Friday was our first full day in New York City, and we packed it very full.

1. Breakfast at the Red Flame Coffee Shop, a very fast-paced, New Yorkish diner two doors down from the Algonquin, where we were staying. I had a bagel with lox and cream cheese. Tom had a lox omelet. As good as the smoked salmon (the cooked version) is in Seattle, the lox version is much better in New York. Yum!

2. Took the subway and the el to the Museum of Modern Art, which is in Queens at the moment, while its Midtown location is being remodeled. We had tickets to the Matisse-Picasso show, which was very exciting to see. Tom and I both love modern art. It's hard for me to explain why I like it so much. It can be hard to understand what makes something Art, especially when it looks like a bunch of weird shapes or squiggles. But so often I think abstract and pre-abstract painters and sculptors put color and shape and texture together in such beautiful, exhilarating ways that I don't need to understand the piece intellectually. And, of course, both Matisse and Picasso were brilliant at lifelike drawing and painting as well, so you can look at their portraits in paint or ink and just swoon at the beauty of the lines they made on the page. Photography was not allowed. We bought postcards of some of our favorites for our photo album.

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