Today we were on the Upper West Side, walking towards an entrance to Central Park, when we saw a mother duck and ten ducklings crossing Malcolm X Boulevard. Pedestrians were helping to escort them across, making sure that traffic stopped on both sides until this duck family had crossed the street. When she got to the other side, the mother duck was able to hop up onto the curb but the ducklings were too small and simply congregated there, straining to get up on the sidewalk … until a couple of people finally bent down, cupped their hands and gently helped them up one by one.

Once they got into Central Park, the mother duck and her ducklings followed a fence until they found a place to sneak through … at which point they all got into the water and were quite contentedly swimming around.

We’ve never seen this sort of thing before in Manhattan and may not see it again. It was awesome. The only sad thing was we didn’t have our camera to take pictures.

Last week while walking around Queens, we saw some graffiti artists at work. This particular wall was previously covered with random graffiti and the owner agreed these artists could re-paint this surface with something a little more organized and cohesive in appearance. They had been at work for six hours (since 8am) and at least one of them did not mind having pictures taken while he was at work - not that he is recognizable in any of the photos.

Ha-Aretz (which I sort of view as the Israeli version of the New York Times) has a glowing article today about Mohammad Shamsi Ali.  He is the deputy imam for the Islamic Cultural Center (or ICC) located on 96th Street in the Upper East Side - a couple of blocks away from where we live.  I took a picture of the mosque dome some time ago.  Maybe it’s time to drop by there for another visit.

The Pope is in NYC today and the fact that he was in the proximate area to our apartment was signaled by the sound of helicopters overhead. The sound was ongoing for awhile and when I went outside I saw four helicopters hovering in the sky right above our street. They were spaced evenly in relation to each other and were mostly staying in place. Due to their spacing, at most I was able to get two into one picture.