New York: The Met and the Rockettes

Since we only had a short break in New York, our days were jammed packed from start to finish. We started our day with a brisk walk through the city, heading for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Autumn had hit the city hard and all the trees along the edge of Central Park were stunning shades of orange, gold and red, glowing warmly in the bright sunshine.

 The smell of cooking pretzels wafted over the 'sidewalk' as yellow cabs whizzed past us, honking their horns. There was no doubt that we were in the Big Apple!

Before long, we reached the Met. Determined to have my Gossip Girl moment, I took a second to pose on the steps....

Blair Waldorf eat your heart out! 

....before delving inside to view all of the museum's treasures!

One of my favourite exhibitions was 'Death becomes her,' which was a collection in the Anna Wintour Costume Centre, showing the evolution of mourning dresses over the years! It may sound a little morbid, but some of the dresses were just stunning!

Another absolutely stunning exhibition called 'Treasures from India' was one showing off some of the Al-Thani (the ruling family in Qatar) collection, which contains beautiful pieces of jewellery, some of which were centuries old! Some of the pieces on display were simply dazzling, set with hundreds of diamonds and other precious stones.

The Met is home to more beautiful pieces of art than I could possibly mention and I was so excited to finally get to visit. I only wish we'd had more time as there was far more there than could possibly be seen in one day and we'd only had a few hours to spare.

Luckily though, we still managed to have time to see a few of the highlights and pose for a couple of silly pictures!

Next, it was another quick dash back downtown to Radio City where we were going to see their Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes!

The show was fantastically kitsch and wonderfully gaudy. We were taken on a 3D adventure with Santa, before lines of perfectly synchronised ladies dressed as reindeer, elves and the Sugar Plum Fairy high kicked their way through the performance, while spreading the magic of Christmas. There was even a real live camel in the nativity scene!

The show was brilliant and the dancers showed some incredible skills. For example, in one scene, the dancers (dressed as toy soldiers), managed to collapse onto each other in almost painfully slow motion after being shot with a toy cannon, while in another, a pair of ice skaters performed graceful tricks on an  impossibly small rink!

 It really put us in the Christmassy mood which was pretty damn impressive given that it was only November!

Upon leaving the theatre, we found ourselves to be rather on the hungry side so, directed by a fellow friendly Brit, we headed to a couple of New York hot spots for dinner and cocktails.

We started in Lavo, where we tucked into a selection of interesting Italian dishes, before finishing our evening over the road at Tao (Kim Kardashian's 30th birthday venue) for a little drink in the shadow of a giant Buddha.

All in all, we had an absolutely fab day, having managed to squeeze everything in from art and culture to good food and beautifully scenery. But hey, we were determined not to waste a second of our time in the city!