Day Four: We do the tourist thing

We’re in a cab racing down 5th avenue, after paying $40 for admission to the Metropolitan museum but the nice people at the counter didn’t tell us that the museum was closing in 30 minutes, so anyway we’re in the cab and Donna shouts, look there’s ted dancing in the street, and I thought, who the hell is ted and who gives a damn if he’s dancing in the street, and the cab driver says, that was him alright. I liked him in Cheers. Oh, that Ted Danson.

So we finally weaken and take the gorky bus tour to see neighborhoods we don’t normally visit and maybe go for a walk there later. The tour guide keeps saying things like “there’s Macy’s department store, yeah, heh heh heh, and “that’s where Madonna sang Happy Birthday Mr. President, yeah, heh heh heh”. But I really started questioning her training when she says that we can’t get lost in NYC because the streets are numbered, and they’re alphanumerically ordered. This tidbit excited a torrent of Spanish in the back row where a painfully touristic extended family is looking mostly grim, for some reason a lot of touristy families look like they’ve been fighting in the hotel room and are in a reluctant truce on the street. Then, the tour guide says, “if you take a look to my right, you’ll see a building built by the architect Arthur Deco who was very popular in the 30s.”