Today marks the almost halfway point of my trip to NYC. It’s the first time that I’ve traveled more than 2-3 hours from home without my parents, to a city pretty unfamiliar to me, and so far everything has been lovely.
Jocelyn and I took a red eye flight to JFK from Vancouver at 10:40. At the time it seemed like the best option, as it was a direct flight, and we were hoping that we would be able sleep on the flight and maybe do a little exploring during the day – which, unfortunately, did not really pan out. There were a ridiculous number of young children and infants on our flight who were very uninterested and on the whole displeased with the concept of sitting relatively still on a plane for five hours, as you can imagine, not much sleep was to be had. Cathay had quite a wide selection of in-flight films to choose from, though. That may have mediated my annoyance about the whole flight situation slightly.
To add to it all, our flight was delayed because of wacky weather, so we didn’t land until an hour after our estimated arrival time. I was totally fine, but once Jocelyn and I sat down for a quick breakfast by our hostel, I felt completely downtrodden.
We were so exhausted we spent two hours in Barnes & Noble attempting to read but mostly dozing in and out of sleep. As soon as we could check into our hostel we did and crashed for about an hour.
Feeling a little more energized, we decided to try to explore some more so we took the subway to Midtown/Times Square and walked around amazed by the spectacle of it all. Let me tell you, it is even more schizophrenic and seizure-inducing in person. Guy Debord would be rolling in his grave.
After we decided that any further exposure to the flashing lights would’ve hazardous to our health, we decided to grab some dinner before checking out the Top of the Rock – we stopped by a lovely Japanese ramen place called Sapporo which was very tasty.
The Top of the Rock was a lot of fun, though I thought it was a little pricey. We were originally planning to see if we could catch sunset over New York, but unfortunately we were too late. The views were still spectacular, though.
Friday was our first “real” day in the city, and we decided to tackle the American Museum of Natural History and Central Park. The Museum is HUGE. But amazing. The Hall of Biodiversity was definitely my favourite, though it was really sad that the resource centre was empty. Also, I got to see dinosaur bones for the first time, which was kind of exciting – though by the end of the day, they were old news – the museum has LOTS of dinosaur bones.
Afterwards, despite our aching feet, we decided to walk around Central Park a bit. It’s a very wonderful urban park but it doesn’t hold a candle to Stanley Park in my opinion! We left earlier than I would’ve liked as it started raining very unexpectedly…
Today we explored Chelsea, NoHo, SoHo, Chinatown, and Little Italy. There was tons of shopping and lots of walking! I got a really cute pair of heels from UO, and a pair of trousers from Anthropologie. SoHo was insanely crowded – like Robson Street at home, but during Boxing Day – yet when I mentioned it to the salespeople, they all said it was slow or normal…yikes. We went to Prosperity Dumpling in Chinatown for lunch for a really cheap meal – it cost me $3! – before taking the subway to Battery Park, where we hung out eating sweets until dinnertime (as you can tell, we have super healthy eating habits). Dinner was at one of the few Malaysian restaurants in the city, Nyonya, which was yummy but not nearly as good as my beloved Banana Leaf at home.
That was an awfully long post. I’m going to try my best to keep track and record my trip…hopefully there will be another post in a few days!
superlatifs 