New York, New York!
Trip Start
Jan 10, 2008
1
62
95
Trip End
Ongoing
New York,
New York,
United States
Saturday, June 7, 2008
It turned out that my cousin Caroline just happened to be in New York passing through so Matt John and I went into the centre to meet her and had a really nice brunch before putting her on the train (turns out that it was the wrong one - oops!) to get her to summer camp.
After seeing Caroline off we went for a wander around Times Square, we even managed to spot 'The Naked Cowboy', who has become a bit of a New York institution. He hangs around Times Square in his underwear posing for photos with tourists. (I'd say that he does pretty well out of too!) Crap Elvis was the only male that I saw having a photo with him though.
The great thing about Manhattan (one of the areas of New York) is that it is one island and it's almost possible to walk anywhere (if you have the time and energy) and if not the metro has heaps of stops.
Central Park from the top of Rockerfeller
You can also work out roughly how long it will take you to walk some where by working out how many blocks you have to walk.So we headed to Central Park and hired bikes for a couple of hours for a ride around the park which was lovely. For dinner we headed to a Cuban restaurant with John and Lisa.
Being a Monday John had to go back to work so Matt and I headed to the World Trade Centre, then to Wall Street and the New York Stock exchange and then on to a boat to the Statue of Liberty and then Ellis Island (which was New York immigration quarantine/arrival point for many years).
Matt and John managed to score last minute tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld live while stayed at home for an early night.
We decided to see the Brooklyn Bridge so walked across it to have some lunch on the other side of the river in Brooklyn. We stumbled across a piece of art that was temporarily in place - it was a telescope that had the look of being drilled through the ground. The premise was that the telescope went through the middle fo the earth and you could see people in London from the New York side and vice versa. (The cool thing is that about a week later we were in London with Dennis and Jeannette and saw the London side).We got in touch with a friend - Brian who we'd met in Argentina and caught up with him for dinner and a drink which was really nice.
We had a relatively quiet day wandering through different areas of New York - we went to China Town, Little Italy, Soho. We also had lunch at the Soup Kitchen. Not particularly special until you realise that it is the soup kitchen featured in Seinfeld. The soup Nazi now has a chain of soup kitchens, and the soup was lovely. Fortunately no one yelled 'No soup for you!!!!' at us, and the staff were all really friendly.
Matt and John headed to the baseball to watch the New York Yankees while I had another early night.
We went to the Rockerfeller building and briefly saw Brian before heading up to the top floor to check out the view. We bought some tickets to a comedy club, so Matt and I and John and Brian went along, it turned out that the night we went was the last stretch of a world record breaking 50 hours of non stop comedy, we saw some great comedy and then went for a drink with Brian.
Our last night in New York we met John and a friend of his for a drink and were joined by Kaylee a friend of Matt's who had moved to New York about 6 months earlier. We had a few drinks and some dinner and then went to meet some more friends of Johns at another pub nearby.
Before heading to the airport for our overnight flight to London we went to the annual BBQ in the park. This is nothing like your usual backyard BBQ, the people who cook these BBQs are called pitmasters and enter competitions and everything, so we enjoyed some great American barbeque before heading for the airport.
