New York - Part 2

Thursday morning we started out on a guided tour called ‘West Side Stories’. This was really interesting as it toured different parts of the park and also gave insight into the history and design of the park. We saw many bridges, lakes and gardens, as well as the line for the Shakespeare tickets, the people in the front of the line had arrived at 1am, a 12 hour wait for tickets!
After the tour we ate lunch in a very busy diner full of locals. The menu was huge, in the end we told the helpful waiter we wanted an authentic NY bagel experience, and he ordered for us. It was really nice, a bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese and a pastrami sandwich.
After we had printed out the tickets, we jumped on a train and headed out to Flushing to see the New York Met’s play. After being told the prices of the tickets at the club shop, Damien looked on line and found some tickets for below face value! It was a great start to the game with lots of scoring. Unfortunately in the end the Met’s lost to the LA Dodgers, 2-11. We still enjoyed it, really glad we got to go to another game.

After bit of a sleep in on Friday we headed down to Times Square for a walking tour. This ended up being a bit long, but was still very interesting, we were taken into some of the nice old building and theaters that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Apparently buildings in the Times Square area all have to have a quota of billboard space.
We then continued with the tourist sites, Wall St and the Bronze Bull sculpture, lunch in Battery Park and a visit to the world trade center site. We then headed to MOMA, a modern art gallery. It is open until 8pm on Friday nights so we spent a bit of time looking at sculptures and paintings. When we returned to the hostel we cooked beef pinwheels (steaks with cheese and spinach rolled into them), for dinner… very nice!

Christine opted for a big sleep in instead of breakfast on Saturday, and once we did get moving, instead of joining another tour of Central Park, she had a nap by a lake. In the mean time Damien did the tour around the North end of the park. This was also very interesting being told about the features of the park. Most of the tour was in forest like areas of the park, with a man made creek, most of the tour you couldn’t hear any of the nearby city noise.
After the tour we headed to Union Square where there was a farmers market. We bought some nice cheese and had a lot of little samples. Luckily we found another market nearby for lunch as the farmers market didn’t have any ready to eat items. We had massive crepe’s for lunch, a rest in Union Square Park and then a coffee.
After a fairly cruisy day we headed to the Guggenheim, which like MOMA, was open late. This was a spiral building with a major display on Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect who designed the building and one of Christine’s (many) favorites. The Guggenheim is also the scene for a gunfight in a recent movie (The International), but unfortunately all the damage from that scene had been repaired!
While the MET was the biggest and best of the 3 galleries we went to, we were both really impressed with the Guggenheim, and didn’t make it right through the collection as we were kicked out at closing time.
The Guggenheim is right next to Central Park, so we walked through the park on our way home. We had been told that it was really nice at night. The main area we visited was the Belvedere Castle, which is all lit up at night. We found a little Italian restaurant a bit closer to the hostel for dinner, and then ate doughnuts on the way home because we were still hungry!

Sunday morning we were hoping to go to a church service in Harlem, but while we were having breakfast we were told by someone who had already been down there, that the line for the 11am mass was already way too long, at 7.30am! Instead we headed to 112th st to the ‘Seinfeld’ Café. Although the name is different than in the show, the outside of the building looks very similar, and the inside was a lot busier than in the show. We both had milkshakes, there were good but made us feel sick, they were huge, over a liter of milk!
We then picked up some nice bread and antipasto to go with our cheese and headed to Central Park where we sat on the lawn and watched a Latin music concert. We also grabbed some Samuel Adams to celebrate our great times in NY and the USA. After the concert we headed back to the hostel for our last night. We tidied our room and packed our bags, ready to check out, we didn’t feel like dinner after grazing all afternoon.

Our last day in the USA we checked out, stored our bags and headed for the Statue of Liberty. Our plan of heading over to the island was foiled by long queue’s and all the Monument Passes already being given out. Instead we took the (free) Staten Island ferry, which leaves every half hour and passes right by the statue. Being in a bit of a rush we took the ferry across and straight back to get some lunch, our final USA burgers, before returning to the hostel and taking the metro train to the airport.