The Big Apple 4

Spent much of the morning lazing around in Central Park - reading the Sunday New York Times, people watching, dozing in the hot sun and cool shade / Van Gogh and Expresssionism exhibition at the Neue Galerie showing how much of an influence Van Gogh's paintings had on young Expressionists such as Egon Schiele, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein / Paint all around me so thick, so unctious, so intense, I wanted to lick it off the canvas / Amazing to think of the impact Van Gogh's work had on the new generation of German and Austrian artists when first seen in the flesh, in full glorious colour in a gallery at Dresden in 1905 or in Vienna in 1909.

To the Galerie's infamous Cafe Sabarsky for lunch / The thirty minute wait was worth it / Bratwurst with Riesling sauerkraut and roasted potatoes for M / Bavarian sausage with potato salad for me / Crisp, chilled Riesling / Black forest gateau for M / Viennese dark chocolate torte with apricot confiture for me / To end, coffees with whipped cream.

A stroll around The Met and its newly restored Roman and Greek galleries to work off the food a little / We also enjoyed their exhibition of Contemporary Photographs From The Collection - Walker Evans' melancholic colour polaroids of everyday American street scenes, Damian Ortega's photos of Mexican sidewalks, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Shomei Tomatsu, Raghubir Singh's spontaneous street photos of modern urban India / These are my favourite type of photos - those that record the mundane, the overlooked, the everyday scenes of ordinary life and commonplace things, re-acquainting me with the urban landscape I live and move around in with a fresh pair of eyes.

And then we had to catch the plane home again / Sad at leaving, but already looking forward to a Bank Holiday Monday lying in a London park in the heat and the sun / Little were we to know England was suffering a miserably wet and windy weekend.