We wrapped up our first week of New York City today, walking our feet off and taking more subways up and down Manhattan.  We started by walking through Central Park, where surprisingly, the Fall colors were still visible.

While in the area, we visited Columbia University to check out the campus.  Alice (The High School daughter of the friends we are staying with in New Jersey) wants to go there, so we were curious.  It was a beautiful, but very small campus, with only 4500 students.

In the same area was the Frick Collection museum — an art collection created by Henry Frick (1849-1919). Entry is free on Sunday from 11-1, so we walked over and went through the museum.  I am not an expert in painting, but this was one of the best collections I have seen in a museum in years.

When in the area of Central Park, we also visited the Natural History museum.  We particularly wanted to see “George” — the last Galapagos tortoise of his species.  We saw him alive on our trip to the Galapagos in 2009, but he died last year and is now on display in New York.  The rest of the museum turned out to be fascinating too.  I haven’t been to a Natural History museum in a few years, and this was a pleasant walk through dinosaur bones and lifelike animal displays.

Once you seen ’em stuffed, might as well head out to the Bronx Zoo to see them live too.  Unfortunately, the Winter schedule has many of the major animal displays closed though.

We spent the last of our final night in East Village by visiting a couple of jazz clubs — two clubs is our version of “bar hopping” 🙂 Being Sunday night, the clubs were all featuring jam sessions, and the Jules session included the owner/bartender joining in for some superb French vocals.