back and in one piece and not mugged!
Kris and I returned from our NYC trip last night, relatively unscathed although completely exhausted. Highlights include (more detail upon request):
SATURDAY, March 4th: Got on the bus at about 11:30 a.m. The bus then drove down through Lincoln, past the airport and to a random Irving in the middle of nowhere for package-delivering purposes. We got back onto the road and drove to the highway, and promptly turned around and returned to the Irving. The driver announced that something was wrong with this bus, and that he was going to grab a cab back to Fredericton to get a new one, assuring us that this would take him only 15 minutes. Really, we sat there for an hour, and it was a boring Irving. There weren't even any magazines. People were unimpressed, and we were alarmed about catching all our connecting buses. Things were actually OK though... oh, and at one stop in St. Stephen's (just before the border), David Rodgers's mother came up to me, all, "aren't you from Bridgewater?" etc., etc., etc. She was also on the bus, but headed for Florida. (And Janeet, she thanks you profusely for sending David and Peter Peter back to Dartmouth on the bus instead of letting them hitchhike to Arizona or wherever they were headed.) At the border, the Homeland Security officials made everyone of a visible minority except for one guy get off the bus, and they took them somewhere for about 40 minutes. The rest of us didn't know what was going on, but they wouldn't let us off the bus, so it sure was boring. Anyway, then we drove and drove and drove.
SUNDAY, March 5th: Arrived in New York City at 4:50 a.m. their time. We decided we probably couldn't check into our hostel at that hour, so we elected to wander the streets aimlessly until about 2:30 or 3:00. We trudged through many a street, saw some sunrise, and finally elected to sit down at an overpriced restaurant around the United Nations to get some warmth and some food. We then tried to go to Central Park, but accidentally went down 1st Avenue in the wrong direction and ended up near the bottom of the island instead. At some point after discovering this, we turned around and walked up AVENUE A (shout-out to everyone else obsessed with "Rent") until we found a little spot to sit, where a nice lady gave us directions to the park and didn't steal any of our stuff. Eventually we made it to the park, and got a little lost again looking for Strawberry Fields. (I kept an eye out for Derek and Jeff, but didn't see them. :( ) After paying appropriate homage to Mr. Lennon, we found a subway and in not too long discovered that the people running the hostel had given us terrible directions. Eventually, though, we found the place (not a slum, surprisingly, although hot water was scarce). We fell asleep around 3:30 or 4 that afternoon, woke up around 7, ate a little, and fell back to sleep until morning, having been awake since about 7:30 a.m. on Saturday and then traipsed around Manhattan with our backpacks.
MONDAY, March 6th: American Museum of Natural History (dinosaurs!!!), more wandering, and continuining our "mastery" of the subway system. We managed after much delay to find a restaurant that our Lonely Planet book had recommended, a Tibetan place which was really nice and quite cheap. After that we found a convenience/grocery-ish store and bought some provisions to get us through the next couple of days.
TUESDAY, March 7th: World Trade remains/Statue of Liberty/Chinatown day. Having never been to New York before, we felt we might have been missing something when we paid our dutiful visit to where the World Trade Centre used to be. I pointed out that it looked like a construction site. Kris tried to get a decent picture of what there was, but ultimately lost interest, as aesthetically, there wasn't a lot to be found. We then went to Battery Park (discussing its name's potential origins. Kris thought maybe it was military-related, given the fort they have there. I thought maybe lots of people tend to get attacked there and the name was to serve as a warning.) From there, we got on the ferry to see Miss Liberty, and after almost creating an international incident (the x-rays that scanned our bag perceived our can of pineapple as a potential threat to security), off we went. The guards on Liberty Island definitely had the biggest guns (firearms, not muscles) I've ever seen in my life, and the NYPD helicopters circled the place nonstop. Next we found Chinatown, which was a whole other trip in and of itself. We bartered for anything we bought, and ended up so far in that they didn't have English on the stores' signs anymore. We went up a couple of streets until we started to understand things again and got some interesting, very deep-fried supper. For our surprise dessert, we were presented with an orange.
WEDNESDAY, March 8th: Supposed to be Dress Day. (I did that dumb thing again involving going to BCBG's website pre-trip, falling in love with a dress, and figuring out the precise address of that city's store so as to torture myself with the idea of buying this dress.) This was also the day when Kris's dry cough required a Robitussin purchase, and he consequently spent portions of the rest of the trip quite spaced out. We wandered around Fifth Avenue and Madison, and ultimately made it to the BCBG store, only to discover that not all of their spring line, including my coveted dress, has made it to their store yet. Tragic as this was, we did some more wandering and then went to Trump Towers to take some pictures for dear Darmac. We narrowly missed an encounter with Mr. Trump as we were getting coffee at the Starbucks on the second floor of his building when he walked off the elevator on the first floor and into presumably his waiting limo. That night took us to the Hard Rock Cafe, where we accidentally scared a waitress into thinking we weren't going to pay and where we stood in the doorway between the doors from Abbey Road Studios, which were apparently detached from the building and shipped to New York.
THURSDAY, March 9th: The Day I Was Really, Really Tired. It was going to be Building Day, but we were zonked, myself more severely. After napping all morning and seriously considering allowing Kris to go get us food and bring it back to me I finally forced myself up, and after a sizable cappuccino we decided to explore the impressive-looking mall near our subway stop. This amused us for some time, and after returning our purchases to the hostel, we were off to 41st Street to see..........RENT!!!!! ON BROADWAY!!!!!!! We luckily managed to get cheap seats, second row center, due to Mr. Jonathan Larson's brilliant policy of "everyone should be able to see a play even of they don't have $60 USD apiece", and it was AMAZING. And outside the theatre, there was a dude with a whole bunch of makeshift drums like Angel has in the play, sitting kind of in the street and playing his heart out and possibly making a small fortune. Location, location, location.
FRIDAY, March 10th: Last Day/Building Day. We checked out of the hostel that morning and got to the bus station we were to leave from later that night where thankfully they let us check our backpacks. The weather was so gorgeous that we walked around in long-sleeved t-shirts all day. We found the Flatiron Building, where unfortunately some work was being done, so the pictures won't be as dramatic as we would have liked. We also saw a lady peeing on the sidewalk. Next was the Empire State Building, where we went up to the 86th floor's observation deck (a very windy place on all sides but one) and decided that we should have done that earlier in the week, as it's much easier to figure out how all the different places fit together. Later, we got our picture taken with King Kong, who spent a lot of time running around inside and outside of the ESB, generally wreaking havoc. We went to the UN, which was closed but where we ended up talking to this lady with a Bristol Board sign about how someone has failed to recognize the Turkish genocide of 1915, who told Kris he has "Armenian eyebrows" and wouldn't leave him alone about his English, French, Scottish heritage until he promised to search back his family tree and try to find some Armenian. Her cheery parting words to us, after she got us to take a couple of pictures of her with her sign, were that he wouldn't want to be associated with Ireland and Scotland anyway, since they have been responsible for ruining so many other cultures. Later that evening we went to the Laugh Factory with the cheap tickets some dude had sold us on the street, where the comics were overall hilarious and where the two-drink minumum purchase nearly ruined our financial reserves and got us reasonably buzzed (they were strong). We went over to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum (they let you in the lobby for free), where I got my picture taken with a frightening likeness of Whoopi Goldberg and Kris was photographed with one Miss Beyonce Knowles. Then it was time to retrieve our bags from the bus station and prepare ourselves for another 20-hour bus ride.
SATURDAY, March 11th: Boarded bus at 12:30 a.m. Alanna surprisingly boarded the same bus as us in Bangor! Arrived in Fredericton at 7:10 p.m. Crashed. That's about it.
SATURDAY, March 4th: Got on the bus at about 11:30 a.m. The bus then drove down through Lincoln, past the airport and to a random Irving in the middle of nowhere for package-delivering purposes. We got back onto the road and drove to the highway, and promptly turned around and returned to the Irving. The driver announced that something was wrong with this bus, and that he was going to grab a cab back to Fredericton to get a new one, assuring us that this would take him only 15 minutes. Really, we sat there for an hour, and it was a boring Irving. There weren't even any magazines. People were unimpressed, and we were alarmed about catching all our connecting buses. Things were actually OK though... oh, and at one stop in St. Stephen's (just before the border), David Rodgers's mother came up to me, all, "aren't you from Bridgewater?" etc., etc., etc. She was also on the bus, but headed for Florida. (And Janeet, she thanks you profusely for sending David and Peter Peter back to Dartmouth on the bus instead of letting them hitchhike to Arizona or wherever they were headed.) At the border, the Homeland Security officials made everyone of a visible minority except for one guy get off the bus, and they took them somewhere for about 40 minutes. The rest of us didn't know what was going on, but they wouldn't let us off the bus, so it sure was boring. Anyway, then we drove and drove and drove.
SUNDAY, March 5th: Arrived in New York City at 4:50 a.m. their time. We decided we probably couldn't check into our hostel at that hour, so we elected to wander the streets aimlessly until about 2:30 or 3:00. We trudged through many a street, saw some sunrise, and finally elected to sit down at an overpriced restaurant around the United Nations to get some warmth and some food. We then tried to go to Central Park, but accidentally went down 1st Avenue in the wrong direction and ended up near the bottom of the island instead. At some point after discovering this, we turned around and walked up AVENUE A (shout-out to everyone else obsessed with "Rent") until we found a little spot to sit, where a nice lady gave us directions to the park and didn't steal any of our stuff. Eventually we made it to the park, and got a little lost again looking for Strawberry Fields. (I kept an eye out for Derek and Jeff, but didn't see them. :( ) After paying appropriate homage to Mr. Lennon, we found a subway and in not too long discovered that the people running the hostel had given us terrible directions. Eventually, though, we found the place (not a slum, surprisingly, although hot water was scarce). We fell asleep around 3:30 or 4 that afternoon, woke up around 7, ate a little, and fell back to sleep until morning, having been awake since about 7:30 a.m. on Saturday and then traipsed around Manhattan with our backpacks.
MONDAY, March 6th: American Museum of Natural History (dinosaurs!!!), more wandering, and continuining our "mastery" of the subway system. We managed after much delay to find a restaurant that our Lonely Planet book had recommended, a Tibetan place which was really nice and quite cheap. After that we found a convenience/grocery-ish store and bought some provisions to get us through the next couple of days.
TUESDAY, March 7th: World Trade remains/Statue of Liberty/Chinatown day. Having never been to New York before, we felt we might have been missing something when we paid our dutiful visit to where the World Trade Centre used to be. I pointed out that it looked like a construction site. Kris tried to get a decent picture of what there was, but ultimately lost interest, as aesthetically, there wasn't a lot to be found. We then went to Battery Park (discussing its name's potential origins. Kris thought maybe it was military-related, given the fort they have there. I thought maybe lots of people tend to get attacked there and the name was to serve as a warning.) From there, we got on the ferry to see Miss Liberty, and after almost creating an international incident (the x-rays that scanned our bag perceived our can of pineapple as a potential threat to security), off we went. The guards on Liberty Island definitely had the biggest guns (firearms, not muscles) I've ever seen in my life, and the NYPD helicopters circled the place nonstop. Next we found Chinatown, which was a whole other trip in and of itself. We bartered for anything we bought, and ended up so far in that they didn't have English on the stores' signs anymore. We went up a couple of streets until we started to understand things again and got some interesting, very deep-fried supper. For our surprise dessert, we were presented with an orange.
WEDNESDAY, March 8th: Supposed to be Dress Day. (I did that dumb thing again involving going to BCBG's website pre-trip, falling in love with a dress, and figuring out the precise address of that city's store so as to torture myself with the idea of buying this dress.) This was also the day when Kris's dry cough required a Robitussin purchase, and he consequently spent portions of the rest of the trip quite spaced out. We wandered around Fifth Avenue and Madison, and ultimately made it to the BCBG store, only to discover that not all of their spring line, including my coveted dress, has made it to their store yet. Tragic as this was, we did some more wandering and then went to Trump Towers to take some pictures for dear Darmac. We narrowly missed an encounter with Mr. Trump as we were getting coffee at the Starbucks on the second floor of his building when he walked off the elevator on the first floor and into presumably his waiting limo. That night took us to the Hard Rock Cafe, where we accidentally scared a waitress into thinking we weren't going to pay and where we stood in the doorway between the doors from Abbey Road Studios, which were apparently detached from the building and shipped to New York.
THURSDAY, March 9th: The Day I Was Really, Really Tired. It was going to be Building Day, but we were zonked, myself more severely. After napping all morning and seriously considering allowing Kris to go get us food and bring it back to me I finally forced myself up, and after a sizable cappuccino we decided to explore the impressive-looking mall near our subway stop. This amused us for some time, and after returning our purchases to the hostel, we were off to 41st Street to see..........RENT!!!!! ON BROADWAY!!!!!!! We luckily managed to get cheap seats, second row center, due to Mr. Jonathan Larson's brilliant policy of "everyone should be able to see a play even of they don't have $60 USD apiece", and it was AMAZING. And outside the theatre, there was a dude with a whole bunch of makeshift drums like Angel has in the play, sitting kind of in the street and playing his heart out and possibly making a small fortune. Location, location, location.
FRIDAY, March 10th: Last Day/Building Day. We checked out of the hostel that morning and got to the bus station we were to leave from later that night where thankfully they let us check our backpacks. The weather was so gorgeous that we walked around in long-sleeved t-shirts all day. We found the Flatiron Building, where unfortunately some work was being done, so the pictures won't be as dramatic as we would have liked. We also saw a lady peeing on the sidewalk. Next was the Empire State Building, where we went up to the 86th floor's observation deck (a very windy place on all sides but one) and decided that we should have done that earlier in the week, as it's much easier to figure out how all the different places fit together. Later, we got our picture taken with King Kong, who spent a lot of time running around inside and outside of the ESB, generally wreaking havoc. We went to the UN, which was closed but where we ended up talking to this lady with a Bristol Board sign about how someone has failed to recognize the Turkish genocide of 1915, who told Kris he has "Armenian eyebrows" and wouldn't leave him alone about his English, French, Scottish heritage until he promised to search back his family tree and try to find some Armenian. Her cheery parting words to us, after she got us to take a couple of pictures of her with her sign, were that he wouldn't want to be associated with Ireland and Scotland anyway, since they have been responsible for ruining so many other cultures. Later that evening we went to the Laugh Factory with the cheap tickets some dude had sold us on the street, where the comics were overall hilarious and where the two-drink minumum purchase nearly ruined our financial reserves and got us reasonably buzzed (they were strong). We went over to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum (they let you in the lobby for free), where I got my picture taken with a frightening likeness of Whoopi Goldberg and Kris was photographed with one Miss Beyonce Knowles. Then it was time to retrieve our bags from the bus station and prepare ourselves for another 20-hour bus ride.
SATURDAY, March 11th: Boarded bus at 12:30 a.m. Alanna surprisingly boarded the same bus as us in Bangor! Arrived in Fredericton at 7:10 p.m. Crashed. That's about it.