Around the world in four hours: an escape to The Cloisters and Harlem

As I headed uptown on the A train, bound for The Cloisters, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew that The Cloisters - a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art - contained reconstructed medieval monasteries, but I didn't understand how the structures could have been transplanted from Europe into the middle of a modern Manhattan block. When I emerged from the subway at 190th Street, I was surprised to find a residential neighborhood filled with nondescript gray buildings to my left, contrasted with seemingly endless parkland to my right.

The Cloisters sits in the back of 67-acre Fort Tryon Park. Once you enter the park, the city completely disappears. When John D. Rockefeller first developed this urban oasis in the 1930s, he actually bought 700 acres of land across the Hudson River in New Jersey to preserve the view. The only sign of modern civilization is the George Washington Bridge. The park is not well-manicured but instead is left completely natural, heightening the sense of wildness. With the park's rolling hills and woodlands, I felt like I had entered a time machine and gone back to the medieval French countryside. For you "Gossip Girl" fans, Aaron definitely knew what he was doing when he sent Serena here for a romantic date.

After a beautiful 10-minute walk, I arrived at the actual Cloisters museum. The Cloisters, completed in 1938, houses the Met's medieval art collection. The genius of the museum is that the building itself is a work of art. The Cloisters incorporates parts of five medieval French cloisters. (In case you're not an art history buff, a cloister is the colonnaded courtyard found at most medieval monasteries.) Therefore, The Cloisters is as much a religious experience as a museum visit. The art is incorporated into small, dimly lit chapels or reconstructed monastic rooms, and each display space is connected to a garden or cloister.

The museum contains many renowned masterpieces, including the Unicorn Tapestries and the Book of Hours of Jean Duc de Berry, but my favorite part of the museum was a little garden overlooking the park with a view of the Hudson River and the Palisades. As if the museum weren't authentic enough, the garden only has plants - delicious-smelling herbs surround pear trees - that would have been found in a medieval monastic garden. In the spring and summer, a museum cafe uses produce from the garden.

During the off-season, visitors can replace the cafe with The New Leaf, a restaurant in Fort Tryon Park that features a view of the river and live jazz on Friday nights. For those on a budget, there are a few cute, wallet-friendly restaurants about five minutes down Fort Washington Avenue. I stumbled into a little Mexican restaurant called Ta Cocina decorated with prints by Mexican artists and tables filled with Mexican spices. It had great service and was less formal than The New Leaf.

Instead of disappearing back underground to the subway after your visit, I would recommend that you take the M4 bus, which stops right outside Ta Cocina and takes you through the main part of historic Harlem. If you're feeling adventurous, get off at 116th Street and start walking west. After passing through the beautiful Columbia University quad, you will come to a little park overlooking West Harlem. As you continue heading west, the neighborhood takes on a distinctly African feel, with African groceries and clothing stores. If you walk about 10 minutes to Lafayette Street, you will find an African market far superior to claustrophobic Canal Street. While there are a few stalls with fake purses, most of the venders sell jewelry and other trinkets and are not half as pushy as the vendors on Canal Street.

You don't have to drive to the Adirondacks to escape to the countryside or take a long plane ride to get to Africa. For a trip to different worlds in space and time - from a Mexican cocina to a medieval monastery - there's no need to leave Manhattan. Just head uptown.

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