We woke up, found breakfast, jumped on a train and rode it up to where we were supposed to meet a tour guy for a 5 hr tour of Manhattan (I bought a groupon online about 2 months ago, checked reviews, made reservations, etc). Anyway, we had the address but weren't really aware of exactly what part of the city we were going to. We walk up the steps from the subway right. into. times. square. All you can do (if you've never been there before), is just stand and block traffic and take it all in. It is crazy busy at 10 in the morning even! And the lights and zippers (the scrolling word sign things). So we waited for 45 mins for our tour guy to show up...and never saw him. It wasn't cool in many ways, but one of the reasons was after I purchased the groupon, he said he could only do the tours on Sat and Sunday's...well since we weren't going to be there by 10 AM on saturday that only left us with Sunday. If I would have known we would have been jipped, we would have made the trek to Sun AM mtg instead.
We walked around times square and happened upon the tkts booth "under the red stairs". It's where you can buy discounted Broadway and off broadway tickets. The line was pretty long, so we just walked over to the theater that was showing Jersey Boys (that was jon's 1st choice and it was "on broadway"-my only requirement). They happened to be opening their doors in 10 mins for ticket sales and we ended up getting a good deal right at the theater for a 3 pm show. This was the good thing that came out of our tour guide not showing up. The tour would have gone on until 3 pm, and they weren't showing the production any other time we were there. We brought dressier summer clothes for a show, but it was so cold that we didn't feel like going back to the hotel and changing just for that.
BTW...Jersey Boys was and excellent show to see! (but in between 12:00 when we bought the tickets and 3 pm when the show was, we walked around this area of Manhattan). We ended up going into an American Eagle store. I was looking for leggings to wear under my skirt and with my flip flops (they were chaco's...but probably not made for walking around NYC for 4 days). In AE, I found a box of cards. They had 50 Adventures on Foot for NYC. So in place of our tour guide, we had these cards and would take the tours that were listed for the rest of our visit. I thought they were pretty cool and informative for a whopping $15! haha. And a fun souvenir to keep after as well. On one side of the card there was a map with the route traced and then on the other side, it had directions how to get there (what subway to take, streets to walk to) and then details about the stops you were supposed to look at, or places they thought you should maybe eat at.
Bryant Park
Locals playing Backgammon
NY Public Library
Grand Central Terminal/Station. This building we did go into...pretty amazing!
Can't really tell here, but there are constellations on the ceiling. There's a story behind them too, you can look it up online.
Gotta have a hotdog from a street vendor.
On a recommendation, we were told to eat at Vezzo's...we found it without a hitch. It was only established in 2006, but had very yummy warm thin crust pizza for the tired cold person walking around all day in her flip flops.
We did make it up a few floors in this building, but it was "poor visability" that evening so we decided to skip it and hopefully try again the next night (except the next night was the same)
Times Sq at night...it's like daylight!
No comments:
Post a Comment