Okay, so there’s an entire subway stop devoted just to the Museum of Natural History, right. That should give you a clue to the gigantic size of said museum. It encloses four entire city blocks, and has five floors, one of which is devoted to relieving you of your hard-earned cash. More on that later.

You’ll walk up these enormous steps to get into the building, past gargantuan stone pillars, into a massive rotunda where the poinant words of FDR are carved for time immorial. They’re somewhat trite, but they speak of duty to ones country - something we’ve largely forgotten in the intervening years - and they’re about three stories high.

We payed $13 to get in - even though we really didn’t need to pay anything at all - the securitty guards just let us walk right in withouth actually checking to see if our tickets were valid, much less in existance.

But oh. My. Goodness. What a trip that building was! Brain overload times seven - from the animals to the space “scale of the universe” exhibit to the giant model of a blue whale hanging inside the Marine Animals of the World to the stuffed lions and tigers of the Asian Mammals exhibit.

But the most remarkable exhibit of the day had nothing to do with history - it was the cafeteria in the basement, which exists, I’m pretty sure, to remind people of just how much cheaper it would be to forage for roots and roast small animals on a spit. I bought one lousy cup of coffee and one lousy tasting cup cake and it ran me $5 American. That’s like… $21.66 Canadian, or the price of small car in several South American countries! Then, to add insult to injury , the girl that was cashing people out was so slow that they should have tattooed “Great Glaciers of America” on her forehead so we could at least feel like we were learning something.

But - away from that subject - it’s making me too uptight. Nick and I headed off to Chinatown where all the Asian people of New York city apparently live and don’t venture far from: I remarked to Nick on the first day that we were there that there seemed a lack of them in the rest of the city - but I guess I found out where they all went. We ate at a restaurant called the Lucky Unicorn - which was indeed lucky, though not very much like a unicorn. Nick sort of picked it at random (okay - it was the only sign we could read), and the food was amazing! I had this curry chicken with rice and it was just crazy good - also some Sake, Japanese rice wine, which tastes like regular wine mixed with fish guts and has a bouquet of subtle sweatsocks and spoiled milk. I choked it down by holding my nose and imagining that feet were burning, but all for naught, the flavour haunts me still.

Then we went back to the hostel and crashed - except that I could crash because some moron had decided to turn the air conditioner off. Sleep had escaped me so I sat on the roof in the darkness listening to a troupe of french youths gabbing in their native tongue. This put me in an unfortunately romantic mood which I quickly cured by howling desparately at the moon. Alright I may have made that up.

I went back to my room and rolled into bed. And that was day #3.

Dan (In New York and in a very very very strange mood…)

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