After Madonna, time for a few ales then a stoll down time square. The place is as busy at 1am on a Monday night as it is any time of the week. People everywhere.

Tonight we went to see Madonna at Madison Square Gardens. An amazing show, how this old girl can perform on stage in a two and a half hour fully choreographed spectacle has got me beat, she doesn’t even get up a sweat and just doesn’t stop.  The show is incredible, the technology was just dazzling, moving LCD panels, platforms, lasers and even a car being driven down the catwalk. Just a shame there’s no plan’s to bring it to Australia. MSQ is a good venue we got a great view. It is about as big as the Tennis Centre with similar size court, but instead of the two tiers it is four and holds about 20,000. It was the venue for Elvis’s only New York show ever, That Marilyn birthday song to Prez Kennedy and where Muhammad Ali won his world Championship.

The memorial for slain Beatle John Lennon is in Central Park just across the road from the Dakota Building where he lived and was shot. This area of the park is called Strawberry Fields.  Still today there are cards, flowers and candles and several people sitting around in Virgil remembering John. There was a van parked out side the apartments advertising some show on Fox next week, looks like a heap of nutters are speaking out about a conspiricy… maybee Prince Philip shot him fromt the grassy knol or are Lennon and Elvis are holidaying in Argentina with Hitler..who knows, he might have even been harboring weapons of mass destruction.

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Today we went to the Target Book fair at Columbia University to see They Might Be Giants, you might know them from classic tunes as They called me Dr Worm or Instanbul… top quality act- (might need to listen to JJJ to understand)  There was a pretty good Target Dog too.

We will go for a better walk through the park over the next few days but here’s a few highlights.

The best views in New York are from the top deck of the Rockafeller Centre. There are spectacular views of both Downtown showing the Empire State building and other skyscrapers and Uptown showing the magnificent Central Park.

5th Avenue is home to all the big fashion brands, the boutiques are just too over the top to even think of going in. There are door bitches for door bitches. Prado, Guci, Cartier you name it there are all here and only the beautiful people are game enough to enter, with their stupid toy dog in a bag (so last year) and more bling than Mr T.  The street is packed with the young wishing they had what it takes to own some of these label items. It’s got nothing to do about looks, most of the stuff you wouldn’t use to wax your car, it’s all about the label and the image- I’m dressed by …yeah I know Target.

We came across the Trump Tower on 5th Avenue and thought we should pop in and see if Donald was on the turps in the bar, but no..he must have been off counting his billions. We had a beer in the fancy bar- thinking it would cost us all we had but all turned out well and was quiet reasonable, The place is over the top and plenty of 90’s bad taste with brown marble and lots of tasteless gold chrome and mirrors. Perfect tackiness, a pretty cool giftshop too, bears, fake gold nuggets but no hair pieces.- they could have made a killing.

Probably the busiest place we have been- the Apple store. This huge complex was jammed packed with people playing with the latest fashion accessory the I Phone or IPODs.  There would have been 3-400 items on display for people to play with and there were queues for having a go. Staff roamed the floor with hand held credit card chargers so you could just purchase on in pulse. They were making a killing.

This place is amazing, you might remember Homer making a ass of him self when the Simpson’s went to New York. They have got a huge piano on the ground for kids to dance on, I think there’s a Tom Hanks movie they played on it too… might have been the De Vinci code or Philadelphia- who knows.  Anyway this toy shop is massive and they specialise in fury stuffed animals (someone had a bit of a problem and it wasn’t me- bears of every size) life size farm animals, African safari animals, 30ft giraffes, huge hippos and even monstrous dinosaurs. …I have got to admit we didn’t leave the shop with out picking up a little friend.

We probably don’t need any words to describe these ugly things. All are current models except the one with wood panels. But im sure you can still option it up on your Caddy or Crown Victoria.

We read about a pretty interesting plane museum on  board the USS Intrepid in the Hudson River.  They had a British Airways Concorde on display and plenty of interesting military aircraft. But we were in for a bit of a disappointment, as the museum had been closed for refurbishment, opening again in a few weeks and they no longer had the Concorde on display. After doing a bit of research we found the Concorde was moved to some airfield just out of town while the ship was being renovated in New Jersey. The Concorde was vandalised and they have even misplaced the nose cone and kids have been using the wings to kick footballs off.  Pretty sad state of affairs for such a rare and important aircraft. This is one of only 15 in existence.