New York: Island Hopping

• Tweet

• Tweet

The previous evening, whilst on our quest to find where New York’s beautiful girls went in the evening, we had stumbled into the San Gennaro street festival in Little Italy. This was a huge street festival which consisted mainly of every type of food you can imagine. As it was held in Little Italy, it was a meatball sub for me.

Having seen much of North Manhattans tourists pulls, we went south to the financial district and the building that make the New York skyline so famous. We walked through Chinatown and along broadway to get there, and even the Avenue of the Strongest. Once there it was stroll along Wall Street and the surrounding streets, before deciding to take another boat trip.

This trip was taken at a more leisurely pace, via the Staten Island Ferry. This is a free ferry which links Manhattan, and you guessed it, Staten Island. The service is used by the millions of New Yorkers every year who make the commute between the two islands for work. The commute is certainly better than a trip around the M25! It takes about 25 minutes each way and passes about 400m from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and gives yet more superb views of the Manhattan skyline.

After taking a return trip to Staten Island, we went into battery park and up past the statue of the bull. This is a 3000 tonne solid copper statue that apparently turned up on Wall Street one day, and no-one knows where it came from or why it was put there! The mother of all drunken pranks!

Ground Zero was next on the agenda, an obviously deprressing sight. Seeing the vast emptiness of it, surrounded by the skyscrapers makes it hard to imagine what went on there on 9/11, and the utter carnage of the aftermath.

Needing some livening up after the sombre sight of Ground Zero, we went for dinner to a Mexican restaurant in SoHo. If the food in Mexico is as good as in that restaurant I will be eating very well!

We grabbed a power nap beofre Friday night in NYC and went up to E34th and 3rd. What a change from previous nights, the clubs were packed. We had a top evening talking to the the natives who were all very friendly, before getting our penultimate cab in NYC back to the hostel for our final nights sleep before Vegas.

Overall my four days in NYC were an absolutely awesome experience, the city is fantastic and the boys were all on top form. I’d definately like to spend some more time there and will hopefully be able to return at some point in the future. We covered the majority of the larger touristy things, but given more time it would be excellent to be able to slow down and become immersed in the city and its various districts.