Day 9/10 – Black Friday & Chelsea

To add to my list of ‘first’ experiences is “2 and a half hours shopping before breakfast” – we weren’t as crazy as some but to get into the spirit of Black Friday we arrived down at Macy’s Herald Square at 7am on Friday morning! That meant getting up as early as a normal work day in NZ and riding the subway … no breakfast! When we came out of the subway stop it was barely daylight and Herald Square was crowded! People in the streets with Victoria Secret bags and bags from other stores – they’d obviously been shopping since the stores opened at 4 or 5 am. Inside Macy’s it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be – I assumed that because they were opening so early they must’ve been expecting hoards, granted, it was busier than the previous Tuesday we’d been there but not as busy as 3 years ago when we went.

We checked our coats and went to check out a few things we’d seen earlier in the week but alas, they weren’t on sale, and the line for trying on jeans was diabolical so the jeans I’d bought earlier for $50 I didn’t regret given the pain I would’ve gone through to try them on on Friday. After the Mister tried on a couple of pairs of shoes (took about an hour!) we finally got some breakfast – coffee from the 6th floor Starbucks (shush now … it had to be done. And if you order a double short latte it’s actually drinkable. I didn’t say nice, I said drinkable) and a cinnamon pastry from the basement Cucina. YUM. We didn’t buy much in Macy’s in the end, a couple of things for nieces and when we finally left at about 11.30am it was crazy. My god. That was obviously the busy time, not 7am. The first floor was solid people. It was like those letter games we had as kids (you know, 8 letters on a little board/tray that fits 9 letters, and you have to slide one letter along, and another and another to eventually get the letter you’re working with to move across the tray to the left to start a word) – as one person moved, another shuffled into their spot and so on – if you have personal space issues – don’t go to Macy’s on Black Friday!

We decided to be uber-shoppers and made our way uptown to Bloomingdales – not as crowded and we had a good explore of each floor and a turkey sandwich but didn’t really buy anything. What a day! Ended the evening with another fabulous dinner – this time on the Upper East Side at a cozy corner Italian restaurant – they’d had a mishap with kitchen renovations over Thanksgiving and when we got there were only serving drinks and appetizers – we’d read a mouthwatering review of their pasta in Time Out so decided to start with the appetizers and wait to see if the kitchen opened. They said if they could boil water they’d be able to do the pasta dishes on the menu. The appetizers were amazing! Absolutely incredible: both on bruscetta – tomato relish with julienned carrot and beet root, and grilled aubergine and creamy ricotta. The boiling water apparatus did come back online and we enjoyed some wonderful tomato pasta and spinach ravioli in a butter sage sauce. It was really good and yet another part of town that we’d not been to before.

Saturday morning we got up early and got down to the Chelsea market to hunt down another in the 3-cafe Ninth Street Espresso ‘chain’. This one was in the market – a huge old brick building filled with food and produce stores – and was really just a takeaway bar. It was so great to be walking through the market looking for it and knew where it was when we heard the clunk clunk of the grinder dosing out the coffee, the clink of porcelain saucers and tea spoons and the thump thump of coffee grinds being dumped out. Again, a fabulous cup of coffee and some pastry from Amy’s Bread Shop next door. Man there’s a huge variety of cinnamon pastry and bread around here! Not sure if it’s because it’s Christmassy or just something normal.

After the market we walked across 14th Street to Union Square and then all the way back up the island to our hotel via a combination of Park and Madison Avenues. I’m not sure whether other people walk in this town as much as we do but we see and smell so much doing so. There are some very nice buildings and luxury apartments on Park, that’s for sure!