My first bite of the Big Apple

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... and I will be going back for more. No doubt about that. Coming out of the subway station at 42nd street was UNBELIEVABLE. Having had a good night's sleep on the flight over from BA (sleeping tablets ahoy-hoy) arriving at 6.30am in JFK I was super-excited to leave the airport for the few hours that we had before our connecting flight back home to Dublin. I have to say, when we left BA it was a mere 25 degrees and I thought it was cold..... until we got to NYC. I can safely say, ski trips to the Alps and all included, I have never experienced a cold like the cold that awaited us in New York. At noon the weather on my phone read -6 degrees.... so I'm guessing it was even colder than that in the early hours of the morning. We took the Airtrain from the airport to connect up with the E line of the Subway which took us from Jamaica Center right out to 42 ST - or Times Square. For anyone reading this with a view to travelling to New York, it only takes about 40 minutes and costs just 2.50 dollars.

I have to say, despite the freeeeezing weather - and the odd sprinkling of ice and snow thrown in for good measure, I fell in love with the city. Literally at first site. Times Square is like Piccadilly Circus in London times a billion. It's unreal, covered in lights and massive advertisements, with videos of runway shows and ads for TV programmes and films and the whole she-bang. Out of the this world. Yellow cabs everywhere and all sorts of people hustling and bustling about. There is such a buzz there, oh my god I just loved it! McDonalds on Times Square has a million little glistening lightbulbs as it's sign. I went in to Victoria's Secret on 34th and it was the biggest store I have ever been in - again screens the size of entire walls showing runway shows. Unreal.

We only had a few hours before we had to head back to JFK, but I was really pleasantly surprised at how walkable Manhattan was. We saw all of Times Square and made our way as far down as the Empire State building and then across to Central Park. The Empire State isn't really much to look at architecturally, but it is so tall. And I mean noticeably so, in a city as high rise as NY and having come from BA, I was still taken aback at home tall it was. Central Park was amazing too, it was all snow covered and pretty, and they had the horses and carriages on the go as well as ice-skating on the frozen pond in the middle.

As I said, time was short in New York but I absolutely intend c

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