011 - thu 11/05/2006 - new york

tonight we were going to broadway. we went to times square early in the morning - ok, maybe 11 - and got our tickets.

there were still uncharted districts of manhattan, god damn it. soho. it has a reputation for being a shopping district, but our sex and the city guide yesterday had quite strongly steered us away from there. our book - which was now our new york bible - agreed, saying that the big chains had come into soho and muscled out the smaller, interesting shops. the sex and the city designer used to have a store in soho, even she's moved out now. but we went there anyway. we had breakfast. i found a vintage-style clothes store called 'what goes around comes around' that was selling supposedly authentic 70s rock t-shirts - obviously i have no reason to think they weren't authentic, but you couldn't really tell them apart from something you might iron on with a transfer. guns n roses, the who, motley crue, the ramones, the usual suspects of course. except that there wasn't a t-shirt under $200. us dollars. the who was $450. the most expensive thing in the store was a cruddy black 'the who' t-shirt. pretty funny.

we wandered from soho to tribeca, but couldn't tell them apart much. we'd had enough, so we went in search of the wonderfully named 'meat packing district' which we worked out to be the north most corner of west village. it was an area where they used to pack meat. from what we could tell, an invasion of trendy, cashed-up young professionals is turning this former industrial area into a chic little neighbourhood. we found some cool stores and had great rich shakes at an upmarket diner called, rather obviously, "the diner".

we went back to the hotel and got dressed up for the broadway show. (for me this involved wearing a shirt and jeans rather than a t-shirt and jeans... i packed light.) so then we went to a broadway show. the show? spamalot of course. it was cool, i giggled. we had box seats, right on the side, so we had some shoddy visibility but it was interesting to be so close to the action, and yet strangely removed from it because they never actually looked in our direction. there were a lot of laughs in the show, all of the classic scenes and lines, and a lot of great new scenes. very faithfully pythonesque.

after the show we wanted to hit the town again so we headed to the meat packing district, in the direction of some of the bars our tour guide had mentioned. but once we got there, everyone was so dressy and the bars were so 'money' that we headed back towards our hotel, tail between legs. actually we were buggered, so we grabbed more pizza from mikes pizza and had an early night.