New York, New York!
There's only two of these travel posts left now!
Picking up where I left off last time, we caught the train from Montreal to New York, because we were cheapskates and it was like a quarter of the price of flying. It was actually a pretty comfy trip, about seven hours long, plus about forty minutes at the border for customs and immigration. There was only something like ten other passengers so it wasn't too bad, aside from about half an hour where the elderly chinese guy sang along to his headphones.
The scenery was quite nice for a lot of it though.
Especially when we started rolling through the Catskill area later in the day. Saw quite a few wild deer, though good luck getting a photo in a train!
This was the Hudson at a cloudy sunset.
Other side!
As it started to get darker we pulled out the laptop and watched 20th Century Boys, which made my friend so mad because I forgot what a horribly taunting ending that first movie had. XD I need to go re-watch the rest of the trilogy now.
We arrived at Penn Station that night, wandered out, and through the miracle of Google Maps managed to find our hotel.
Though how we missed it considering it was just around the corner from this place...
Actually, there are so many skyscrapers in New York it becomes difficult to navigate by them, your view is constantly blocked.
Our hotel was actually pretty cool though! A bit expensive, even with the room at half price, but good location and neat old building.
The next morning we trundled out with a vague idea of about twenty different things we wanted to do, so wound up just picking a street north and walking along it.
And were rewarded with giant horse heads, because that's the kind of place New York is. You can choose any old street in Manhattan and there will be something interesting down it.
Plus, the buildings are so cool. Old school skyscrapers! I've started to quietly resent modern building techniques that rob us of this awesome aesthetic. (The trade off is probably structural integrity and cost... would be interesting to learn more about.)
There were heaps of tourist type gift shops, but the neatest random find we made was a Kinokuniya! I mean, of course New York would have a Kinokuniya, Kino is everywhere, but I have apparently made a habit of collecting them so I wandered inside and once more tortured myself by resisting buying books. One day I have to stuff my wallet full of money and, I don't know, drive a car to a Kino so I can just buy books to my heart's content. (New item for the bucket list?)
We found a Book Off too. Book Off has officially made it outside of Japan. I am so excited.
Being New York they had stores for everything, of course. Every giant city has this feature, and it's pretty much the coolest thing about giant cities.
We eventually landed in Times Square.
I thought I was prepared for Times Square - you know, Shibuya, Xiemingding, all those crazy places full of people and giant screens everywhere... they had nothing on Times Square.
First stepping foot in it, you gain a new appreciation for how Steve Rogers must have felt when he ran out there at the end of Captain America.
The whole are is just nuts. Information overload. Lots of people too, naturally, probably at least half of which were fellow tourists. Pretty cool.
There were also a lot of dodgy unofficial mascots loitering in the area, presumably 'buskers' of a sort extracting tips for photos. A weirdly short Elmo, a strangely proportioned Minnie and Mickey Mouse, a Spongebob, a few scraggly Statue of Liberty costumes. They were a bit creepy actually because they were so obviously not legit, and also looked kind of grungy. But I guess it's all part of the experience. Have to wonder what the mighty IP holders think of it though.
The whole yellow cabs of New York thing IS TOTALLY UNDERSOLD. At the diner we stopped in for lunch I stared at the window and a solid thirty seconds of traffic went by of nothing but cabs. 'Look, a white van! C-c-c-c-ombo breaker!'
It's a heck of sight.
M&M's World Store! A whole store dedicated to M&M's? YES PLEASE.
And there was indeed a prodigious amount of M&M's! Surprisingly not the full range of flavours though. I don't know if it's the case elsewhere in the world, but M&M's have been rotating flavours in Australia recently, we've had mint, orange, raspberry, and most recently the extremely delicious vanilla shake. It was mostly just colours in here though, with a selection of dark chocolate and peanut and dark-chocolate-peanut. You know, the usual.
The store itself was still awesome but I consoled myself by buying a bag of birthday-cake flavoured M&M's from the convenience store next to the hotel.
Get on it, M&M's world store. The colours thing is cool and all, but if you really want to make money sell your flavours!
After lunch we tried heading towards the Rockerfeller centre with the intention of going up to the observatory. This started a long and arduous quest filled with amazing side-lining discoveries.
Like just randomly stumbling upon the New York Public Library.
This has featured in so many movies. Ghostbusters was the first one to spring to mind. Actually, all of New York is basically a giant movie set, for any movie geek it's terribly awesome. I kind of just dragged my travelling buddy in here without much explanation, luckily she was the pliant sort.
My camera had started aggressively dying in Canada - it didn't seem to like the cold, and it's pretty much dead now. It started to think it was instagram and did weird colours and filters on me without my asking. But in its dying gasps, it took a photo that I never would have managed otherwise.
Eventually after many epic staircases found the famous and iconic reading room! I don't think you were actually supposed to take photos in here, whoops. The lighting made it nigh-impossible anyway. Must be rather annoying for the people actually there to use the library, though, with the constant stream of looky-loos like myself.
After that entertaining diversion we once again resumed our quest to head to the Rockerfeller.
We saw the Chrysler building on our way. It is definitely one of the prettier skyscrapers.
And then stumbled upon this magnificent place. Grand Central Station! It really is quite majestic.
Although honestly it was also really sort of weird! I've seen this place destroyed in so many movies, some part of my brain expected a construction site, not the whole intact in perfectly reasonable condition building. It would probably be the same thing if I ever saw the Whitehouse. 'Wait, wasn't that destroyed in Independence Day?'
Didn't Cyclops blow out these windows once? Also I recognised it from Improv's Everywhere time freeze. Majestic building. You head inside and you feel like you're really going somewhere important.
Possibly the best thing about Grand Central though was stumbling out and finding this shop called 'Baked By Melissa' which made the most amazing tiny cupcakes.The flavours pictured are cinnamon, mint choc, triple swirl, red velvet, lemon cheesecake and cookies and cream, but we went back there every day and tried them all. They also had peanut butter and choc, triple choc fudge, cookie dough... and so much flavour crammed into every one. I think there was drugs involved, they were soooo good.
Seriously, tiny cupcakes. If you are in New York, you owe it to yourself to try them. My travel buddy declined initially, but when I went back I offered her one of mine and she was an instant convert.
This was basically the entire story of our time in New York, actually. I haven't always gotten the best out of every city I've been to, but I know how to spot tourist opportunities by now. If you see tiny cupcakes that look delicious, you buy them immediately.
It was her first time travelling in ages, though, so could be forgiven. I spent a lot of time steering her away from scammers. She got suckered by the 'peace bracelet' thing from a monk though. I was like 'whyyyyyy? We have those guys in Australia!' There was no real way avoiding people descending upon 'the obvious tourist' in Asia but I'd become used to avoiding/brushing the cold approaches off, so having to deal with it all over again was quite tiring! It's probably the one big drawback of being a tourist.
After all those detours and diversions it was nearly five in the afternoon and we finally made it to the Rockerfeller Center!
Not the prettiest of buildings but still impressive! They had a pretty cool NBC store down the bottom where I bought my old housemate 30Rock magnets.
We didn't not actually make it up to the observation deck, though, because that was when I spotted THE NINTENDO WORLD STORE.
It was awesome. Streetpasses were had and demos were played. I spent a solid hour, much to my poor travel buddy's bemusement, looking at everything.
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Pikmin! The coolest part was definitely some of the merch. I'd been pretty strict on my spending budget, but I caved and bought myself a classic Nintendo light hoodie. No regrets!!!
They needed more Animal Crossing stuff though. I guess Animal Crossing isn't big enough yet. I'm psyched for Tomodachi Life though. Has anyone else seen the video for that? All hail Virtual Boy! Can see myself most embarrassingly losing months of my life to that game.
By the time I was done with the Nintendo World Store, we didn't actually have time to go up the Rockerfeller Centre any longer, so we put that off for another time so we could go grab dinner... and head on over to Broadway!
We'd secured tickets for Bullets over Broadway, Woody Allen's new musical adapted from his film. The production values were all rather stunning, and the music was fairly decent (all 1920s/1930's classics) but the ending was sort of dreadful and ruined my overall opinion of the thing, even though the other three quarters of it were quite enjoyable and fairly well done. Still, Broadway was one of those things totally on my bucket list and it was so worth it.
That was just one day of stuff though!
The next day we crash-coursed our way through the subway system and somehow found our way to Liberty Island.
This was the big must-do for my travelling buddy, so we already had tickets to get onto the ferry. Definitely a heck of a sight, I was probably going more from the whole 'hey part of X-men was filmed here' angle but totally worth it even though we had to go through security like three times.
Skyline from the island! My camera valiantly revived for Liberty Island, even if it remained a little temperamental.
We headed up onto the pedestal, since we apparently had tickets for that. The view up top was indeed decent, but the real draw card was the exceptionally good museum in the base. Really well done, lots of great trivia about the making of and reconstruction of the statue. Never realised that Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame was involved with it! Or how many changes the torch had gone through, either.
Just to be a bit different, have an alternate angle.
We didn't get off at Ellis Island on the way back though, since we'd heard/read plenty of its story in the museum already and the day was quickly disappearing on us. We scouted out an excellent little diner near Wall Street where I had an awesome turkey club sandwich. I'd always disliked turkey as a meat until spending some time in the USA, they're actually pretty good at cooking it I suppose? Whenever I've had it in Australia (rarely) it has always been sort of dry or gamey. Possibly since it's not popular nobody knows how to cook it properly, or we just don't have the masses of dedicated turkey farms to make it nearly so tasty. Or maybe they use bush turkeys or something, those things don't look like they'd taste any good.
Anyway, Wall Street was kind of interesting from an architectural standpoint, we saw the famous gold bull (surrounded by tourists so we didn't bother waiting to get a photo) and Tiffany's and the New York Stock Exchange.
An interesting area to walk in for sure, for a place you hear about a lot it's sort of the geographical equivalent of putting a face to a name.
Typical New York street! It didn't take long at all to get used to that north-south east-west street orientation, which Broadway then gloriously screwed up by being all 'I do what I want!' Still, within a day or two you stopped getting lost because you really couldn't walk the wrong way for more than a block.
We found the Two Towers memorial, but the line was both incredibly long and involved another run through security, and we'd had enough of metal detectors for the day so gave it a pass. We did however get to see the new World Trade Centre built next to it (though still somewhat under construction), aka 'Freedom Tower', it's looking pretty impressive!
We wandered around exploring a bit more and found the waterfront, and followed that for a while, and subsequently found the Brooklyn Bridge!
We unfortunately didn't make it to Brooklyn (or off Manhattan Island at all, actually) but here's a pic from across the river! It looks like it would a pretty interesting place to visit, definitely on my list for next time.
We sat around here for a while, resting our legs after all the walking, and watched what appeared to be a fashion photography shoot. There was always some kind of shoot going on somewhere it felt like, news cameras and pro photographers and artists and film students and probably actual film crews who can be difficult to differentiate when they're trying to be incognito. We didn't see any actual famous people or anything, but honestly there's so much going on in New York it would be pretty easy to get lost in the crowd.
Eventually we found our way back to the subway and hit up TKTS for some more discount Broadway tickets. We had a fairly tight budget but my travelling buddy really wanted to go see Chicago so we nabbed some half price tickets for that.
We still had a while to kill before the performance though so we hit up 'Shake Shack' because it had a crazy line and typically places with crazy lines are awesome! It did indeed have pretty excellent milkshakes, but it was really just an ice-cream and burger place. A good one, especially for the price, but the crazy line was a little misleading!
After that we found a sort of flea market nearby where I bought an awesome new scarf, because I'd been wearing the same tired scarf for nearly two months wanted a change. Good deal! Also bought a new hat to make up for yet another lost hat. Hat and scarf together were like $15, not bad.
Then it was time for Chicago (the musical) itself! Honestly, while it had its moments, it wasn't great. A couple of good numbers but super low-production values, not what you'd expect for the ticket price. (Hardly any costume changes, for that matter. Even when they were fairly necessary!) Still good! Just not... Broadway levels of good? The movie was for once better. 'Cellophane Man' was done particularly poorly.
It's probably a good thing I don't live in New York THOUGH because I would just be going to Broadway alllll the time and would have no money.
Moving right along, the next day we slept in a bit, then braved the subway again and somehow found our way to the National History museum!
Roosevelt had some pretty good quotes on the walls, go Roosevelt.
The museum was incredible, as expected. Also incredibly large. We should have dedicated a whole day to it. We saw heaps of it, sure, but we wound up having to hustle ourselves out of there a mere half an hour before closing time, rushing through some exhibits we would have much preferred to linger in.
One of the first things we saw was this scene. It feels famous for some reason? Maybe that Nicolas Cage movie.
Of course, one of the big highlights was the dinosaur bones!
Sooooo many dinosaur bones. It was tricky to get photos really, since my camera was well and truly dead by then and unwilling to even turn on properly, so I was stuck with my phone's camera which honestly isn't that bad but struggles with even slightly low-level light. Also everyone else there also trying to get photos. And the general size of the things.
Some of the coolest bones were maybe the smaller dinosaurs though! You don't see those ones as much.
Also these guys.
Weird to think that you're looking at something literally millions of years old.Were those even the real bones? Sometimes I wondered if they had just put replicas on display, they seem far too valuable to put anywhere near the clumsy general public.
I could go on and on about each and every exhibit, but you can't exactly fit a whole museum into a Livejournal Post. Just, if you like museums, the Natural History museum in New York is pretty much the apex of museums. The Smithsonian might be better, I don't know, but it's very worth going to. Also, if you go, plan a whole day. Get there at opening. If you really want to read everything and go through it at a leisurely pace, you need every minute. There were far too many exhibits where I really only felt like I had the time to wander in, gawk at it, then hustle along without reading much text.
Luckily, even though it was nearly 5 in the afternoon when we finally found the exit, there was still a good two hours of sunlight left! So we hit up Central Park.
Spring had started to hit in some parts but Central Park was still mostly in winter mode since I had apparently wandered into the longest damn winter ever. It was beautiful even so, it was such a giant and lovely park. Ridiculously large, though after the endless skyscrapers of Manhattan it's desperately needed. Another place we should have dedicated many more hours to.
As it was, we were tired from walking around the museum so took a break by this lake and drank milkshakes from a street vendor while partaking of the view.
Probably one of the most photographed parks in the world.
We didn't actually realise this bridge was at all famous until we were walking past a lot of the streetside art and postcard type vendors.
We sat here for a while and enjoyed the soap opera drama of these three ducks, two of which don't even appear to be the same species? But there was a total love triangle going on. Spring is in the air?
Eventually the sun started to set so we meandered on back towards Times Square area. We entered the lottery for cheap Wicked tickets but a ridiculous number of people turned up so we were flat out of luck, still pretty cool to see people cheering about being able buy $30 tickets (though when they usually cost upward of $150...) So instead we went to go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which turned out to be a great idea because there is something oddly special about seeing an Avengers movie in New York.
We went to the 2D session but they evidently stuffed up the reels so they came in and gave everyone 3D glasses, so 3D movie without paying the premium, yay I guess? Awesome movie, but one really cool thing, this being New York, was that they handed out surveys from the movie studio for us to fill out and hand in! My opinion counts guys! Honestly though most of my feedback was like 'Needs more Iron Man'.
Reminds me of the days years ago when I was working on one of the crappier Spyro games, and we focus-tested a bunch of kids, and this one kid's every other comment basically boiled down to 'it should have spider-man and be more like spider-man, spider-man is awesome'. We laughed but maybe the kid was on to something.
The next day (the last full one!) we went to the Guggeheim Museum!
It's a pretty cool building - the museum itself is much of the attraction. There was also an Italian Futurism exhibit on that started out somewhat meh but got more interesting as walked up the spiral. The layout of the gallery is pretty neat that way.
Some of the permanent exhibits were pretty decent too, though it was hard to be as impressed after Chicago's Institute of Art. Learned a lot that day though. Super cool. Since we starting to run short on time we wound up missing out on the MET and MoMA but glad we at least made the Guggenheim.
Plus, just the name of the place is fun to say. Guggeheim, Guggenheim, Guggenheim. (Is secretly five.)
Stopped by another street vendor for a proper New York style pretzel afterwards! Love giant pretzels, they are hard to find in Australia.
I became a fan of street vendor food in general, really. Cheap and surprisingly good (even if often very processed). New York hot dogs, they're tasty! And ubiquitous. And convenient.
We stumbled across this sight in our wanderings! We wanted to try to get into one of the shows but this was not long after Letterman had just announced his retirement so it was pretty much impossible to get in. That was the case with a lot of the shows filmed there, really, you needed to dedicate an awful lot of your day to lining up to even hope to get tickets.
Still cool to see in person!
We found ourselves something at a loss after that, with most of the galleries and museums closing soon and no Broadway tickets for that night, so rather than trying to go to the Rockerfeller Center observatory again we wandered over to the Empire State Building with the idea of visiting their observatory... but the amount of hawkers outside trying to sell you tickets, not to mention the crazy line inside... I was still game but my travelling buddy was running low on funds so we decided to walk further south and check out the Flatiron district instead, based entirely off the fact that our hotel room had a photo of it.
The Flatiron building is indeed pretty cool, one of the more interesting 'famous' buildings we saw! The whole district was pretty interesting, a comparatively quiet pocket in the madness. Older district, perhaps.
All along the streets in the Flatiron area they had concrete planters out filled with tulips for spring! Seems like a lot of effort for a bunch of flowers that last only a matter of weeks but after the endless winter they were quite the welcome sight!
We grabbed burgers at a Five Guys for dinner and then on whim decided to go into Macy's, since it was apparently The Macy's and we were there so why the hell not?
As soon as we entered the store - holy shit.
The whole place was filled with flowers, and the first thing you saw was this epic dress made of roses which photos really cannot do justice. We'd apparently stumbled into their big Spring sale!
We hadn't really intended to do anything more than window shop, but I found a cool jacket that was down from $145 going for $30. Luggage space be damned, I grabbed that so fast! It was more of an autumn jacket which made it perfect for Australian winter, too. Bargain.
That was definitely one of the coolest surprises of the trip, we'd not really done any shopping until that evening but wow. Not only did I get a cool deal, it was worth going in just for the decorations.
After our grand success in Macy's, we went on a last-minute quest for New York style cheesecake, which was surprisingly difficult to find but we eventually stumbled across a bakery quite close by and scurried away with our bounty to consume inside the hotel.
My travel buddy was catching a flight back to Toronto ridiculously early the next morning, so we tried to get an early night. I myself had a flight to Chicago later in the day, but I was left with most of one last day in New York.
My first stop was by B&H Photo Video, which is my favourite place for pro audio equipment - I'd left it for the last day, to spare my travel buddy that particular planned bit of boredom. I mostly spent time drooling at stuff though, but it was a super cool old-style store, with rolling belts snaking around the roof carrying stock every which way.
Saw this wandering the streets nearby. The cosplay district? Wait, sewing is used for other things too.
I got some more tiny cupcakes and browsed a few souvenir stores, and got myself a neat little A4 souvenir art print for the grand price of $2. Then I finally found myself back at the Rockerfeller Centre! So I bit the bullet and headed up to the observatory.
It was a super cool observatory! Much better view - you get to SEE the Empire State, after all. And Central Park on the other side too. The weather was predictably pants, in keeping with my pattern of visiting observatories when the weather is dreary and overcast, why brain, whyyyyyy? But it was a fairly epic conclusion to an absolutely amazing five days in New York. I wish I could have stayed longer! Alas, New York is hellishly expensive, so in the end I had to catch that cab to La Guardia.
I really do <3 NY. (But I didn't buy the T-shirt. Even though they're everywhere and cost like $5.)
I landed back in Chicago to settle in with my brother again. But despite how awesome New York was, but this point travel ennui had settled in fairly hardcore. The weather was in fact almost nice by this point, but given the chance I didn't even bother to head into downtown Chicago again. I got about as far as the centre of Barrington one of the days, but mostly at this point I was just chilling at my brother's helping out around the house (they were in the middle of renovations) and job hunting. I still had some money left in my budget, but New York and San Francisco had both blown an awful lot of it. Did I have enough to keep going? If I went budget enough, I could probably have made it at least to the UK...
But my curiosity was finally spent, and my tolerance for air mattresses and living out of a suitcase had finally reached its apex.
It was time to call the journey to an end, and find my way back to Australia.
Of course, you can't actually fly direct from Chicago to Australia, LA and Dallas are about the only North American cities with directs, and they were hellishly expensive at the time. So.... why not head back via Japan?
:D
One more travel post left!
Picking up where I left off last time, we caught the train from Montreal to New York, because we were cheapskates and it was like a quarter of the price of flying. It was actually a pretty comfy trip, about seven hours long, plus about forty minutes at the border for customs and immigration. There was only something like ten other passengers so it wasn't too bad, aside from about half an hour where the elderly chinese guy sang along to his headphones.
The scenery was quite nice for a lot of it though.
Especially when we started rolling through the Catskill area later in the day. Saw quite a few wild deer, though good luck getting a photo in a train!
This was the Hudson at a cloudy sunset.
Other side!
As it started to get darker we pulled out the laptop and watched 20th Century Boys, which made my friend so mad because I forgot what a horribly taunting ending that first movie had. XD I need to go re-watch the rest of the trilogy now.
We arrived at Penn Station that night, wandered out, and through the miracle of Google Maps managed to find our hotel.
Though how we missed it considering it was just around the corner from this place...
Actually, there are so many skyscrapers in New York it becomes difficult to navigate by them, your view is constantly blocked.
Our hotel was actually pretty cool though! A bit expensive, even with the room at half price, but good location and neat old building.
The next morning we trundled out with a vague idea of about twenty different things we wanted to do, so wound up just picking a street north and walking along it.
And were rewarded with giant horse heads, because that's the kind of place New York is. You can choose any old street in Manhattan and there will be something interesting down it.
Plus, the buildings are so cool. Old school skyscrapers! I've started to quietly resent modern building techniques that rob us of this awesome aesthetic. (The trade off is probably structural integrity and cost... would be interesting to learn more about.)
There were heaps of tourist type gift shops, but the neatest random find we made was a Kinokuniya! I mean, of course New York would have a Kinokuniya, Kino is everywhere, but I have apparently made a habit of collecting them so I wandered inside and once more tortured myself by resisting buying books. One day I have to stuff my wallet full of money and, I don't know, drive a car to a Kino so I can just buy books to my heart's content. (New item for the bucket list?)
We found a Book Off too. Book Off has officially made it outside of Japan. I am so excited.
Being New York they had stores for everything, of course. Every giant city has this feature, and it's pretty much the coolest thing about giant cities.
We eventually landed in Times Square.
I thought I was prepared for Times Square - you know, Shibuya, Xiemingding, all those crazy places full of people and giant screens everywhere... they had nothing on Times Square.
First stepping foot in it, you gain a new appreciation for how Steve Rogers must have felt when he ran out there at the end of Captain America.
The whole are is just nuts. Information overload. Lots of people too, naturally, probably at least half of which were fellow tourists. Pretty cool.
There were also a lot of dodgy unofficial mascots loitering in the area, presumably 'buskers' of a sort extracting tips for photos. A weirdly short Elmo, a strangely proportioned Minnie and Mickey Mouse, a Spongebob, a few scraggly Statue of Liberty costumes. They were a bit creepy actually because they were so obviously not legit, and also looked kind of grungy. But I guess it's all part of the experience. Have to wonder what the mighty IP holders think of it though.
The whole yellow cabs of New York thing IS TOTALLY UNDERSOLD. At the diner we stopped in for lunch I stared at the window and a solid thirty seconds of traffic went by of nothing but cabs. 'Look, a white van! C-c-c-c-ombo breaker!'
It's a heck of sight.
M&M's World Store! A whole store dedicated to M&M's? YES PLEASE.
And there was indeed a prodigious amount of M&M's! Surprisingly not the full range of flavours though. I don't know if it's the case elsewhere in the world, but M&M's have been rotating flavours in Australia recently, we've had mint, orange, raspberry, and most recently the extremely delicious vanilla shake. It was mostly just colours in here though, with a selection of dark chocolate and peanut and dark-chocolate-peanut. You know, the usual.
The store itself was still awesome but I consoled myself by buying a bag of birthday-cake flavoured M&M's from the convenience store next to the hotel.
Get on it, M&M's world store. The colours thing is cool and all, but if you really want to make money sell your flavours!
After lunch we tried heading towards the Rockerfeller centre with the intention of going up to the observatory. This started a long and arduous quest filled with amazing side-lining discoveries.
Like just randomly stumbling upon the New York Public Library.
This has featured in so many movies. Ghostbusters was the first one to spring to mind. Actually, all of New York is basically a giant movie set, for any movie geek it's terribly awesome. I kind of just dragged my travelling buddy in here without much explanation, luckily she was the pliant sort.
My camera had started aggressively dying in Canada - it didn't seem to like the cold, and it's pretty much dead now. It started to think it was instagram and did weird colours and filters on me without my asking. But in its dying gasps, it took a photo that I never would have managed otherwise.
Eventually after many epic staircases found the famous and iconic reading room! I don't think you were actually supposed to take photos in here, whoops. The lighting made it nigh-impossible anyway. Must be rather annoying for the people actually there to use the library, though, with the constant stream of looky-loos like myself.
After that entertaining diversion we once again resumed our quest to head to the Rockerfeller.
We saw the Chrysler building on our way. It is definitely one of the prettier skyscrapers.
And then stumbled upon this magnificent place. Grand Central Station! It really is quite majestic.
Although honestly it was also really sort of weird! I've seen this place destroyed in so many movies, some part of my brain expected a construction site, not the whole intact in perfectly reasonable condition building. It would probably be the same thing if I ever saw the Whitehouse. 'Wait, wasn't that destroyed in Independence Day?'
Didn't Cyclops blow out these windows once? Also I recognised it from Improv's Everywhere time freeze. Majestic building. You head inside and you feel like you're really going somewhere important.
Possibly the best thing about Grand Central though was stumbling out and finding this shop called 'Baked By Melissa' which made the most amazing tiny cupcakes.The flavours pictured are cinnamon, mint choc, triple swirl, red velvet, lemon cheesecake and cookies and cream, but we went back there every day and tried them all. They also had peanut butter and choc, triple choc fudge, cookie dough... and so much flavour crammed into every one. I think there was drugs involved, they were soooo good.
Seriously, tiny cupcakes. If you are in New York, you owe it to yourself to try them. My travel buddy declined initially, but when I went back I offered her one of mine and she was an instant convert.
This was basically the entire story of our time in New York, actually. I haven't always gotten the best out of every city I've been to, but I know how to spot tourist opportunities by now. If you see tiny cupcakes that look delicious, you buy them immediately.
It was her first time travelling in ages, though, so could be forgiven. I spent a lot of time steering her away from scammers. She got suckered by the 'peace bracelet' thing from a monk though. I was like 'whyyyyyy? We have those guys in Australia!' There was no real way avoiding people descending upon 'the obvious tourist' in Asia but I'd become used to avoiding/brushing the cold approaches off, so having to deal with it all over again was quite tiring! It's probably the one big drawback of being a tourist.
After all those detours and diversions it was nearly five in the afternoon and we finally made it to the Rockerfeller Center!
Not the prettiest of buildings but still impressive! They had a pretty cool NBC store down the bottom where I bought my old housemate 30Rock magnets.
We didn't not actually make it up to the observation deck, though, because that was when I spotted THE NINTENDO WORLD STORE.
It was awesome. Streetpasses were had and demos were played. I spent a solid hour, much to my poor travel buddy's bemusement, looking at everything.
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Pikmin! The coolest part was definitely some of the merch. I'd been pretty strict on my spending budget, but I caved and bought myself a classic Nintendo light hoodie. No regrets!!!
They needed more Animal Crossing stuff though. I guess Animal Crossing isn't big enough yet. I'm psyched for Tomodachi Life though. Has anyone else seen the video for that? All hail Virtual Boy! Can see myself most embarrassingly losing months of my life to that game.
By the time I was done with the Nintendo World Store, we didn't actually have time to go up the Rockerfeller Centre any longer, so we put that off for another time so we could go grab dinner... and head on over to Broadway!
We'd secured tickets for Bullets over Broadway, Woody Allen's new musical adapted from his film. The production values were all rather stunning, and the music was fairly decent (all 1920s/1930's classics) but the ending was sort of dreadful and ruined my overall opinion of the thing, even though the other three quarters of it were quite enjoyable and fairly well done. Still, Broadway was one of those things totally on my bucket list and it was so worth it.
That was just one day of stuff though!
The next day we crash-coursed our way through the subway system and somehow found our way to Liberty Island.
This was the big must-do for my travelling buddy, so we already had tickets to get onto the ferry. Definitely a heck of a sight, I was probably going more from the whole 'hey part of X-men was filmed here' angle but totally worth it even though we had to go through security like three times.
Skyline from the island! My camera valiantly revived for Liberty Island, even if it remained a little temperamental.
We headed up onto the pedestal, since we apparently had tickets for that. The view up top was indeed decent, but the real draw card was the exceptionally good museum in the base. Really well done, lots of great trivia about the making of and reconstruction of the statue. Never realised that Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame was involved with it! Or how many changes the torch had gone through, either.
Just to be a bit different, have an alternate angle.
We didn't get off at Ellis Island on the way back though, since we'd heard/read plenty of its story in the museum already and the day was quickly disappearing on us. We scouted out an excellent little diner near Wall Street where I had an awesome turkey club sandwich. I'd always disliked turkey as a meat until spending some time in the USA, they're actually pretty good at cooking it I suppose? Whenever I've had it in Australia (rarely) it has always been sort of dry or gamey. Possibly since it's not popular nobody knows how to cook it properly, or we just don't have the masses of dedicated turkey farms to make it nearly so tasty. Or maybe they use bush turkeys or something, those things don't look like they'd taste any good.
Anyway, Wall Street was kind of interesting from an architectural standpoint, we saw the famous gold bull (surrounded by tourists so we didn't bother waiting to get a photo) and Tiffany's and the New York Stock Exchange.
An interesting area to walk in for sure, for a place you hear about a lot it's sort of the geographical equivalent of putting a face to a name.
Typical New York street! It didn't take long at all to get used to that north-south east-west street orientation, which Broadway then gloriously screwed up by being all 'I do what I want!' Still, within a day or two you stopped getting lost because you really couldn't walk the wrong way for more than a block.
We found the Two Towers memorial, but the line was both incredibly long and involved another run through security, and we'd had enough of metal detectors for the day so gave it a pass. We did however get to see the new World Trade Centre built next to it (though still somewhat under construction), aka 'Freedom Tower', it's looking pretty impressive!
We wandered around exploring a bit more and found the waterfront, and followed that for a while, and subsequently found the Brooklyn Bridge!
We unfortunately didn't make it to Brooklyn (or off Manhattan Island at all, actually) but here's a pic from across the river! It looks like it would a pretty interesting place to visit, definitely on my list for next time.
We sat around here for a while, resting our legs after all the walking, and watched what appeared to be a fashion photography shoot. There was always some kind of shoot going on somewhere it felt like, news cameras and pro photographers and artists and film students and probably actual film crews who can be difficult to differentiate when they're trying to be incognito. We didn't see any actual famous people or anything, but honestly there's so much going on in New York it would be pretty easy to get lost in the crowd.
Eventually we found our way back to the subway and hit up TKTS for some more discount Broadway tickets. We had a fairly tight budget but my travelling buddy really wanted to go see Chicago so we nabbed some half price tickets for that.
We still had a while to kill before the performance though so we hit up 'Shake Shack' because it had a crazy line and typically places with crazy lines are awesome! It did indeed have pretty excellent milkshakes, but it was really just an ice-cream and burger place. A good one, especially for the price, but the crazy line was a little misleading!
After that we found a sort of flea market nearby where I bought an awesome new scarf, because I'd been wearing the same tired scarf for nearly two months wanted a change. Good deal! Also bought a new hat to make up for yet another lost hat. Hat and scarf together were like $15, not bad.
Then it was time for Chicago (the musical) itself! Honestly, while it had its moments, it wasn't great. A couple of good numbers but super low-production values, not what you'd expect for the ticket price. (Hardly any costume changes, for that matter. Even when they were fairly necessary!) Still good! Just not... Broadway levels of good? The movie was for once better. 'Cellophane Man' was done particularly poorly.
It's probably a good thing I don't live in New York THOUGH because I would just be going to Broadway alllll the time and would have no money.
Moving right along, the next day we slept in a bit, then braved the subway again and somehow found our way to the National History museum!
Roosevelt had some pretty good quotes on the walls, go Roosevelt.
The museum was incredible, as expected. Also incredibly large. We should have dedicated a whole day to it. We saw heaps of it, sure, but we wound up having to hustle ourselves out of there a mere half an hour before closing time, rushing through some exhibits we would have much preferred to linger in.
One of the first things we saw was this scene. It feels famous for some reason? Maybe that Nicolas Cage movie.
Of course, one of the big highlights was the dinosaur bones!
Sooooo many dinosaur bones. It was tricky to get photos really, since my camera was well and truly dead by then and unwilling to even turn on properly, so I was stuck with my phone's camera which honestly isn't that bad but struggles with even slightly low-level light. Also everyone else there also trying to get photos. And the general size of the things.
Some of the coolest bones were maybe the smaller dinosaurs though! You don't see those ones as much.
Also these guys.
Weird to think that you're looking at something literally millions of years old.Were those even the real bones? Sometimes I wondered if they had just put replicas on display, they seem far too valuable to put anywhere near the clumsy general public.
I could go on and on about each and every exhibit, but you can't exactly fit a whole museum into a Livejournal Post. Just, if you like museums, the Natural History museum in New York is pretty much the apex of museums. The Smithsonian might be better, I don't know, but it's very worth going to. Also, if you go, plan a whole day. Get there at opening. If you really want to read everything and go through it at a leisurely pace, you need every minute. There were far too many exhibits where I really only felt like I had the time to wander in, gawk at it, then hustle along without reading much text.
Luckily, even though it was nearly 5 in the afternoon when we finally found the exit, there was still a good two hours of sunlight left! So we hit up Central Park.
Spring had started to hit in some parts but Central Park was still mostly in winter mode since I had apparently wandered into the longest damn winter ever. It was beautiful even so, it was such a giant and lovely park. Ridiculously large, though after the endless skyscrapers of Manhattan it's desperately needed. Another place we should have dedicated many more hours to.
As it was, we were tired from walking around the museum so took a break by this lake and drank milkshakes from a street vendor while partaking of the view.
Probably one of the most photographed parks in the world.
We didn't actually realise this bridge was at all famous until we were walking past a lot of the streetside art and postcard type vendors.
We sat here for a while and enjoyed the soap opera drama of these three ducks, two of which don't even appear to be the same species? But there was a total love triangle going on. Spring is in the air?
Eventually the sun started to set so we meandered on back towards Times Square area. We entered the lottery for cheap Wicked tickets but a ridiculous number of people turned up so we were flat out of luck, still pretty cool to see people cheering about being able buy $30 tickets (though when they usually cost upward of $150...) So instead we went to go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which turned out to be a great idea because there is something oddly special about seeing an Avengers movie in New York.
We went to the 2D session but they evidently stuffed up the reels so they came in and gave everyone 3D glasses, so 3D movie without paying the premium, yay I guess? Awesome movie, but one really cool thing, this being New York, was that they handed out surveys from the movie studio for us to fill out and hand in! My opinion counts guys! Honestly though most of my feedback was like 'Needs more Iron Man'.
Reminds me of the days years ago when I was working on one of the crappier Spyro games, and we focus-tested a bunch of kids, and this one kid's every other comment basically boiled down to 'it should have spider-man and be more like spider-man, spider-man is awesome'. We laughed but maybe the kid was on to something.
The next day (the last full one!) we went to the Guggeheim Museum!
It's a pretty cool building - the museum itself is much of the attraction. There was also an Italian Futurism exhibit on that started out somewhat meh but got more interesting as walked up the spiral. The layout of the gallery is pretty neat that way.
Some of the permanent exhibits were pretty decent too, though it was hard to be as impressed after Chicago's Institute of Art. Learned a lot that day though. Super cool. Since we starting to run short on time we wound up missing out on the MET and MoMA but glad we at least made the Guggenheim.
Plus, just the name of the place is fun to say. Guggeheim, Guggenheim, Guggenheim. (Is secretly five.)
Stopped by another street vendor for a proper New York style pretzel afterwards! Love giant pretzels, they are hard to find in Australia.
I became a fan of street vendor food in general, really. Cheap and surprisingly good (even if often very processed). New York hot dogs, they're tasty! And ubiquitous. And convenient.
We stumbled across this sight in our wanderings! We wanted to try to get into one of the shows but this was not long after Letterman had just announced his retirement so it was pretty much impossible to get in. That was the case with a lot of the shows filmed there, really, you needed to dedicate an awful lot of your day to lining up to even hope to get tickets.
Still cool to see in person!
We found ourselves something at a loss after that, with most of the galleries and museums closing soon and no Broadway tickets for that night, so rather than trying to go to the Rockerfeller Center observatory again we wandered over to the Empire State Building with the idea of visiting their observatory... but the amount of hawkers outside trying to sell you tickets, not to mention the crazy line inside... I was still game but my travelling buddy was running low on funds so we decided to walk further south and check out the Flatiron district instead, based entirely off the fact that our hotel room had a photo of it.
The Flatiron building is indeed pretty cool, one of the more interesting 'famous' buildings we saw! The whole district was pretty interesting, a comparatively quiet pocket in the madness. Older district, perhaps.
All along the streets in the Flatiron area they had concrete planters out filled with tulips for spring! Seems like a lot of effort for a bunch of flowers that last only a matter of weeks but after the endless winter they were quite the welcome sight!
We grabbed burgers at a Five Guys for dinner and then on whim decided to go into Macy's, since it was apparently The Macy's and we were there so why the hell not?
As soon as we entered the store - holy shit.
The whole place was filled with flowers, and the first thing you saw was this epic dress made of roses which photos really cannot do justice. We'd apparently stumbled into their big Spring sale!
We hadn't really intended to do anything more than window shop, but I found a cool jacket that was down from $145 going for $30. Luggage space be damned, I grabbed that so fast! It was more of an autumn jacket which made it perfect for Australian winter, too. Bargain.
That was definitely one of the coolest surprises of the trip, we'd not really done any shopping until that evening but wow. Not only did I get a cool deal, it was worth going in just for the decorations.
After our grand success in Macy's, we went on a last-minute quest for New York style cheesecake, which was surprisingly difficult to find but we eventually stumbled across a bakery quite close by and scurried away with our bounty to consume inside the hotel.
My travel buddy was catching a flight back to Toronto ridiculously early the next morning, so we tried to get an early night. I myself had a flight to Chicago later in the day, but I was left with most of one last day in New York.
My first stop was by B&H Photo Video, which is my favourite place for pro audio equipment - I'd left it for the last day, to spare my travel buddy that particular planned bit of boredom. I mostly spent time drooling at stuff though, but it was a super cool old-style store, with rolling belts snaking around the roof carrying stock every which way.
Saw this wandering the streets nearby. The cosplay district? Wait, sewing is used for other things too.
I got some more tiny cupcakes and browsed a few souvenir stores, and got myself a neat little A4 souvenir art print for the grand price of $2. Then I finally found myself back at the Rockerfeller Centre! So I bit the bullet and headed up to the observatory.
It was a super cool observatory! Much better view - you get to SEE the Empire State, after all. And Central Park on the other side too. The weather was predictably pants, in keeping with my pattern of visiting observatories when the weather is dreary and overcast, why brain, whyyyyyy? But it was a fairly epic conclusion to an absolutely amazing five days in New York. I wish I could have stayed longer! Alas, New York is hellishly expensive, so in the end I had to catch that cab to La Guardia.
I really do <3 NY. (But I didn't buy the T-shirt. Even though they're everywhere and cost like $5.)
I landed back in Chicago to settle in with my brother again. But despite how awesome New York was, but this point travel ennui had settled in fairly hardcore. The weather was in fact almost nice by this point, but given the chance I didn't even bother to head into downtown Chicago again. I got about as far as the centre of Barrington one of the days, but mostly at this point I was just chilling at my brother's helping out around the house (they were in the middle of renovations) and job hunting. I still had some money left in my budget, but New York and San Francisco had both blown an awful lot of it. Did I have enough to keep going? If I went budget enough, I could probably have made it at least to the UK...
But my curiosity was finally spent, and my tolerance for air mattresses and living out of a suitcase had finally reached its apex.
It was time to call the journey to an end, and find my way back to Australia.
Of course, you can't actually fly direct from Chicago to Australia, LA and Dallas are about the only North American cities with directs, and they were hellishly expensive at the time. So.... why not head back via Japan?
:D
One more travel post left!