Happy Birthday to us....Jon and I jetted off to NY for a quick 4 days recently.

I've been planning to do this for my (cough30thcough) birthday since I turned 29. 

My birthday is the 15th and Jon's is the 26th (tomorrow) so we were kind of celebrating them together. We left Friday night, stayed with some lovely friends in the cities and he took us to the airport bright and early Saturday morning (actually, I don't remember it being very bright yet). 

 We made the 1st two parts of the trip...airport to bus and now looking for the subway....

 We found the subway and made it down to the general area of the hotel...saw a few things on the way to the hotel.

 We got to the hotel around 1 pm, but our room wasn't ready so we stuck our bags in a corner and they let us up to the restaurant lounge/balcony area of the hotel. We were directly next door to where the twin towers were. These 2 gray squares are going to be Memorial Pools, the white weird shaped thing is like a museum/memorial building, and there are about 4 other buildings going up around this area that are all part of the World Trade Center things. Tower 1 is at the top left corner of this picture. The pools/museum sites are set to open on 9/11/11. There is constant working around the clock, but we never noticed it in our hotel room.

We could see NJ from the hotel too.

 The building in the middle that looks 1/2 finished is Tower 1.

 We still couldn't check into the room yet, so we decided to wonder around in hunt for some food. There's only 18,000 restaurants in Manhattan....shouldn't be too hard to find food. We walked over to the Hudson River (there was a walking path that went along the river) and we saw the Statue of Liberty (behind Jon).

One of the many fruit stands/vendors on the corners/streets.

 In this crazy city filled with people, buildings and restaurants, you could turn around a corner and find a little garden plot or park. It's pretty neat to see green in the midst of all the gray colored buildings.

Some locals

Our 1st place in NYC to eat

 Jon orders the TX burger (we're in NYC!) and I ordered the beef gyro. Pretty tasty and a lot of it too!

 I took a picture of this...wasn't really sure what it was/is, then looked it up later. It was the location of the very very early stock exchange.

 U.S Custom's House

We found Wall St. Our hotel was in the very lower part of Manhattan...Financial District area.

 One of 7 (?) Trump Building's in NYC.

Statue of George Washington and where he took the oath of the 1st US President.

 Gotta take a few pics of the subways. We either walked or took the Subway (now that i'm home I found a map of the bus system/routes...we tried to figure that out ourselves and it didn't work out so well, so we mostly walked or rode the subway system. We never once felt unsafe too. We were pretty much out of the hotel from 8:30 AM untl 10:30/11-ish at nights.

  

We went to a Yankees vs Mets game in the Bronx. There is no personal space on public transportation as we found out, and I'm pretty sure no limit to the # of bodies on the subways either.

There are youtube videos that people have posted online of the towers collapsing...taken from in apartments/offices and on the street level. I've seen some of them in the past and tried to get a feel for what it would have been like. I had always wondered where the fire stations were, how far away help was...turns out this fire station was right across the street. Some of the fire fighters lost their lives. This was a memorial put up for them. 

Oouuff....our feet are tired...off to bed, end of 1st day. But feeling very amazed at how much we've seen of the city so far!