Day 13 - Saturday October 14th 2006

Today was the designated NY shopping day and the girls were chomping at the bit to get out the door. We quickly walked down to Tower Records which is a nation wide CD/DVD store that is going out of business and was apparently having a big closing down sale. Well let me tell you, dvd’s here are a lot more expensive. Stuff you would get at home for $20aus would be $25-30US. We have been on the look out for the full series of Sex and the City for Sandra and the cheapest we have found it is almost $300, which is at least $150 more expensive then home.
Anyway we piled ourselves into a taxi and headed straight for the New York institution, Macy’s. This store is billed as the biggest department store in the world and it sure felt like it. It takes up 2 full city blocks and is 11 stories high and has everything you could think of bar golf clubs and guitars. It has wooden escalators and just goes on forever. It has a floor dedicated to xmas decorations, they sell grand pianos and organs and have about 4 floors of women clothing. Pets are well catered floor with a big chunk of floor space dedicated to dog and cat costumes and accessories, so that you can dress your pet in things that would get you locked up if you tried to put your kids into them. And talking about kids, the ‘kids’ floor has a large selection of kids suits, just what the inspiring pimp needs with a price tag to match. It has its own McDonalds (naturally located on the kids floor), Starbucks and about 7 other eateries/restaurants. Toni picked up a baby Halloween outfit and mum bought some shoes after which we had an awesome lunch from the Macy deli. The place was far too big to really have a good look at in a small amount of time, but they did cater too everyone, from high end expensive fashion down to nice stuff that people with normal wages could afford.
It took me a couple of hours to extract the girls from the store and then we proceeded up and down Fashion Avenue where Toni found some shoes that she absolutely had to have and found other assorted clothes from some other stores. Going in and out of all these places started becoming a bit of a blur to me so sorry if I’m a little scratchy on the details.
We then headed up the famous 5th Avenue, home to some of the worlds most elite and expensive stores, most of which we didn’t bother going into. We did go into Tiffanys but weren’t game enough to go to floor 2-5 seeing how expensive the ground floor was.
We tried earlier in the day to go to the top of the Empire State Building, but it was a 75 minute wait to get to the top and on our tight schedule, that was never going to happen. Instead, we went to ‘Top of the Rock’ at the Rockerfeller Centre. It has a great observation deck 69 floors up that overlooks Central Park and has a great view of the Empire State Building. And best of all, there was no wait!!!!


We headed up to FAO Schwarz, which is the big toy store featured from Home Alone 2 and has the big ‘zebra crossing’ piano that was in Big with Tom Hanks back in the 80’s. The place was packed and they had a couple of professionals working the zebra crossing which was very impressive. They had a maternity ward with new dolls in cribs and the area was done up like a hospital, down to the staff in the section being dressed in nurses uniforms. I’m still amazed I got Toni out of there without one.
The game Monopoly must be huge over here. We counted in FAO Schwarz and they had 27 different versions of the game, From the Yankees Edition to Family Guy, From Orange County Choppers to Star Trek, it was covered. No Aussie Editions though.
NYC’s street corners are covered by guys selling knock off Luis Vutton and Gucchi bags and Toni then made us cover half of Manhattan to find the exact knock-off she was after.
Surprisingly the girls didn’t actually buy that much but night eventually fell and we were utterly exhausted and completely shopped out, so we piled into a taxi and headed home for the rest of the night were the girls watched some Law and Order and I logged in to do some work