Fly, Pigeon, Fly!

My kids love pigeons. If we are walking along a sidewalk and they spy one along our route, Jonah takes off at a run and yells "Fly, Pigeon, Fly!" at the top of his lungs. Apparently the pigeons here are used to a lot of noise and unpredictable pedestrians, because you can practically see them rolling there eyes and sighing with annoyance as they lazily fly up just out of reach, just long enough to make the unruly child feel like he accomplished something before returning to their garbage and crumbs. Anyways, it is quite funny.
Today we looked at another apartment in Inwood (that is way on the northern tip of Manhattan), visited the Strand Bookstore and FAO Schwarz. The parks are beautiful in Inwood, with cool rock formations. Also Columbia University has their sports fields at the very tip of Manhattan and that is kind of interesting. The rents are way cheaper and the subway goes right through there, so although it is 30 minutes + to get to lower Manhattan, it is all on the same system and pretty accessible. We have visited a few times, trying to get a feel for the neighborhood and decide if we could live there. It definitely doesn't have the nonstop NY sort of continuous energy thing going on. That might be a good thing with the stage our family is at right now. The apartment was nice and roomy by NY standards. The current tenant is relocating to Japan, so it is a good deal since it is a lease takeover.
In one review I read, Strand was described as follows:
"Strand is to Powell's what crack is to cocaine"
OK, this is a bit of an inside joke, but those of you from Portland may appreciate it. I must say it felt very similar to Powell's, and while they bill themselves as having 18 miles of books, I didn't explore quite so extensively due to the young shoppers at my side. But it is a very cool bookstore.
After chasing some more pigeons and taking another subway ride, we found ourselves at the door of FAO Schwarz. I was prepared to be unimpressed, but Maya and Jonah had Christmas money that was burning a hole in their pockets, so I felt obligated to at least check it out once. Holy cow is that place ever cool. First of all the kids played on a $250,000 floor piano (the kind that was in the movie Big)--you run back and forth on the keys and they light up and play music. Then we walked through the collectible doll collection to an art area where the kids could do crayon paintings (crayons you draw with then paint with brushes of water to turn it into paint). There were life sized lego creations of things like Santa Claus and Star Wars characters, all sorts of trains running around on tracks, every game I have ever heard of and collectibles and action figures to things I would have never thought they made collectibles for (like say Wallace and Gromit). The stuffed animals display is sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, so that tells you how cool the gigantic giraffes and things are. We didn't even explore the ice cream/candy parlour, the books or the puppets...I felt lucky to get out of there with just a $10 Playmobil set for each kid and figured we should leave before the stakes got higher. Anyways, it was way cool.
Definitely a fun outing for a rainy day. Actually it ended up not even raining here. It isn't that cold and the weather is more mild than the NW has been. What is up with that? I hope we aren't saving up for a big snowstorm with power outages...