New York

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Arriving in New York, it took me a few days to get back into the habit of speaking English. I caught myself on quite a few occasions, structuring a sentence in Spanish in my head before realising that I didn’t need to. Not that it would have mattered if I spoke Spanish though, as most people we met in New York could speak the language, with the amount of Latin Americans that now live in the country.

New York was also the beginning of the REALLY COLD part of our trip. We arrived in New York to find a blanket of snow over everything, as they had had a large snow storm a few days earlier. All of the winter / skiing clothes that we had left in Bogota during the South American part of the trip finally got to be used. We realised it is a mission in itself just to get out the door in New York, as you spend 5 minutes every time putting on your skivvy, jumper, jacket (two in the case of Patty), beanie, scarf and boots. The temperature never got above 0 degC while we were here, regularly dropping down to minus 20 degC with the wind chill factor.

While in New York, we stayed with one of Patty’s childhood friends and her partner, she is an Australian who she met when she was living in Japan as a nine year old. She had her apartment in Harlem at the northern part of Manhattan island, about a 20 minute subway ride from the downtown area. We were initially a little worried staying in this neighbourhood, based on movies we had seen in years gone past, however New York has been cleaned up big time over the last 5 – 10 years, and we never had a single problem walking around this area, or taking the subways, even when getting home in the early hours of the morning (as we regularly did over the eight days we were here).

New York was definitely my favourite city of the ones we have visited over the year we have been travelling. This may be partly due to the fact that I could finally communicate easily with everyone again, but it is also an incredibly busy, vibrant place and a city that seriously never sleeps. No matter what time of the day or night it was, there was always heaps of people on the streets and stores open. The shopping here was also amazing, much to Patty’s delight! Over the last 10 months of travel, I had reined back Patty from buying anything, as we had absolutely no room in our suitcases to carry any excess gear. Once we hit New York, the brakes came off as we knew here we would be able to post anything we bought back to Australia. By the end of the eight days here, we had amassed just over 25kg of clothing and shoe purchases, which we packed up in two large boxes and posted back to Australia.

Anecdote: We started our shopping spree by going to Bloomingdales, a huge chain store similar to Myer. At the entrance to the store, Patty and I split up with me heading to the one floor of men’s clothing and Patty off to check out the four floors of women’s clothing, organizing to meet back 3 hours later. I arrived promptly back at our meeting point having bought a few t-shirts. As is typical with Patty, she hadn’t turned up 10 minutes later, and I was starting to dread her arrival, as I envisioned her needing this extra time because she was in the midst of a buying frenzy. Finally Patty turns up and I see that she isn’t carrying a single bag. I confusedly asked her where all her shopping was, and she proceeds to tell me she couldn’t find a single thing to buy in 4 floors of women’s clothing!! What the?! I couldn’t believe after finally agreeing to allow her to go shopping she hadn’t bought a single thing! Mind you, she made up for it later in the day when she got to Banana Republic, another big clothing store here.

Outside of the bargain basement shopping, we also did quite a bit of sight seeing in New York. We had received a lot of wishing well gifts from our wedding, so we began making the most of these by putting them towards particular experiences and meals, to remember our generous friends and relatives. One such experience was buying a city pass, which provided entry to the top 6 tourist attractions the city has to offer. With this, we climbed to the top of both the Empire State Building (at night) and the Rockefeller Centre (at sunset) so we got to see the city sky line both during the day and evening. We also took a cruise out to the Statue of Liberty and visited a really interesting museum on nearby Ellis island, which was once used as an immigration centre for the multitude of immigrants that arrived in America in the late 1800’s.

New York also has some outstanding and well known museums that were included in our New York city pass, the one that we enjoyed the most being the Museum of Natural History. This is a massive museum with exhibits on dinosaurs, the universe, planets and earth (including a planetarium), native Indians, animals and much more. The exhibition that fascinated us the most was one on how the brain functions, with many practical demonstrations and displays. We had planned on visiting a couple of museums that day, however there was so much to see here, that we never made it to any of the others!

Anecdote: The brain is an amazing organism and we read / saw many things to prove this while at the brain exhibition in the museum. For instance, we saw a clip about a young African-American man who had lost his sight as a baby to a rare cancer. This kid had then managed to develop a technique to “see” similar to how a dolphin uses sonar, by making a clicking noise with his tongue. His hearing was that finely tuned that the echo from this clicking noise, he was able to judge how far away objects were from him and even what the objects were! He was able to ride a bike, chase his brothers around the house, and even play basketball!

Walking around New York is like being in your favourite sitcom / movie, as you recognize so many of the names and places that you see. Places like Times Square, Wall Street, 5th Avenue, Broadway, Central Park, the Empire State Building, the subway, the Brooklyn Bridge, Harlem, the Hudson River, the Bronx, Soho, Ground Zero and even the Seinfeld diner! We had a great time just walking the streets of New York and checking out all these famous places. We also went to a number of Broadway shows, including Billy Elliot and Memphis, which were also great fun.

Food was the other big highlight of New York, with us heading to all the recommended diners and eateries for meals. We normally did this in combination with catching up with the large number of friends and family that Patty has in NYC. Trying out huge slabs of pepperoni pizza (one piece and I was full), eating cheese burgers at a famous burger joint hidden away in the back of Le Parke Meridien hotel, french food in Balthazar, special lamb burger at the Ace Hotel, sushi in the Chelsea markets, brazilian beef at Platforma, and so many other places. We are both going to have our work cut out when we get back to Australia to drop the extra kilos we have started putting on during this part of the trip with all the extra food we have been eating. This eating combined with a lack of motivation to do exercise in this cold weather is a bad combination!

Our 8 days in NYC came to an end way too fast, as we could easily have spent a month here and not run short of things to do.

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