Day 16: SoHo

This morning we caught the subway downtown to Bleecker Street where the Soho district officially begins. I had three hours before meeting the family for lunch, and only made it to three shops in this time. They are massive, in size and selection. Slightly overwhelming. I bought a few things in American Eagle, where the staff were exceptionally friendly and helpful. In fact, everywhere I've been I have had fantastic service, staff taking my coat, helping me pick things out, giving me tips on the best deals and sharing their extensive product knowledge. Most of the stores have multiple levels and are really nice inside. The Hollister store is absolutely incredible - a nondescript doorway leads into a California beach house, organised into fully enclosed little rooms with wardrobe-style shelves, colourcoded and folded. Soft lighting, pot plants, sofas with blankets and magazines, and the staff going around spritzing everything with their house perfume. The stairs are styled as a pier, with huge screens covering the walls playing videos of the Cali surf. The epitome of cool.

My next stop was Desigual, a Spanish chain. Their clothes are incredible:
http://www.desigual.com/desigual/browse/category.jsp?categoryId=cat1110046&isCategoryPage=true&categoryNavIds=cat930047%3Acat930049%3Acat1110046
I bought a fabulous coat, completely unique to anything you would see at home. There were several I wanted. All the stores have security guards, usually imposing black men. This one, however, started picking out coats for me and came over to help me. He told me I was 'killin' it' and it was 'fabulous, girl!'. I had to buy it.

Then we went over to the Rockefeller Center to have lunch and meet Deborah. It is a huge complex of buildings with a ridiculous statue and an ice skating rink in the middle with every country's flag around the edges.

There was an amazing Lego shop next door to this, with several incredible models including one of the center itself:

This is the new 'Friends' girls Lego I was reading about. The sets include a teahouse, a dog show and a hair salon. Give me the Hogwarts castle set any day.

My aunt is a deputy managing editor on the Wall Street Journal, so we got to go into the News Corp building to see her. Apparently there are sometimes Fox protesters outside, and the editor arrives with bodyguards. Him and Rupert Murdoch himself work here but are currently in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. To get in we had to show ID and get passes, then go through a security barrier. The rooms were massive, with hundreds of journalists and computers organised into sections. Screens everywhere streamed live exchange rates and stock news, and they were filming an interview for the webcast and recording radio broadcasts too. Even relatively empty it was a hive of activity, and a completely different world to what I've heard and seen of how NZ press operates.

We picked up my cousin Charlie from his school, which is 12 storeys high and has a playground on the roof. Very different to the primary schools we know.

Dinner was at a nearby Italian place, again very authentic. I had pumpkin ravioli with cinnamon and walnut sauce which was incredible, quite sweet for a main meal, but delicious. They gave us complimetary deep fried olives which were amazing, and a glass of very sweet moscato. We also had a really nice Italian wine.

Mum, Deborah and I went to a Broadway show, Memphis. See it if you ever get the chance!

http://www.memphisthemusical.com/

The theater district is busy and thriving, and shows often run for years in their own theater. This one was quite small, but was a lovely old building with ornate frescoes on the walls. The show was absolutely incredible; I can't really describe it. The quality of singing and dancing in all the cast members, not just the leads. The costumes, the set, the music were all fantastic and the play itself was really good. It followed a white man trying to expose Memphis to r'n'b or 'race music' as it was called, in the 1960s at the height of racial discrimination in the South. He falls in love with a black singer and they face many problems and cannot be together in public without getting beaten. I have heard there are some areas in the 'deep South' states like Georgia and Alabama which are still very old-fashioned and unofficially uphold things like the Mason-Dixon line. I really hope that isn't true.

After the show we had a drink at a tiny bar called Jimmy's, which was small and dimly lit and filled with photos of Muhammad Ali. The bartender is an elderly, grumpy Russian woman who tells everyone what to do and where to sit in an abrupt manner, and made me an extremely strong and syrupy Midori and lemonade. Hilarious.

To get home we walked through Times Sqaure, which was ridiculous. There are a few shops and restuarants around but I'm not entirely sure what the attraction really is. The billboards completely covered several storeys of the skyscrapers, lighs flashed in every direction and the whole place buzzed. It was really surreal and quite overwhelming, just the sheer size of everything. This must be the prime advertising space in the world, I can't even imagine how much a commercial on the big screens or a 5-storey LED billboard must cost. 

There were thousands of people milling around, a lot of them tourists like us taking photos. But I'm not sure what everyone else was doing. There were also police everywhere. I didn't want to hang around there for too long for fear of brain implosion from sensory overload, so we went home.