Day 1

Well our first day of exploring New York is over. It was exhausting, a sort of haphazard wandering from subway station to subway station, bumping into whatever landmarks were close.

The first thing we bumped into was our first Firebird;



There was a Camaro parked about half a block up the street. What an incredible city this is.


We caught a subway to Chinatown to buy some fake stuff. The first shop we hit was shut down and plastered with notices about Trademark infringements and so on, but the rest of the street was open for business and slinging all sorts of ridiculous hiphop gear and a thoroughly necessary pair of gloves I picked up for 5 bucks. Score.




We did some walking and ate some hotdogs, then caught the ferry over to Staten Island so we could see the Statue of Liberty on the way there and back. We didn't actually explore Staten Island thought, as far as I know its only noteable feature is that Redman lives there.

Afterwards we did the Times Square thing and wandered around the city some more. You know the only thing weirder than recognizing where your real-world location corresponds to in the map for Grand Theft Auto 4, is that as I type this Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are having a tearful breakup on TV, standing on the very street I was standing on about 5 hours ago.

After further wandering, we picked up some tickets to Phantom of the Opera for Tuesday and eventually wound up at the Rockafella building, which didn't actually have much to offer aside from watching some people ice-skate. And it had very pretty floors.



By this point it was the afternoon, temperatures were steadily moving from cold to god damn freezing, we'd been walking all day, I had tried and failed to contact the bank card people to get a PIN number AND we'd caught two wrong subways which cost us the best part of an hour, so things were kind of sucking.

All of this was forgotten, of course, when this arrived on our table;



Holy crap, best pizza ever. Kept me warm for the last few blocks of freezing weather on the way back to the Hostel.

Oh by the way, the photo album is here.