The Big Apple

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Well, unsurprisingly enough, NYC was amazing. There's just so much to see and do at any time of day or night. I arrived on Sunday morning and just spent the whole day wandering around Central Park. There was SO much going on, including street artists, buskers, baseball games, a shakespeare play, fundraising events, a huge stage with fairly big bands playing free concerts, and a roller disco. The hostel I stayed at was right off Central Park, and 20 seconds from a subway station that accesses everywere else in NYC, so that was handy. That evening, about 10pm, me and a guy from Leeds that was staying at the hostel headed out to Times Square, which I personally thought was just amazing. This is Sunday evening, at 10pm, and it was completely packed - and I really mean that, it was packed to the extent that it was difficult to walk along the sidewalk because of the sheer amount of people there. Everything was huge and glowing and loud and it was just generally exciting. We walked around for about 30 minutes looking for the Empire State building (we didn't have a map or anything, we were just going by looking up and heading towards the tallest building we could see), then went up that for an awesome view of the city. Despite being pretty expensive and having to do a HUGE amount of queueing before we could actually get up there, the view was breathtaking and it was definitely worth it.

The next day I went to the south shore of Manhattan, intending to take a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty. However, this also turned out to be expensive and had massive queues (and to actually go up to the crown of the statue, you had to reserve months in advance), so I ended up just going back and exploring more of Manhattan. Times Square was still pretty cool in the day, and I also headed to the Financial District to see all the huge skyscrapers and Wall Street and so on, before heading back to the hostel to chill for the evening.

The 3rd day I headed back to the south shore because Frank, a dutch guy from the hostel, told me that there's a free ferry that goes to Staten Island and back and goes right past the Statue of Liberty. I did that, and it was awesome, especially because on the way back you get the view of the whole famous New York skyline. After that I took the subway across the river to Brooklyn, where I wandered around for a while before heading back over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan and back up to the hostel. That evening me and Frank headed to a cinema in Brooklyn to see Inception, which is great and definitely worth seeing, despite being pretty confusing (god knows how Frank managed to follow it in a foreign language, though I guess all dutch people are incredible at English). The next morning I hopped on the bus and headed further up the coast, to Boston.

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