Day 5, in which Carrie Fisher reprises her role as Princess Leia, coffee pot coffee pot

Today we enjoyed some fortifying coffee and muffins in bed before heading uptown to enjoy the marvellous queues at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, to those in the know). After queueing to enter the building, what could be more charming than queuing to buy tickets? Why, queueing for the coat check, silly!

Finally ticketed-up and bereft of baggage, we joined the queue for the escalator and travelled to the top floor to see the Bauhaus exhibition. We somehow got confused and walked around the exhibit in reverse, and so it was that I shall always hold the impression that Bauhaus got cruder and more primitive through time. I also spent a lot of time not knowin what Bauhaus was or where it came from - something I only figured out right at the end of the exhibition where it was fully explained in an introductory display.

We followed this with an exhibition of Gabriel Orozco's work. I'd not previously heard of Orozco but found him to be a very playful artist, and perhaps the biggest delight was in seeing the other visitors' faces as confusion gave way to laughter (a good example of how he plays with imagery is my favourite work, Cats & Melons. C'mon, follow this link).

After a sandwich in a local bagel shop - where the only bagel filling was 'fat', although you had the option to choose between dairy, animal or vegetable - we went to see Carrie Fisher's fabulous new one-woman show at Studio 54, Wishful Drinking, in which she reveals all about her inbred Hollywood origins, her drug and alcohol addictions, her failed relationships, her manic-depression and the recent death of a friend in her bed. The material may hardly sound like comedy gold, but as Ms Fisher noted "if I can laugh at my life, I know I'm going to be alright", and she went further and managed to get us all laughing along too. Crowd pleasing material concerning her appearance in Star Wars included recreations of the hologram scene and an audience participation section with a life-size Princess Leia sex doll, while more intriguing material was presented with a Q&A session on the said friend's death and an analysis of the lyrics from songs Paul Simon wrote about her (it was not, it seems, at any stage a very happy marriage).

After a stroll down through Greenwich into Soho - through City Hall and down onto the tip of Manhattan to see the Brooklyn Bridge (pointless after dusk, it turns out, as they don't illuminate the piers) - I thought it might be nice to visit the Abercrombie & Fitch store at Seaport. I was wrong. It was in fact fucking horrible to visit the Abercrombie & Fitch store at Seaport. Entering the store, they got us first with a chemical attack: the aftershave hung so thick in the air we were drowning. The second wave of attack came in the form of 90s rock anthems played at deafening volume, while the general public was recruited to complete the assault by screaming, pushing, grabbing and generally being disorderly. Despite seeing a few t-shirts I liked, I had to abort the entire process in the face of cruel and unusual punishment, and we went for recuperative white wine at Pier 17 instead.

We ended the evening at L'il Frankies at 1st & 1st in the East village, a typical local-neighbourhood-pizzeria-cum-world-famous-radio-station, where apparently Mark Ronson DJs (and not Jon Ronson, as I initially and very excitedly believed). Most of the American food we've eaten so far has comprised white carbs, protein and fat (and not in that order), so we ordered a big bowl of broccoli and an entire roast aubergine in an attempt to please the gods of our tummies. It was all very nice, and I'm certain the prosecco we poured down alongside only aided our digestion.

It was a beautiful night, so we strolled home.