Another plus of Madison Avenue is it runs through the heart of the Upper East Side, New York's most exclusive, and prettiest, residential neighborhood. To clarify, Fifth Avenue is very much an Upper East Side avenue as well, but the shopping part of it is further south, in Midtown. The avenues have the grand prewar apartment buildings that house New York's most famous high society families, but the cross streets in the sixties, seventies and eighties contain beautiful townhouses and are much prettier in my opinion.

As per my recent Sydney post, repeat cities like Sydney and New York present blogging problems, and in this case it's compounded by the fact that I seemed to have been on a journalist strike, as my entries are sparse and mostly written while on a subsequent trip. By piecing together my writing fragments and the photos taken I have a vague idea of what I did, so I'll use that framework to largely make up any details needed to flesh this out. Actually we were in New York for a week, but I'll just do a quick blog about it to move onto some newer destinations. I worked during the day, and Somchai (surprise!) went shopping on Madison Avenue. Generally, we tend to stay downtown, mostly because we like it better and because we had an apartment in Soho. But downtown is too cool for Christmas so we spent most of our town in midtown or the East Side to get the full-on Christmas spirit. While for most people Fifth Avenue is New York shopping, we much prefer Madison Avenue. Fifth Avenue is crazy crowded, particularly at Christmas, the shops are very variable in quality and not particularly attractive. Madison Avenue in contrast, has a much quainter feel to it, and has many more unusual boutiques and one-off shops interspersed among the luxury brands.