People in love in this city are shown no quarter!

One of the things I love about New York City is the incredible convenience factor of having nearly everything one needs or wants within close walking distance. Within a 6 block radius of our apartment we have found:

• 5 Supermarkets - of various price and quality levels.
• 3 small grocery stores.
  
• 8 Pharmacies.
  
• 15+ drycleaners/laundromats.
  
• 20 Convenience stores - except here in NYC they are referred to as "bodegas."
  
• 10 Hair/Nail Salons.
  
• 2 Video stores - one of which will deliver and pickup the movies for free!
  
• 10 Wine/Liquor Stores.
  
• 10 Chinese food restaurants - one touts itself as "Hawaii BBQ & Chinese Food."
  
• 1 Peruvian restaurant.
  
• 2 Argentinian restaurants.
  
• 8 Pizza joints.
  
• 3 Non-pizzeria Italian restaurants.
  
• 5 Sushi restaurants.
  
• 1 Indian-Chinese fusion restaurant.
  
• 1 French restaurant.
  
• 1 Brazilian restaurant.

Fortunately for our budget and bank accounts we have not tried every one of those restaurants. We do hope to wind our way through many of them during our 2 year lease.

But, the convenience factor was really driven home for me on the weekend of St. Valentine's Day. The invasion began slowly on the morning of Friday the 12th and it was complete by my evening walk home from the subway. It seemed that nearly every second corner had been captured by a legion of flowers! Where the flower stands normally had flowers on the sidewalk opposite the traffic, they had flowers lined up in menacing rows on both sides of the sidewalk. I had to walk through a gauntlet of flowers just to get home. Sounds terrible... I know!

Actually, it was a nice way to walk home.

With everything being so convenient, there really is no excuse for NOT arriving home or at your sweetheart's door without flowers (at least occasionally) and there is certainly no excuse for missing St. Valentine's Day.

RW

P.S. I didn't forget. How could I? I brought home some white and red roses for my ladies and one of them even got a blue box with white ribbon....

American Museum of Natural History

We spent Sunday exploring the American Museum of Natural History. (http://www.amnh.org/)
We received a family membership to the museum from my sister...what a great Christmas gift! We took the M86 crosstown bus, which proved fast and convenient for our Sunday morning journey. The museum was crowded, but still very manageable. The facility is enormous - it will take us a few visits to get familiar with the exhibit spaces, elevator locations, etc.

One highlight included The Silk Road, an exhibit that takes you along the famous trade route from AD 600 to 1200. The journey travels from ancient cities in Asia to the Middle East, starting in Xi'an, then Turfan, Samarkard and ending in Baghdad. The exhibit is hands-on, from watching live silk worms spin cocoons in Xi'an to exploring the night market and smelling the spices in Turfan.

We learned that along the journey camels carried a majority of the items for trade. The life-size camels along the exhibit were fun to look at and see how they would have been packed for the journey.