What can I say about New York, that hasn't already been said? There are numerous songs, movies, books, TV series inspired by New York; and if you visited you'd understand why! All I can say is that it lives up to all the hype, at least for me. The only thing that is not as I expected, is that all the women are NOT walking around in designer shoes and clothing all day, in fact, most people dress quite comfortably.
We left Amherst this morning around 10h00 and arrived in New York around 14h00. Our address while in New York is 207E 117th Street, East Harlem, New York. Yes, we're living in Harlem, the part of Harlem known as "Spanish Harlem." As soon as we arrived we could see why, there were Latino looking people all around. The first thing that greeted us was a group of young boys playing football on the road. There's lots of graffiti all over, we're just above a Mexican restaurant on the second floor of the building, there's a Payless Shoes on one corner of the street and a Mc Donald's on the other. Not your most affluent area in New York, but I would definitely recommend this place if you're coming to New York with South African Rands which don't go a long way AT ALL! It's $200 per night for a beautiful 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment. The place is newly refurbished, with wooden floors and a huge lounge/dining room/ kitchen area, a flat screen TV with cable, wireless internet, air conditioning. And it's now 00h30 and the neighbourhood is absolutely quiet. For a one bedroom apartment in central Manhattan it costs $230, minimum. It takes us 10min to get into Manhattan by subway, the subway station is a 2min walk from the apartment. The subway runs 24hrs a day.
The first thing we did once our bags were off loaded, was drive down Fifth Avenue, quite an experience. Driving in New York, you have to own the road. The yellow taxi cabs don't do anyone any favours. James had good training for driving in New York: he's spent a lot of time driving in Jo'burg!
From Fifth Avenue we headed for Times Square. We figured that since one bomb attempt had been made in Times Square in the last month, chances are there wouldn't be another one in the same location. We were completely awed by Times Square. It's bright and bustling and we just stood there taking it all in for a little while. There's the old TRL studio, the stairs that Jay-Z and Alicia Keys stand on in the video for Empire State of Mind, the Times Square ball, and of course all the Broadway theatres are just off Times Square.
While in Times Square we found a good Italian Pizza joint that sells those huge pizza slices like you see in the movies and we were all filled by one slice each.
After lunch we headed for the Meat Packing District, not for meat, but to do some wedding dress shopping for Mairi, so exciting! We went to this amazing little boutique on 4th Street west, no 313, called Lovely. It was down a few stairs into the bottom entrance of the little red brick apartment building and it really was lovely. It was the first real wedding dress shopping that Mairi did and it was so difficult! The dresses were all just so beautiful, it was difficult to make any sort of decision about them. Looking at the price tags did help to narrow it down a bit though!
If anyone is thinking of buying a wedding dress, or knows of someone who is, who might get the chance to go into this little boutique, I would highly recommend that you give this place a visit. The sales assistant was lovely, the store was so quaint, the dresses were beautiful. You can visit their website at www.lovelybride.com.
After the wedding dress shopping, we walked along talking about how much is a reasonable amount to spend on a wedding dress which you usually only wear for one day. We happened to walk into the Chelsea Market, where we met two South African ladies married to American men. We noticed them because they were speaking Zulu to each other. They're both from Durban! What are the chances?
Once we were done in the Meat Packing District, we headed for Hashanti's aunt's place on 86th Street, West Side, Manhattan, NYC. Her aunt lives in an amazing location, when you step out of the front door of her building, you look left and you see central park! In order to get to Hash's aunts place, we had to walk through Central Park of course! There were more horse drawn carriages than I expected to see. And I found it fascinating to be in the midst of so much greenery all around, with a view of the skyscrapers in the background.
When we arrived at Hashanti's aunt's place, there was more food than we could finish in a week! And it looked and smelled like home: breyani, roast chicken, curries! Not what we were expecting to find in NYC! We ate as much as we could while we were there and when we left she had packed lots of food for us to take with so that we wouldn't have to worry about food at least for another day.
I'd say we packed A LOT into our day, but there's still so much more to be done. Tomorrow we're hoping the weather's good so that we can try to go and see Lady Liberty, and we got baseball tickets to see the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees, in the Yankee stadium! How amazing is that???!!!
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