This is the first of several posts relating to my adventures with Bif traveling the Oregon Trail. If you’re wishing I’d instead planned on writing several posts relating the hilarity of small children–I hear you. I wish so, too. But there was plenty of hilarity along the trail, for us, that is.
And no, NYC was not part of the trail, but we couldn’t just teleport to Missouri, could we? I really wish spell-check would stop telling me “teleport” isn’t a word.
Bif and I had plans for NYC. Big plans. Sure, we only had three hours to spend, but we weren’t going to waste them just sitting around. But we were also hungry, so we decided to waste just a few minutes eating leftover hibachi and General Tso’s chicken with boxes of elderberry juice from IKEA. This plan also had the bonus of lightening our snack bag. The only awkward part was just as we were sitting down a scraggly middle-aged man came by with a story about how he hadn’t eaten all day and did we have any money to spare. We did not, but we were hungry as well, so we only waited until he’d turned around and begun talking to the people across the walk from us before we unzippered our bag, pulled out our lunch and begun eating.
After lunch we wandered around Bryant Park. It is not nearly as exciting as Central Park, except for the restrooms, which have toilets with revolving sanitary plastic seat covers. Bryant Park is also much smaller, so we were able to see everything it had to offer:
- A fountain
- A carousel
- Numerous flowers
- Less-numerous statues
Here is the first statue I photographed. I wouldn’t have photographed him at all, except there was a bird on his head. Which makes you wonder how many other things are only noticed because a bird happens to be sitting on top.
This is the second statue I photographed. I felt very cool and trendsetter-y because as I stood and photographed it other people came and stopped to look at it and after we’d walked on, another tourist stopped to get her picture taken beside it. Which makes you wonder how many other things are only noticed because someone else is taking a picture of it.
Anyway, I was looking at the statue and asking Bif what was so important about Mr. Bonaficio de Andrada e Silva. One of the men who’d stopped behind me said, as if everyone knew who Mr. Bonaficio de Andrada e Silva was, “A statesman.” But then the man continued, “A scientist. An author…” so I realized he was just making stuff up, and it annoyed me that a stranger would tease me like that. Then I peered closer and saw that the plaque indeed categorized Mr. Bonaficio de Andrada e Silva as all three. So now I knew the stranger had not been making fun of me for not recognizing Mr. Bonaficio de Andrada e Silva–he’d been making fun of me for not being observant. Whatever.
At first I thought this statue was of a potato, or maybe an Ellis Island immigrant. It is, in fact, Gertrude Stein. She will make a reappearance later in our adventures, but as far as I know, she has no connection to the Oregon Trail.
The important part of this picture is not William Cullen Bryant, or the poem about him, or even Bif. Please turn your attention to the urn at left. Observe the Georgia-O’Keefe-esque bison skulls it is decorated with. Weird, right? They also make an appearance later in our adventures.
After that our time in New York was fairly straightforward. We walked towards F.A.O. Schwarz, failing to find the Swedish Cpighurch along the way, despite the landmark Brazilian flag. At F.A.O. Schwarz, we failed to find plastic oxen figurines, despite F.A.O. Schwartz being NYC’s largest toy store. This lowered my opinion of F.A.O. Schwarz by a lot, even if they do have a big piano.
Then we needed to rush to Union Station but we were feeling confident so we tried looking for the Swedish Church one more time…
and found it!
So we arrived at Union Station sweaty, stressed and exhausted, but stocked up on our favorite Swedish treats.
P.S. I wanted to make sure Bif’s opinions were also included in my recreation of our trip, so I asked her some questions.
Me: What’s your opinion of the Bryant Park pigeons?
Bif: Superb. Umm. There was a dark one that had a very nice vertical takeoff. And some others were very nice to look at.
Me: And what’s your opinion of Gertrude Stein?
Bif: The statue was not to scale. Well, it was to scale, but it wasn’t life size. Was it?
Sonja's Blogg 