Vacation part 2 – First days in New York

When we left off, we had just arrived in New York outside of Penn Station on the Bolt Bus. We grabbed a cab, not wanting to haul our suitcases on the subway, and headed down to Chinatown where our hotel was located, the Comfort Inn Manhattan Bridge. It is a fairly new hotel, in a very convenient location, and had a pretty good price for a New York hotel. As you can see in the review, I would recommend it no problem. And it has a pretty nice view:

The view from our hotel at night, including the Manhattan Bridge

It was pretty late when we arrived, so we didn’t go out on the town, but instead wandered around Chinatown and Little Italy and grabbed a late dinner at an Italian restaurant before heading back to the hotel and turning in for the night.

The next day, Monday, we started off by taking a trip down to City Hall park, and then Battery Park to see the sights, such as the Woolworth Building:

The Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan, one of teh first true

From there we headed uptown, first to Bryant Park to relax for a bit, then to check a bit of the shopping on Fifth Avenue. When we got tired of seeing things we couldn’t afford, we paid a visit to the Rockefeller Center, where the line to get to the top is far shorter than the Empire State Building, and the view is nicer:

Looking north towards Central Park from the top of the Rockefell

Sadly, we couldn’t go to the 70th floor of the Rockefeller Center, the very top, as it was taken over by a film crew shooting a movie starring Matt Damon and involving a motorcycle somehow. We did, however, choose to take the historical art tour of the Rockefeller Center, and as Julia and I were the only people on the tour, it was a very personal experience. We also learned that most tourists are pretty ignorant: our tour guide said that we were the first people to have any idea who Diego Rivera was. Pathetic.

Afterwards, we headed to Williamsburg to meet Julia’s friend Quinn who is living in Brooklyn. We jumped on the L and went under the East River to grab dinner at your typical hipster restaurant, which did have pretty good food I do have to admit. And that was it for Monday.

Tuesday morning we started out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We spent the entire morning there, and saw maybe about a quarter of it, and much less of that in any detail. It’s a place you can spend a week at no problem. I’ve been there twice now, and there are still huge collections I have never seen.

We were temporarily stymied by a gyro mishap, but soon we disappeared behind the Met to check out Central Park. We wandered around for a few hours, and saw the typical touristy things like the Bow Bridge and Strawberry Fields. We exited the other end of the park onto the Upper West Side, where Julia got a manicure and we stopped and ate cupcakes from Crumbs.

Tuesday night, we hopped around SoHo, going to McSorley’s because it’s old (where we found a tiny bar kitten that looked a lot like Sasha), then to a couple more bars until we ended up at the Blind Tiger in Greenwich Village, which had more than one recommendation from people I know. They were right, and it was an excellent place.

All of that barhopping, which we are entirely too old for, wore us out, so we headed back to the hotel and went to sleep so we could shop on Wednesday, which will be in the next installment. Stay tuned!