Days 42 & 43 - Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and Broadway!

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Once again, we've been a bit infrequent with the updating of our blog (it would be a lot easier if we had wifi in our room!), so we are again combining yesterday's events and today's events into a joint blog.

Yesterday was a fairly early start, to catch an early ferry to Liberty Island to see the Statue of Liberty. We ate our breakfast, and were ready to go out by around 9:30am. We caught the subway down to South Ferry station, and walked to our right out of the station over to the ticket area for the ferry, passing through Battery Park (where, funnily enough, we appeared to pass a turkey in a playground!). A staff member informed us that we didn't need to queue for tickets as our CityPass voucher was the ferry ticket; we would just have to hand that over when we boarded the boat.

We walked down the queueline, not realising at first just how long it was - it literally snaked all the way down the park on the waterfront. We overheard someone say that the queue for the ferry was around an hour (although it looked like it would take much longer than this!), so once we finally reached the end of the queue, we took our place in line and waited.

Thankfully, the queue seemed to move pretty quickly, and we were soon by the water. We took a picture of a bronzework on a dock, which was in memory of men lost at sea, with the statue depicting some men on a sinking submarine, with one man in the water reaching up for help. We also took some pictures of the Statue of Liberty which we could see in the distance on the island.

We eventually reached the front of the queue after around an hour, where we went through an airport-style security check; having to empty all of our pockets, take off our belts and have our bags put through a scanner. We boarded the ferry and found a spot to stand on one of the higher decks. It took around 10 minutes to reach the island, and we took some pictures of the statue from the boat as we approached it.

We reached the dock, where we got off the ferry and made our way over to the visitor centre/welcome area to make use of the toilets and water fountain. We noticed that there was a cafe on the island, so we went in to check the prices, as it was now approaching dinner time. They didn't seem too expensive, considering the location of the cafe, so we decided to have something to eat whilst we were there. Emma had some chilli cheese fries whilst Craig had a turkey burger with fries (although he said that the bun from the burger, at first glance, appeared to be made of some sort of hard rubber - thankfully, it was actually bread!).

Once we had finished eating, we walked towards the edge of the island, where we took some photos of the great views of the New York city skyline. We walked around further so that we were at the front of the statue, and took some more photos here. It was once again a very hot day (we later overheard an old man from Queens say that it was the hottest October that he had ever experienced), so we went and sat under some trees at the foot of the statue. We lay there for a while, before going back to the dock to catch the ferry back, after spending around 2 hours or so on the island.

We had been contemplating for a while whether or not to go and watch a Broadway
show whilst we were here, and after much deliberation, we had decided that we would try and get some discount tickets to watch'Mary Poppins' (we would have preferred 'The Lion King' or 'Wicked' but apparently it's pretty much impossible to get cheaper tickets to these shows). We knew that there was a booth at Times Square where you can get tickets for around half price on the day of the show, so we decided to head there next to see how much the tickets would be, and also how good the seats would be.

We caught the subway back up to Times Square, and walked over to the booth. We didn't want to queue just to ask for information at the actual counters, so we instead asked a staff member who was standing nearby. They informed us that we may get 'Mary Poppins' tickets the following day for around 40-50%!o(MISSING)ff for the matinee show if we get there when the booths opened at 10am (although they also said that these would be the lower priced tickets and so the worst available seats that they had not sold).

We decided to come back early the next day to see what tickets were available, hoping that if we couldn't get any decent seats for the matinee show, we would instead try to get some for the evening performance. We came back to the hostel for a while to relax, as we had been walking around all day. After spending an hour or so in the room, it hit us that we still hadn't used our Empire State Observation Deck passes in the CityPass, and thought what better time to see New York than in the evening when it's all lit up.

We had a quick look on a leaflet that we picked up from our hostel for the opening/closing times of the observation deck, and found that it was open until 2am. We waited in the room, relaxing some more until it got dark, and left at around 8:15pm. We caught the subway down to 34th Street and walked over to the towering building just across the street. Thankfully, no queues were waiting for us when we arrived, and we swiftly made our way through, past the ticket area and the security area and into the elevator. This first elevator took us up to the 80th floor, where there was lots of information about the construction of the Empire State building. There was an audio tour available, however we decided to skip most of this and continue up to where the views of the city were, as we didn't want to be out too late knowing that we would be getting up early in the morning to try and get Broadway tickets.

We then got into another elevator, which took us up to the 86th floor, where the observatory deck is. We stepped out and immediately saw the glow of lights from the buildings below us. We went outside into the caged area, where we spent a while taking photos of the views surrounding us, walking around the deck so that we got plenty of pictures of the city from all angles of the building. As we took the pictures, we realised that Craig couldn't stop blinking in almost every photo that we took - we deleted most of them as we were going but we've left some of them in as it was pretty funny (even when Emma was mocking him by pretending to blink, he blinked in that one too!).

We eventually left the observatory deck at around 10pm, taking the elevator down (which had no one else in it, so we took some photos of us looking scared at how far down it goes!) to the ground floor, where we left the building and walked back over to the subway station. Once we were back at the hostel, we soon fell asleep after a pretty long and tiring day.

Today, we were up early at around 7am. We got showered and dressed, ate some cereal, then headed down towards the subway station at around 9am. We caught the train to Times Square, and walked over to the ticket booths by the steps. We had a quick check on the boards (which list all of the shows which they have discounted tickets for) before we got in line, but were disappointed to see that there seemed to be no tickets available for 'Mary Poppins', and that tickets for any evening shows wouldn't be available until after 3pm.

The weather today was pretty rubbish (it appears that the heatwave has finished, and it rained most of the day today) so we went in a few of the shops around Times Square to pass the time and to keep us dry. We went into a huge Toys R Us store, complete with its own ferris wheel inside, and had a look around the different areas within it, taking pictures of some of the lego models of things such as the Empire State building and Captain Jack Sparrow from 'Pirates of the Caribbean'. There was also a huge animatronic dinosaur (very similar to the ones in the Jurassic Park ride at Universal) and an area full of Willy Wonka sweets and chocolates. We went in some of the skate shops and clothes shops around there, and also into the Disney store, which was full of various toys, teddies and costumes for both children and adults.

By the time we had looked in most of the shops, it was around 12pm, so we headed to McDonalds to sit out of the rain and to use their wifi, getting a bite to eat whilst we were there. As we browsed the internet, Emma had a look to see if there was anywhere to get discount tickets online, and found a site which had a discount code that you could either use online (but have to pay service fees), or a page which you could print out to take to the box office at the New Amsterdam Theatre, where the show took place. The discount would bring the price of each ticket down from the full price of around $125 down to $80 for the better seats (orchestra or front mezzanine).

Knowing that we wouldn't be able to print out the page, and not really willing to pay the $7 or so service fees per ticket for booking online, we thought that we would try and just take the netbook to the box office and show them the page, as it didn't have a barcode or anything on it, it literally just said to print the page and show them. We saved a screenshot of the page and took the netbook over to the theatre, where the lady behind the window said that it would be fine for us to use it.

We purchased our discounted tickets for Row M of the Orchestra seats, which we knew were pretty good seats from the seating plan that the woman had showed us. We popped back to McDonalds to see how much the seats next to us were worth, and sure enough, they were going for just under $125 each, and were slightly worse than ours, being at more of an angle to the stage. We were therefore pretty happy with our deal, and figured that it was much better than having to wait in a queue for the tickets from the booth, which probably would have ended up being worse seats for around the same price that we paid!

We went back to the hostel to relax for a few hours before the show at 7pm. We picked up some food from the supermarket to eat for our tea a bit later on, and then spent a couple of hours in the room playing games on the netbook and DS. We got changed into slightly more formal wear before leaving the hostel at around 6pm, catching the subway back to Times Square, where the theatre stood right next door to the exit of the station.

We entered the theatre, noticing a large picture of Mary Poppins flying with her umbrella in the entrance, so Emma took the opportunity to pull out her own umbrella and get a photo next to it in a similar pose! Eventually, after waiting for around 10 minutes, we were let into the theatre to take our seats. We walked down the aisle and were very pleased to find that our seats were probably even better than we were expecting them to be; the stage was so close to us, and the seats were tiered so we knew that we would have an unobstructed view once the show started. We took a few photos of the theatre before the lights went down just after 7pm and the show started.

Wow. The show was absolutely incredible. The singers and dancers were amazing, and the people that played Mary and Bert really couldn't have done a better job, they were just fantastic. Most of the show was the same as the film, with familiar numbers such as 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious', 'A Spoonful of Sugar', 'Jolly Holiday', 'Chim-Chim-Cher-ee', 'Step in Time', 'Feed the Birds' and 'Let's Go Fly a Kite' being particular highlights ('Step in Time' was AMAZING - Bert even walked up the walls, onto the ceiling of the theatre and continued to tap dance and belt out the song - upside down! - from there before walking back down to the floor!). There were also some new songs in there which were a nice addition, along with some added storylines to the original film, including an evil Nanny that could REALLY belt out the high notes!

All-in-all, we really enjoyed the show, and we were quite sad to watch Mary Poppins fly over us at the end as she left the Banks family! The whole audience seemed to enjoy it just as much as we did, and everyone gave a standing ovation at the end when the performers came back on to take their final bows. We left the theatre with all of the songs still in our heads, and were still humming them when we eventually arrived back in our room after catching the subway back to the hostel. We stayed up for a little while, playing Mario on the DS before going to bed at around 11:30pm.

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