Two weekends ago, my friend Priya from U Illinois visited, and we had a ball going through town.
Priya took the Metro North Line into Grand Central, so we found a cute breakfast place there before hitting the mass transit to the Upper East Side, where I visited the Metropolitan for the first time ever! I was surprised how nice the spaces are there.
Usually, we both agreed that it really wasn't good how Western countries found it ok to steal cultural items from developing nations for their own museum collections, but sometimes the story is not so bad. In Egypt, the Temple of Dendur was built several millenia ago, but it was becoming threatened by the Aswan Dam. For many parts of the year, it remained completely flooded for months. The U.S. Government, along with many other nations responded to a sort of "Cultural S.O.S." call from the Egyptian government by sending money to save monuments drowning from the dam, and the Egyptian government bestowed the Temple upon the Metropolitan as a gift, but also for its preservation. They house it in a beautiful room located on the north side of the building facing Central Park.
My future tea set.
I also had not seen Central Park since many years ago, so we walked through the Park on our way to 5th Ave ...
Where we saw many ridiculously expensive but beautiful things. 
The next day was the final World Cup match. I'd heard about watching the game under the Manhattan Bridge, but it was way crowded there even 5 minutes after they opened the area, so we opted to take the train up to Murray Hill in stead. We did find a bar with enough standing space. I went in not caring who won, but mid-way through, I was so annoyed by the needless and loud cheering of the Spain fans, that I decided to cheer for the Netherlands. And then Netherlands lost. This whole world cup, I've only cheered for teams that lost. Oh well.Anyways, it was a fabulous weekend. I'm so glad Priya lives so close by!
And so is she! :)
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