NEW YORK (9th July - 11th July)
The bus dropped us at Madison square garden. At that hour of night, there were very few people on the road. Walking few foot steps ahead, we reached the metro station. The station was huge and the network seems to connect all nooks & corners of the city. Initially, it took us a while to understand the right route to reach our hostel (Lafayette) in Brooklyn.
After a very good sleep on the clean sheets, we woke up all refreshed & set to roam in the city. We first went to New York tourism center to find out the interesting places to visit in New York. I was overwhelmed with the number of possible options and felt that I have too less time to spend in the city. We decided to go for some of the commonly visited places, instead of doing anything off-beat.
We started from Lower Mahanttan & visited Wall Street first. The buildings on the streets were sky tall & posed a challenge for Jomy to take a good photo of them. The streets were very busy, people walking up & down the street, no one acknowledging the presence of others. There were no false smiles, greetings between the passers by, which I found to be very normal (unlike other parts of U.S). There were street vendors, mostly Pakistanis selling Halal food, pretzels and sandwiches. I don't know of any other place in U.S where food is sold on streets. I was quite happy to see this and ordered halal food for myself & Jomy. We fed ourselves sitting in a park along the side of Wall Street. I felt absolutely relaxed, sitting there without any worry & watching people passing by.
From there, we moved on to other places like Statue of Liberty, China town, Cathedrals, Empire State building, Central park etc. Central park was huge (~800 acres) - We didn't bother to walk a lot there. We found a nice landscape & made ourselves comfortable there.
Late in the night, we went to top of the Rockefeller building to catch the view of the lighted city - The view of Mahanttan skyline from there was astounding. I have never seen a city to be so beautiful before. We spent our time here till midnight and then planned to check out the night life at Times Square. Oh my god, even at 2A.M in the morning, there were so many people on the streets. The square was very well lit with huge colourful ad boards and the place was lively.
On the next day, we went to Times Square again. The place was really crowded and we tried to walk on the other nearby streets. Around this area, we found lots & lots of arts & entertainment theatres. There were so many shows going on every day in the city and found it to be opulent in arts & entertainment. Later in the day, we had our dinner in Hard Rock Cafe at Times square which I always wanted to go. The place was wonderful, with very good ambiance & music. After treating our belly well, we decided to call off for the day & took the metro to the hostel.
I found this city to be very interesting and to have many aspects which was missing in most of the U.S cities. I tried to relate it to my experience in Mumbai and could find similarities in many ways. I loved this city and I wish that I had few more days to spend here, in New York. But, the time had come for me to say Ciao to U.S and be back in Bangalore.
Ciao U.S.A...
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