My birthday was a few weeks ago—happy birthday to me! Jeremy was away in New York for my birthday week, and after much hemming and hawing, I decided to be decadent and fly to New York myself for a few days myself to have a belated birthday celebration.

I’d been to New York City a few times before, but never for an extended period of time, and never on my own. This time around, I had three whole days to explore, two of which would be spent by myself since Jeremy had to work.

To be honest, the idea of New York intimidated me. I’m happy enough tootling around London on my own, or Paris, or even Sydney, but New York…well, New York is the ne plus ultra of a metropolis. I kind of thought that if I didn’t get mugged, I would at least get hopelessly lost in the urban canyons of Manhattan.

I suppose I have Rudy Giuliani and the planning commission of 1811 to thank for the fact that neither incident came to pass. Midtown Manhattan, where I spent most of my time, seemed remarkably safe and clean to me, and the grid system of the streets meant that even someone as orientationally challenged as myself could navigate without a map.

I was eased into city life by being treated to dinner at Russian Samovar on my first night in town. The copious amounts of herring, borscht and beef stroganoff and the not insignificant amount of vodka consumed over the course of the evening remarkably had no ill effect, and when I woke up the next morning to the sun gleaming off the buildings around Rockefeller Center, my anxiety turned to a sense of thrill. It was a beautiful summer’s day, and I was in New York City, and I could do whatever I wanted.

I wound up doing something I didn’t initially plan to do: I went to the Museum of Modern Art. Modern art isn’t really my bag—that is to say, I can appreciate it on an intellectual level, but it doesn’t move me in the way that the Old Masters do. As it turns out, MoMA is a pretty classy—and classic—joint; it has a lot less of your unmade beds and pickled sharks and more of your water lilies and starry nights, the latter alone being worth the (steep) price of admission.

In order to avoid museum fatigue, I motored through MoMA pretty rapidly and made it back outside by lunchtime. With the sun shining and Central Park just a few streets away, there was really only one thing for me to do: find myself a deli and buy a sandwich to eat in the park.

This was somewhat easier said than done, as 5th, Madison and Park Avenues are clearly not deli territory (handbags and shoes, yes—pastrami on rye, not so much). I did finally manage to bag myself a sandwich and a shady place to sit, and the rare roast beef on wheat that I ate under the trees in Central Park that day was certainly one of the finer lunches I’ve had this year.

I was torn as to what to do afterwards: stay outside in the sunshine, or venture into another museum, and if so, which one? I opted for more museum-going, and proximity was the deciding factor. My lunch spot in Central Park was just a short jaunt from the Frick Collection, and the lure of Holbeins, Vermeers and Rembrandts drew me like—well, an art-lover to a really amazing art collection.

The Frick Collection was…a revelation. First of all, it’s housed in a magnificent mansion on 5th Avenue which, while enormous for a private home, is rather intimate for a great art museum. Secondly, it was much less crowded than MoMA, so you could really study the artworks without being buffeted by crowds. It was also the first time I’d ever used a museum audio guide, which I found had the interesting effect of making you feel as if you were swaddled in a little private cocoon; no wonder the people walking around with audio guides always have that creepily distant look about them.

But most of all, the art on display was just so magnificent and so right up my alley that I couldn’t not love it. There was Brueghel and Van Eyck, Goya and El Greco, and the above-mentioned Old Masters. These were all fantastic, of course, but the painting that really stopped me in my tracks was one I’d seen reproduced a million times before and never given a second thought: the portrait of Louise de Broglie, Countesse d’Haussonville by Ingres. Viewed in the flesh, as it were, the young countess all but leaps off the wall. She’s painted with such a sense of presence that you can almost hear the rustle of her sumptuous silks, and it’s very hard to pull yourself away from her bold, rather saucy gaze.

I did eventually pull myself away, if only because after several hours of museum-going, my feet were as tired as my brain. I had just enough energy to schlep myself back to the hotel and shower before going out and eating a bridge of sushi with Jeremy. And having conquered my first day alone in New York, I went to bed exhausted, satisfied and eager to take on day two (a description of which is yet to come)…