Mothers’ Merry Month of May

Part One
(Before we start, that title is punctuated correctly, there were two mothers enjoying a busy May.) On with the story…

A merry month indeed. My mother arrived on the 1st of May on her first big around-the-world trip, and she was keen to make the most of it; as were we. We’d been saving a bunch of fun things to do until a) summer (or at least better weather) arrived; and b) we had a visitor to do them with. After all, I figured, if the sightseeing or event or tour wasn’t all that great, we wouldn’t want to repeat it when visitors arrived. So with time to kill before Mum arrived, I scheduled out her two and a half weeks with us, taking into account all the things she’d said she’d like to try and fit in.

As it turned out Ahmed had to be away the first week Mum was going to be here. And it was only a matter of good luck that he was still in town and able to pick her up from the airport late Sunday night. The day before she arrived I’d made an attempt to do a bit of cleaning up and get a bed ready between which I had to run Yasmin to a classmates birthday party over in the next town. So we were ready for kick-off the first day of her holiday with us.

Ahmed took off before the crack of dawn for the airport and wouldn’t be seen again until the Friday night. We started the week slowly with a bit of local shopping. Showed off Costco (bulk buying heaven), WalMart (worth a look if you’ve not seen it), and HomeGoods (discount kitchen and home wares heaven). Then we came home and unpacked the goodies while Mum took Yasmin for a swim downstairs. Heated pool though it is, it was a bit cold for Mum, so they were back in a short time. But by the time they’d dressed it was dinner time and day one over.

The next day we dropped Yasmin at school and went and did grocery shopping and took a look around Marshall’s (discount clothes, home wares etc.) and Bed Bath & Beyond (everything for the bed, bath and wherever your beyond is).

Wednesday we had a day trip to NYC planned. We were to enjoy a tour of NBC TV studios, lunch at Trump Tower and a theatre matinee on Broadway. The morning proved rather more challenging than anticipated and with Ahmed away, we had to get Yasmin to school on the way in to the train. We missed the train but were hopeful we’d make it to the studio tour in time, but it wasn’t to be. It cost 25% to re-book the tickets and there wasn’t another tour available until just before our theatre show. So we pushed it out to the following week, paid the fee (I muttered under my breath about it, to no avail), and went for a walk along 5th Ave to Trump Tower for an early lunch. Trump’s bistro (the best in the world according to him, as quoted on The Apprentice recently) is hardly better than an average café in Melbourne, but it is quite nice to watch the water fall over the forty-ish foot high marble wall. And it is one of the few places to sit, eat and relax in mid-town.

After lunch we decided to walk along south Central Park, watching the clock to make sure we wouldn’t be late for the theatre. If it looked like it was getting too close to time, we planned to grab and cab; but it wasn’t necessary and it was a nice walk along the bottom edge of the park and up Broadway. I’d booked tickets for Mercedes Ruehl as Peggy Guggenheim in “A Woman Before a Glass”. It was great. But as I looked around the packed matinee, I realised I was probably one of the youngest people there. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older women (yes, I know I’m on the lower edge of middle-age) with a few stalwart men peppered amongst the crowd. However, they made for a great audience and Mum especially enjoyed her Broadway experience.

We didn’t have time to dawdle after the theatre though as I’d arranged for Yasmin to be picked up by a school friend’s mother and we needed to get back to pick her up as close to dinner time as we could manage. The subway, fantastically efficient once you know how to work it, got us to Grand Central quickly but we just missed the last off-peak train and had to pay the fare difference onboard. By the time we got back to our station, picked up the car and got to Yasmin, she’d had dinner and was planning on staying the night for a sleepover. With much reluctance, she decided to come with us as we were going out for dinner at the local diner. An ice-cream dessert was the perfect bribe to get her into the car without much fuss.

The next day was a school and ballet class day, so we couldn’t go far out of range. Mum went for a walk into town by herself and came home laden with shopping bags. She’d discovered Burlington Coat Factory, another discount clothing store, and had a fine time in there unsupervised. I made a pathetic attempt at weekly exercise while she was out and went for a swim after I dropped Yasmin at school. After lunch we picked up Yasmin and went off to ballet. Mum, as the only grandmother present, was given a special seat in the classroom and allowed to watch the entire class. Not so us the rest of us mere mortals. We were sat out in the back room only allowed a peek every now and then through the curtains. Even though there’re only a few kids in the class, and therefore only a few mum’s present, the noise level is pretty wild and it can be a very tiring hour or so. With that, all the other busy-ness of the week, and a weekend in NYC coming up, Thursday evening and Friday were taken fairly easily.
Ahmed arrived home late Friday night from his jaunt in Europe (sans gift this time, the slacker) so not everyone got an early night in preparation for the big NYC weekend.

Next morning we were up at the crack of lunchtime, missing a dozen trains into the city and wasting half a day breakfasting and getting our collective acts together. But it didn’t matter really. We still managed to get into the city, drop the bag at the hotel, find the bus tour ticketing, have a late lunch, get on a bus and do the double-decker tour of downtown/midtown Manhattan. Partly because we were so late getting started, partly because it wasn’t the warmest day, partly because Ahmed spent some of the trip on the lower deck sleeping and partly because a three-hour tour of a city is of limited entertainment value to a four-year-old, we didn’t get off at any of the predictable stops – Empire State Building, Macy’s, Madison Square Garden etc. Rather we stayed on board being entertained by an interesting tour guide with an artistic bent until we got to 5th Ave, at which point we got off, took a wander through FAO Schwarz (an upscale toy store), spent 20 minutes trying to extract Yasmin from the Thomas the Tank Engine (or should I say Thomas the Train, as he’s known here) display track, then found an upscale little Italian eatery at which to enjoy dessert and decent coffee (that end of 5th Ave is very upscale). An Italian eatery, it seems, that has been on telly. I went downstairs to the restroom (!) and on the basement level was a private dining room I could swear was a venue used on The Apprentice as one of the ‘rewards’ for the winning team in the early weeks of the latest series; the team were taken there for dinner with ‘The Donald’ and Milania (sp?).

After flirting outrageously with the rather gorgeous Spanish/Italian waiter (we couldn’t agree where he might be from) Mum paid for dinner and we left for the hotel in a chatter cloud of effusive praise for the food and service (Mum). You’d think she’d never eaten out before. Maybe life in the Australian desert is getting to her – she’s gone a bit Croc Dundee in NYC…

Back at the hotel we settled Yasmin down to sleep, or a facsimile thereof, and with Grandma babysitting Ahmed and I went out to find something to entertain ourselves. Having not done this the entire time we’ve been here, we thought a stand-up show would be cheap and cheerful. If you wander around Times Square you’re bound to run into someone hawking discount tickets to something or other and we picked up a couple to a comedy club about two blocks from the Square. We had plenty of time so we walked around for a bit, eyeing off all the restaurants and nightlife we were discovering. Having only ever been in during the day (and not having had any babysitters) we’ve not enjoyed much of the non-sleeping part of the City-that-never-sleeps. Mostly because that which never sleeps is the sleazy bit and we’re not particularly interested, but mainly because we just haven’t seen it. Well we saw it and it was fine and I’m sure it’s interesting if you know people there or if you’re into the whole ‘New York is exciting and I’m here for a good time’ experience. But as a short term tourist, it’s just a bunch of pubs, bars and restaurants like anywhere else. Unless you know which places are the places to be, you could almost be anywhere … almost … it is after all, New York City.

The comedy was good and we had some laughs, although the content was very localised considering the out-of-town audience. But then I guess that’s New York – the center (sic) of the universe. The room was not much bigger than our postage-stamp sized apartment and they jammed everyone in so tight I was sitting closer to the couple next to us than I was to Ahmed. Somehow they kept track of who was ordering what, with the two drink minimum being where they haul in their profit margin, and we managed to sail past two drinks each into not-such-a-cheap-night-out-anymore territory.

Mother’s Day
The next morning was Mother’s Day. I’d hoped we’d be able to have a posh breakfast somewhere, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Because we’d missed some sightseeing opportunities the day before we wanted to get on and make up for it. So we cabbed it to an open venue, not so many of them in mid-town on a Sunday morning, and had an American breakfast – lots of fat and sugar and coffee. After we left Harriet’s we rushed to the Circle Line Cruise dock and jumped on a three-hour cruise around Manhattan island with minutes to spare. Mum and I took about twelve-bazillion photographs (the wonder of digital technology) while Ahmed alternately dozed, watched Yasmin and looked out the window. The boat ride certainly opens a new perspective on the city. That’s a lot of brick work piled on a small island!

After we’d done with boating, we headed back to mid-town to use the second day of our bus pass on the Uptown Loop. Not as interesting as the previous day. Uptown is a lot posher and as a result the streets are less interesting – all clean, clear and quiet. Again we didn’t feel like getting off to visit much but near the end we stopped at the Children’s Zoo and playground at Central Park for you-know-who. The movie Madagascar is based on the Central Park Zoo and a movie about something like that might give you the impression it’s big. Ah ha, fooled ya. It’s tiny. And we didn’t see any lions or zebras. Just a few performing seals, penguins, tree monkeys and copulating polar bears (you should have heard the various parental explanations for that!). After we’d done the zoo and Yasmin had run amok in the tiny park with a giant slide, we tried to rejoin the bus tour for a ride back to the hotel. But wouldn’t you know it, a ‘vehicular incident’ between a cab and a van just in front of the bus stop snarled traffic and the bus couldn’t (wouldn’t) pull in and let us on. So we cabbed back, picked up the bag, rescued ballet bear who had been left on the floor of the hotel (good save – that could have been a disaster) and headed to GCT to catch the train home, all happy, tired travellers who’d done as much as we could in a very short time. The bus tour is a great way to get your bearings in NYC and, if you’ve a mind to, you can hop on an off at various points of interest. We’ll try to cram in some of those before we come home as it’s just not a trip to New York without the Empire State building.