NYC

I woke this morning in New York City. It's always a pleasure to be here; the throb of the metropolis is quite different from the continuous quiet hum of Los Angeles, and you can feel it even early in the morning, from nine floors up. We are staying at our usual haunt, the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington at 47th Street. We arrived last night via Jet Blue from Los Angeles--an easy and uneventful flight whose only snag was a failure of the video system. Not much of a loss. I kept myself busy with the NY Times crosswords I had saved up for this contingency...

A rather glum taxi driver brought us in from the airport and we arrived at our hotel around 8PM, in good time to unpack and take a leisurely walk to find a bite to eat. We settled for Blackwell's Restaurant & Pub on 47th Street, and enjoyed a glass of their good beer and some reasonably decent fish and chips. Back to the hotel to catch up on the disasters of the day on television news--mostly, today, the disastrous tax bill being rushed through Congress.

I'm honestly not sure whether I'll keep up with our New York/Washington trip on The Buddha Diaries. Feeling no compulsion. It will depend on time. Today is our uptown day, with Michelangelo and David Hockney at the Met, Edvard Much and Anselm Kiefer at the Met Breuer.. and then there's always the Guggenheim and the Neue Galerie.

Much to do. Too much, really for a single day. It's great to be back in New York City...!