One the first day we started off by picking up our tourist
passes. These allowed us to use the hop on-hop off buses which included a tour
guide, as well as the pass which gave us discounted access to pretty much all
of New York’s attractions. These both saved us stacks of money so I’d highly
recommend them.
We started off our first day by jumping on the water taxi
and heading right down to the point of the Manhattan Island. This came with an entertaining
accompanying commentary giving a quick little overview on our way down. This
ride also included a specified booked time for us to go into the 9/11 Memorial,
which was one of the things we were very keen to do. While the memorial will be
free access once finished the area is under development so for crowd management
you need a booking to be able to go in. While there is still a lot of major construction
going on in the area and the museum isn’t open yet, it’s great to be able to
experience the manmade waterfalls that cover the floor area of the original
towers. Running my fingers over the names really brought home the people
involved, and highlighted the sheer number of innocent people killed. The memorial
has been done really well, and will only get better over time.
After spending some time watching the waterfalls we headed
back out onto the streets. We needed to get a few things so headed into Century
21, a department store in the vein of Kirkcaldie and Stains in Wellington.
There are two of these in New York and the downtown store was massive. The
prices of the products are pretty good but the place itself is organised chaos,
laid out like a maze and with people everywhere. I’m not sure whether it’s like
this most days or whether people were just trying to get out of the cold!
We decided to head back up to Times Square to drop off our
purchases and so jumped on the Grey Line hop on bus which was on the downtown
loop. This took us back downtown and around to the East River, before heading
up the eastern avenues and around to Times Square. While this covered a little
bit of territory we had already seen it was really interesting to get it with a
tour guide. As well as providing some general insight about the area, the guide
was also able to point out the residual impact of Hurricane Sandy, which still
has some major ramifications. Many huge buildings in the financial district are
still running on generators and whole blocks are boarded up waiting to be
repaired. There wasn’t any real impact on the transport network, many of the
external escalators and elevators were shutdown but the subways were all
running as normal so it was mainly superficial damage.
This time of the year it gets dark pretty early in the city,
with it being noticeable from about 4.30pm. There are a lot of lights around (especially
in Times Square), but the change in light does mess with your eating schedule
as you start feeling hungry earlier. To celebrate New York’s influential Irish
heritage we headed down to an Irish pub for dinner, with a plan to jump on the
night bus tour later on that evening. After a tray of beef sliders (not great
but then again mini-hamburgers, how can you go wrong) we headed back to the
hotel to put on as many clothes as possible to survive a couple of evening
hours on an open top bus.
The night tour was a great view of the city, a lot of the
city’s Christmas lights were still up and we also went over to Brooklyn to see
both Brooklyn and Manhattan from afar.
Once we wrapped up the tour we headed over to the Rockefeller Center, to head up to the Top of the Rock observation platform. The Rockefeller Center is the home of NBC in New York and hosts Saturday Night Live, as well as being the 'location' for 30 Rock. By heading up the Top of the Rock we got the night view of New York including the Empire State Building, which was everything you'd expect.
Having soaked up a great day of New York we headed back to the hotel to warm up and try to get some sleep for day two.
No comments:
Post a Comment