dragged along in our wake but even he found Napoleon’s death mask interesting and the locks of hair from historical figures diverting.

 

There was one particularly gross room – which is a positive in my regard – containing instruments of torture.  My kids are pretty gruesome so loved the macabre items such as the Iron Maiden, the iron gibbet (which they recognised from pirate movies) and they all had a turn in the stocks.  There was also half a human head, sectioned in profile, which they found appealing and repellent in equal measure.

 

 A nauseating, dizzifying walk through a rotating tunnel – a very clever optical illusion in which the brain convinces the body it is doing something other than walking on level ground in a straight line – took us into a room full of shrunken heads.  We all had a go on an interactive screen at turning our own portraits into shrunken heads, which was fun, and my oldest son and I (both having a long-standing interest in such things as shrunken heads and mummies) toured the cases looking at each of the examples.  I am always morally torn when looking at things like mummies: I find them utterly fascinating and enjoy the opportunity to study them up close but at the same time I cannot shake the feeling that this was once someone’s child, someone’s parents, someone’s sibling and now here they are shoved in a glass case on display for the entertainment of others.  They are quite amazing things, however, and for all that they are grotesque and perhaps a bit on the creepy side to our 21^st Century, western standards, the fact that people put the heads through this process as an act of preservation, to keep their ancestors and loved ones close to them, is quite touching at the same time – though I am not going to be shrinking anyone’s head for posterity when the time comes for my loved ones to shuffle off their mortal coils.

Having enjoyed our tour of Ripley’s, the kids needed to rest their legs and have an energy boost so we found a nearby café where Mr Pict bought them each hot chocolate and a soft baked cookie to dunk in it.  I sipped a cup of tea and we had a rest and a chat before we then headed to our hotel to check in.

My husband had found a hotel with an apartment room that could sleep six and which had a small kitchen which would enable us to eat in for two meals per day while taking packed lunches for the third.  It was ideally situated not far from 42^nd Street.  We checked in with ease and Mr Pict went off to the car park to collect our suitcases and the bags of food we had brought while the kids and I explored our “home” for the next two nights.  It was a lovely set of rooms – a bedroom for all four boys to sleep in and a multi-purpose room for cooking, dining, sitting and where the husband and I would sleep on the sofa and a folding bed – smartly decorated and nicely presented, bland but comfy.  We even had a balcony, although it overlooked a busy interchange and some water tanks on the adjacent rooftop, except we could also see One World Trade Center in the distance and, if you looked sideways, it was possible to see the Empire State Building.

We had had a plan to go out to find something to eat – a meal out as a treat – and then wander around Times Square in the dark to see all the lights but the snow was falling again and actually settling plus we could sense a rebellion might be mounted by at least half of the kids so we decided not to push our luck at the end of what had been a really great day of family fun.  Instead Mr Pict went out to get some Chinese takeaway and thus fulfilled one of my ambitions since I have never before had Chinese food served in those little cardboard cartons.  So we ate our takeaway buffet and the middle children watched ‘Iron Man 2’ on the TV while the rest of us played pontoon.  Then we read to the boys and settled them down to sleep at the end of a successful first day in New York.