(Continued from last week)

My friend Rosita and I strode out of our hotel with our almost 13-year-old sons. We headed for the subway in high spirits to begin our Boys’ Birthday Adventure in New York City…If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know that I have a spectacularly bad sense of direction, aaaaaand you can probably guess what happened next. After a couple of false starts we had to stop and consult our iPhone maps to get us back on course for the station.

Rosita and her beloved, permanent iPhone prosthesis!

Rosita and I laughed as we remembered another earlier trip we had made to New York City with our friend Katherine. Rosita was the only one of us, who had an excuse for not knowing her way around a city that was new to her. Katherine, like me, had been a student in NYC, but despite the years we had lived in the city, and despite the fact that it is rationally laid out in a fairly systematic grid, we were still constantly getting lost and disoriented. At one point, when we were having trouble figuring out which way was north, Katherine said in all seriousness, “Let’s figure out which way the sun is shining on the buildings!”

“Oh yeah, and let’s also look for which side of the buildings the moss is growing on!” I suggested.

The boys wait…

We stopped to smell the roses along the way…

First stop: Grand Central Station, celebrating its 100th birthday this year…

…and looking grander than ever!

Rosita caught the frenetic activity of shoe shiners:

The beautiful food court

Teas

Spices

Rosita’s photo:

We caught the last day of the Nick Cave installation of raffia horses on the ground floor of Grand Central, but sadly missed the Alvin Ailey dancers donning the horse suits to bring the sculptures to life.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins was commissioned to write this poem for Grand Central’s Centennial

Golden Clock

The iconic Chrysler Building:

The quintessential mode of transportation in NYC:

Rockefeller Center

Minamoto Kitchoan, the Japanese confectionary at Rockefeller Center.

Cherry confection captured by Rosita

It’s not so much about the taste, as it is about the aesthetic experience. I still maintain that desserts are not the forté of Asian cuisine, (red bean paste — need I say more?), but everything in this store is absolutely  exquisite…to look at, anyway!

Next stop: F.A.O. Schwartz, Dylan’s Candy Store, and Times Square

*Check out Rosita’s blog post about our trip.