New York, New York

Friday Tyler let me drag him around to the shops. We first went out to a place called H&H for bagels and sat and ate them in Central Park. They were pretty good, but we both decided that Mount Royale Bagels in Victoria are better! After feeding Ty, he let me walk down Madison Ave (without going in a single shop of course) and then 5th Ave. I did a bit of shopping on 5th Ave - H&M and Mexx - lots of looking but not too much buying as the prices were the same as here. We went into FAO and saw the giant keyboard from BIG, and a giant stuffed elephant for the low price of $15000!
We went to Rockefeller Center and watched people ice-skating and imagined Conan O'Brian inside the NBC studios. We moved along quickly cause it looked like it was going to pour rain, but we made it to Times Square - which was madness. So many people and flashing lights - Mark says when you leave a club at 3am it seems like the middle of the day there. It was cool, but overwhelming and we didn't get to see the naked cowboy, but we did see some crazy girl dancing with no shoes in the middle of the street.
We went back to Mark's flat and recovered for a while before heading out for pizza nearby. We had a pretty calm evening.
Saturday morning Mark was able to hang out with us and we went out for bagel breakfast before going to the Guggenheim Museum. Mark got us in for free, which was really good as I don't really think it's worth $18 each. The building is awesome and very well designed. There were a few Monets, Picassos etc., but the main stage was David Smith - a sculptor who made crazy things out of metal. My favourite by far was the 14 "H's". We had fun trying to figure out what the hell his sculptures were, and Mark and I were very impressed with Ty's imagination and knowledge (he thinks he knows everything now that he's in art school).
We also went to Grand Central station - pretty cool - where Mark bought a card for $8 (and we couldn't find stamps anywhere)! Next stop was ToysRUS at Times Square which was a mad house. It's totally designed so that you can't find your way out once you are in and is just over-stimulating. There were guys set up doing magic tricks, a big ferris wheel in the middle of the story, design your own dolls - everything! But nothing compared to the mad house at Macy's. We went directly to the shoe floor and Ty couldn't believe how many shoes there were - it was quite a lot. I did a fairly quick tour and narrowed my choices down to a pair to try. It was difficult finding help but I eventually got it. All was going fairly smoothly until I decided to open a Macy's card to save 15%. What a mistake. They couldn't get it to work cause my zip code is 6 digits. Then they had to call it in as my credit card is Canadian. Then they had approval but that didn't work so they called again and found out it wasn't approved. So I didn't get the card or the discount after nearly 1 hour!!!! in the store trying to buy a single pair of shoes. I felt so bad for Mark and Ty - they were very gracious and patient. It was the saleswoman's second day and I felt bad for her too. But we survived to make it to Union Square for a coffee at Barnes & Noble.
That night we went out for Malaysian food with Mark and Lisa which was tasty yet expensive as all eating out seems to be in DC and NY. We had planned on going out but were all way to tired to do anything except crawl into bed.