It has been more than 4 months since our New York trip so I should probably post some of the pictures ─ and write down the things we saw and did before I forget it all. Although, I did bring my log book and wrote down every day what we did. But maybe random things will pop up in my memory while going through the pictures.
We flew from London Heathrow and I just happened to look out of the window as we were passing Windsor Castle, that’s pretty cool! :-)
Coming in to land at JFK. I don’t know if you’d be surprised to hear I took lots of pictures on the flight, of clouds and of Canada as it was passing by below us. I am scared of heights but try and stop me from staring spell bound out of a plane window. Weird! Anyway, I’ll spare you for all those cloud pictures. ;-)
I think this area we flew over, on the approach to JKF, is called Rockaway Beach.
The day we landed, I didn’t take any pictures apart from those while coming in to land. I guess not much interesting happened that day. Apart from being in a different country and having to find our way to our apartment in Bushwick (Brooklyn) for the week.
We took the Airtrain to a station called Jamaica where we changed to the J train which took us straight to where we were staying. One thing I would have loved a picture of was the first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline from the Airtrain. I actually did exclaim “OOOHH!!” when I saw it and got some funny looks from fellow passengers. :-D
We got to our apartment without any trouble at all, easy-peasy. We were pretty tired but we forced ourselves to go out and buy some provisions. Luckily, there was a supermarket just a block away and I was really happy to see that they had a great selection of vegan foods. I had been a bit worried that I’d have to do all my vegan shopping at Whole Foods or something.
September 14
After we had booked our accommodation, I found out that there was a vegan bakery two blocks away from it. I was very excited to try some donuts and croissants! It was basically the first thing we did on our first morning there. Sadly, both were a bit disappointing, so we didn’t go back.
Our first day in Manhattan! We took the subway to 34th Street and walked to New York Public Library on 42nd Street, passing the Empire State Building on the way there. I haven’t got a picture of ESB because at street level you can’t really see the part of the building that is so famous. It just looks like an other tall building.
NYPL is where I bought my favourite New York souvenir. :-)
We headed straight for the Rose Reading Room. You may remember it from Ghostbusters. It is a beautiful room.
My favourite thing at NYPL was the painted ceilings, lots of beautiful cloudscapes. ♥
I liked this quote at the entrance to the Reading Room.
Wood carved ceiling not too bad either.
I love this picture Tony took walking down the stairs to the entrance hall.
We walked up Fifth Avenue to get to Grand Central Terminal (I always thought it was Grand Central Station…) and look what was peeking through the buildings, the Chrysler Building. :-)
Right as we walked into Grand Central, there was some kind of fashion show going on.
In Grand Central there is a Danish bakery (bageri means bakery) by a famous (in Denmark) Danish chef. Tony bought a pastry, I didn’t buy anything coz nothing was vegan.
Entering the main concourse. It’s weird, it felt both larger and smaller than I was expecting at the same time.
The pictures we took of the famous ceiling in the main concourse weren’t super great, but I wanted to share this one. See that black rectangle at the centre of the picture? That is a small section left as it was before the ceiling was cleaned up in the late 1990s. The whole ceiling used to be that dirty from decades of smoke.
After we had wandered around Grand Central for a bit we decided to head to somewhere for some food. We walked past the Chrysler Building but as with the Empire State Building, it didn’t look all that exciting from the ground.
The picture above left is where we had dinner, Bare Burger. They had a very nice vegan burger. :-) I quite like the building it is in, I think I would have taken the picture regardless.
After dinner we walked over to MoMA. It was a Friday evening when they have a couple of hours where it’s free to get in. When we got there it was getting kinda late and we were still tired from the flight AND all the walking that day, so we didn’t stay very long. But atleast I can say I’ve been there!
The guy who was handing out the free tickets was being all “you get a ticket, you get a ticket and you get a ticket!” :-D
September 15
Because we had done a lot of walking on the first day, we decided we’d do something that wouldn’t involve quite as much walking, so on the second day we decided to Smorgasburg, an open-air food market in Williamsburg.
However, we got on the wrong subway train on the way there, so we had to get off and, feeling slightly lost, had to find our way to the right one. So we ended up doing a lot more walking than we had planned! But as frustrating as it was, it was also kinda cool walking through different neighbourhoods and seeing how they changed.
Anyway, I didn’t take many pictures at Smorgasburg, and none up close, but that one above is from that day. We’d bought some lunch and then retreated under some trees to be in the shade.
We were next to a kids birthday party and the kids had some very hipster names like Wolf and Luna or whatever, I can’t remember right now, but it just seemed to live up to the Williamsburg stereotype. :-)
By the way, the food at Smorgasburg was a little bit disappointing, it was mostly cooked food. I think we were imagining being able to buy delicious bread and cakes but we didn’t really see any of that.
I got a little bit obsessed with water towers and I’d excitedly point them out whenever I saw one. Tony couldn’t care less! This one was large enough to be turned what I’m sure will be a very swanky apartment!
Oh hey, it’s just me hanging out by the East River with Manhattan in the background! :-D
For some reason I was surprised to see that there was actually a beach right there by the river. I guess I thought it was all so built up that you’d not be able to get right down to the water.
I really liked this building that was covered in all these mismatched tiles. And the green door, I liked that too.
After we had our lunch and we sat in the shade for a bit to read (Tony) and sketch (me), we wandered towards the subway station but first we stopped by Whole Foods and bought some nice bread and cakes. And the air conditioning was a nice reprieve from the heat outside.
One one corner I spotted this mural by Eduaro Kobra. So colourful. Then we went back to our apartment and relaxed for the rest of the day.
