NYC: Thursday

The hostel gave us free breakfast of a bagel and tea/coffee. As this was served from 7am-9am, it was a good incentive for us not to sleep too long even though we'd had a late night the day before. So we got up and breakfasted then headed out. We walked around Central Park a little bit, then decided to do the Central Park Safari, where you can see some of the animals native to Manhattan before the colonists came, as well as some others they'd imported (obviously the giraffes and zebras are not native but we were interested to learn about the Manhattan Lion, which scientists believe arrived from the Appalachians several hundred thousand years ago, though they have yet to discover what prompted its migration north). For an extra dollar you could get bagels to feed to the gazelle.

We learned that in the cat family, the lion is the only one where the males and females look different.

Most of the animals were very tame, completely ignoring the Safari Humvee as it drove past. 

All right. In case you hadn't guessed, this was actually the Natural History museum, where they have dioramas of animals from lots of different areas (we couldn't find the actual Manhattan lion, I think it was in the same room as the Maine coastal moose, which we somehow passed by). In the entrance hall they have casts of dinosaur bones. There's a brontosaurus-type dinosaur - I forget what it actually was - rearing up on its hind legs to protect its offspring from the attacking allosaur. Rather dramatic but it seemed just somewhat scientifically questionable to me. Apparently it gets people through the doors. There were free tours showing you the highlights of the museum, which we did part of but then had to break off to go to the planetarium to see the Robert Redford-narrated show, Cosmic Collisions. It was pretty cool, especially the bit when they showed a planet smashing into the Earth and forming the Moon. 

After looking around the rest of the museum we walked across Central Park and had some lunch before visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We saw some Monets and there was an exhibition on Turner, though most of the works were borrowed from the Tate :P There was also an exhibition on superheroes, and some cool sculptures on the roof. I'm not really into art galleries but neither is Oz, so we wandered through fairly quickly, though we did spend a while in there because it's so big. We wanted to go to the Guggenheim but when we turned up it was shut for some reason. They were doing building works around it so perhaps that was why. Still, we saw the outside of it, and it gave us time to go to Chinatown and Little Italy, which all in all we weren't too enamoured with. But we had a tasty dinner in a Cantonese place where we were the only Caucasians, then went back to the hostel and did not much of anything before getting an early night.