Day 2, Christmas Eve, in which we maintain an erratic schedule

I always forget what a five hour time difference does to a schedule, but sure enough today I woke up at 4am to find myself in a city which - while theoretically never sleeps - certainly isn't up and partying in mid-town. I went to the gym and read my book until the sun rose, and then we went for a walk.

It was freezing cold before the sun has had time to warm up the streets, and my thermal gloves and furry hat had little impact on the cold, so a few blocks later we ducked into the Astro Restaurant on 6th Avenue for coffee, pancakes and to slip on our thermals.

New York at dawn is a wonderfully quiet place, and it was a strange experience to be able to navigate the streets without the usual commuters, tourists and tramps trying to jostle for the same space. NYPD officers stood at street corners in anticipation of chaos, but observing little more than a trickle of traffic. As we entered Central Park, there were so few other people to see that strangers were delighted to stumble across us, and dog walkers would beam and wish us good morning as we passed by.

We dawdled in the park until the museums opened, and then went into the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a bit of a mooch around. There is a lot of stuff in the Met and not all of it worth seeing. A new wing contains reproduction rooms from different time periods, and is about as exciting as walking around the room-by-room displays in Ikea. A completely restored Egyptian temple housed in a giant greenhouse was pretty spectacular however, as was the huge painted glass mural from what I believe was the only French ship sunk by the US during the second world war. We also bought bagels from one of the rudest men in New York (indeed, all of the museum staff were rude apart from the smiling grey duffer whose job it was to secure our voluntary entrance fee).

We wanted a hotdog when we left the museum, but were most particular about who could serve it to us. Hotdog vendors who looked unclean, mentally ill or had bad facial hair were out. We thus made it to the bottom of Central Park before finding anyone worthy of our $3. The hotdog was everything I had dreamed it would be: fatty, chewy and delicious.

After buying snacks and water from the room, we were exhausted. It was 2pm and I'd been up ten hours already. We went back to the hotel for a quick nap, and jet lag took its toll and we didn't resurface until 10:30pm, in desperate search of some dinner.

Again, while Manhattan may be a city that never sleeps, it also doesn't keep many restaurants open after 11pm on Christmas Eve and so by the time we'd found somewhere we wanted to eat the kitchen had already closed. We had a pleasant walk down Broadway and through Times Square instead, then looped round to see the Empire State Building, the Speedy Deli on 32nd Street and the Chrysler Building (only one of these sold us sandwiches).

As we stood before the Chrysler, I noticed it was midnight. We wished each other happy Christmas, then returned to the Algonquin to eat our sandwiches and watch an extraordinarily fat couple look at pretty dreadful houses in the local version of 'Relocation Relocation'.