Chapter 24 - Spending Time in the Big Apple - New York City

Hi, it's Corp & Tammy again...this time sharing the second week of our 2-week adventure in New York City!

On July 12, we moved from Chelsea to the Lower East Side. We stayed at the Citizen M Bowery hotel.

What an experience! Everything in the room (lights and TV) were run by an IPad, which was very weird to us. Each night we had different color lights for the bathroom night light. The red lights made it look like the intro to a horror film.


The room was 151 sq. ft. in size. Smaller than a cruise ship room.

The co-working space was a neat design feature in the lobby.


Here I am one morning working in the co-working space. It was hard for me to concentrate with so many people around. I preferred working in our room, but happy I tried it.

Great view from our hotel room.

We tried gelato the first time....Ferreo Roche flavor.

Corp loved the Ferrero Roche flavor.....chocolate and hazelnut deliciousness!

We were told WoHop was the best Chinese restaurant in Chinatown and they were right. It was delicious!

The chicken fried rice and lomein were delicious. It was our first basement restaurant. It was weird walking down the basement steps and not knowing what we were stepping into.

There were tons of $1 bills on the walls.

We watch all five seasons of the "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" tv show,
so we were excited to learn WoHop was the location of the
final scene in the series finale.

We enjoyed two dinners in Little Italy.

Such a cool illuminated sign!

The bruschetta at LaMore' was delicious!

We also tried a cannoli in Little Italy. A cannoli is a tube-shaped Italian dessert that consists of fried pastry dough stuffed with a sweet, creamy cheese filling. Corp was not a fan.

Little Italy has a large fruit market on the sidewalk.

The market had lots of fruits that were new to us.

We tried a lot of new ethnic foods in New York. We really enjoyed bagel and lox (brined salmon and cream cheese sandwich) at the almost 100 year old Russ & Daughters Cafe. We asked them to make us their most famous sandwich. Little did we know we would be getting a $27 bagel sandwich.

Despite its price, it was really delicious!

After the bagel and lox, we were off to try another Jewish tradition...knish's at The Original Yonah Schimmel A knish is a snack consisting of mashed potatoes wrapped in paper-thin pastry dough that is fried or baked. We tried baked jalapeno and plain potato knishes. They were very filling.

Happy we tried them, but don't need to order them again.

We enjoyed our favorite New York style pizza in the Lower East Side at Nolita Pizza. The buffalo chicken pizza with drizzled spicy honey was the best. Spicy honey (honey, red chili peppers, and vinegar) is now my new favorite condiment.

We were really excited to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge....wow, was it windy! The Brooklyn Bridge is a 1.3 mile suspension bridge that connects Brooklyn and Manhattan on the southern end of Manhattan.

When the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

Video of us on the Brooklyn Bridge.

On the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge is the DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood.

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Beautiful shot of the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO.

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https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1voc4y68kQ04FITPhqGYn5uEj9w4qLTBA

Picture of the Brooklyn Bridge from below.

On July 14, we jumped on the subway for the umpteenth time and headed down to the Financial District to check out Wall Street.

It was pouring rain when we went to Wall Street.

The New York Stock Exchange was not quite as large as we were expecting.

I couldn't resist a photo with the "Fearless Girl" bronze sculpture on Broad St.
across from the New York Stock Exchange.

It was pouring rain when posing with the "Charging Bull" sculpture.

Everyone told us to ride the free Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. The ferry ride didn't disappoint.

Staten Island is totally different than Manhattan.
It's like a 1940's neighborhood in our hometown.

Here we are on the Staten Island Ferry going back to Manhattan.
The Financial District at the tip of Manhattan in in the background.

The tallest building in the photo above is the One World Trade Center. It is on the site of the 2 towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed in terrorist attacks on 9/11. I discovered it's the tallest building in the U.S. and in the Western Hemisphere, and 7th tallest building in the world.

On the way to see the One World Trade Center, we saw this crazy looking building.

Turns out it's called The Oculus and is home to 12 subway lines and a shopping mall.

Corp inside the Oculus. It was an enormous space.

Here I am outside of the One World Trade Center.

The 911 Memorial features twin waterfall pools surrounded by bronze parapets that list the names of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. I found it very moving and can't imagine what it must have been like during the terrorist attacks.

A white rose was placed in some of the cut out names.
I later discovered it signifies their birthday.

On July 18, after a fun bar crawl, we decided to buy tickets to go up to the observation tower on the 85th floor of the Empire State Building.

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=13Fgqb0Y2ft_Ah9An3u3bK29tLLJDZi9M

Empire State Building lit at night.

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Inside the lobby of the Empire State Building.

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Say cheese!

The views were stunning, but not worth the $50 ticket. There were so many people on the tour that it felt like we were cows moving as a herd.

On July 15, we met with my cousin Amy, who was born, raised, and still lives in New Jersey. As a kid, I always called her my super cool East Coast cousin. I'm so glad I reached out to her on Facebook and we were able to schedule a lunch date. We can't wait to see her and her husband Bob again!


Highlight of our trip for me....Amy and I haven't seen each other for at least 40+ years.

Later that day, we were off to see Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. The sung-through musical follows Alexander Hamilton from his early life as a poor orphan in the Caribbean, to his ascendency as the right-hand man of George Washington, to his death in an infamous duel with Aaron Burr.

We didn't like Hamilton because the set never changed and all the lines were sung,
which was really hard to understand.

I actually looked up the show on Wikipedia to understand what was going on. We really enjoyed the Back To The Future - The Musical we saw the week before so there will definitely be another Broadway show in our future.

On July 17, we took our longest subway ride(about 45 minutes) to Coney Island. It features several separate amusement parks and Brighton Beach is beautiful. It was so crazy hot walking on the boardwalk, but definitely worth the subway ride.

In the end, we did almost everything we had on our list of things to see and do. We were disappointed that we couldn't get Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert tickets because of the writers strike. We didn't make it to a comedy show in The Village. And we didn't make it to the Today Show to see a live show. We saved those things for our next trip.

The map below shows the 30+ neighborhoods in Manhattan. The purple circles show where we stayed. We quickly discovered every neighborhood is unique with a very distinctive personality. We really liked the Chelsea neighborhood and I would like to stay in the East Village next time because it had a great neighborhood vibe versus a tourist vibe.