New Year in New York

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Another early rise got me up and showered feeling a little tired. I went down for breakfast and ordered an orange juice, to realise breakfast is not complimentary and the tiny glass of orange juice that was gone in a couple of seconds had cost me $3. Not a good start to the day.
Once I was ready I watched the weather and news for the next 30 minutes and then waited downstairs outside whilst everyone else got ready to leave.
We left around 40 minutes later, and got the subway into Manhattan.

The plan for the day was to go to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and meet Yann and Helder (two International House mates from San Jose) by the World Trade Center.
We got to the Statue of Liberty and saw that the queue was hours long. Two of us began to queue whilst the other three bought tickets. They bought all the tickets and returned with the bad news that the actual monument tickets were sold out. I decided it was not worth my while waiting 3 hours to pass it by and not go inside so returned my ticket for a refund. Ace and Tom quickly followed suit and we made new plans. Carlotta and Jenny decided to still go on the ferry and meet us later.
We first headed towards the Guggenheim museum. After 30 minutes of travel we soon realised that we would not have sufficient time to view the museum and meet Yann and Helder, so instead relaxed and strolled round Central Park.
The lake was frozen over completely and there was a lot of squirrels and birds in the snow. I really liked Uptown Manhattan and found I preferred it to downtown Manhattan.
I thought I liked busy cities, but downtown Manhattan was slightly overwhelming with so many tourists and so many people.
Uptown on the other hand was still busy, but the atmosphere was more relaxed and easy going. We entered a bakery upon arriving and ordered some bread and coffee, which was unlike anything you would find in downtown (more commercial) Manhattan.

We built a snowman for an hour or so in Central Park – it stood around 8ft tall. Ace ripped his trousers whilst building it, so we were delayed in meeting Helder and Yann, by nearly an hour as Ace shopped for new jeans.
We finally made it to the World Trade Center and ate lunch in Burger King. I arranged to meet Helder later to go to Time Square, and Yann arranged to meet Tom and Ace for dinner.
We all got a group photograph taken in New York to take back with us to California and left our separate ways for a couple of hours.
Tom, me and Ace decided to go to Rockefeller Plaza. We took the subway to Times Square and were amazed yet again at the number of subway performers, including a Peruvian flute band and barbershop quartet. We stopped off in Times Square, which was surrounded in NYPD officers.
Rockefeller Plaza was really nice looking but very busy. There was an ice rink, tourist attraction “top of the rock” and a giant Christmas tree with a Swarovski crystal star on top. There was a gold-coloured statue in the plaza which was also nice.

I left Ace and Tom and hurried to Times Square to meet Helder, we waited for 2 hours to get into the blocked off area, it wasn’t until after sunset we finally made it in, and were nearly 6 blocks away from Times Square – but still had a great view of everything we wanted to see.
We waited a further 6 hours outside until the countdown. Everyone around us seemed to be from a different country and everyone was speaking different languages. Helder himself was from Brazil and we met up with a large group of Brazilian people. There were also people from Italy, France, Philippines, Japan, Algeria, Canada and many other places. We spoke with Americans who recommended us places to visit including Hawaii and Texas.
It was a very interesting 6 hours, but was also long and quite cold – despite much higher temperatures than average for the time of year.

Artists such as Ke$ha, Taio Cruz and New Kids on the Block played on the stage, but always played the same songs over and over, which got rather repetitive, and none of them were especially good.
The countdown led to 2 tonnes of confetti and fireworks all across the sky. The ball dropped of course, which was not nearly as impressive as hyped up to be.
All in all, I felt that Edinburgh’s New Years are far more impressive than New York’s, but it was an experience in itself. Feeling extremely tired I hurried home, caught the subway and made it back to the hotel. It was a great New Years Eve even though plans didn’t always go according to plan. And I can’t wait to see the rest of what New York has to offer.

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