New York, before it all went horribly wrong.

So this is an account of my first few days in NYC written before the happenings of a fairly ridiculous and unfortunate new years eve, written that same morning. Notice how I mention the snow not boding well for the rest of the night? SIGNS LIAN, SIGNS.

And on the 4th day, it snowed.

So I've been in NYC since Sunday the 28th, since arriving the weather has been pretty warm (by comparison to Toronto standards) highs between 8 and 13 and lows between maybe 0 to 2 or 3 and sunny! The day before the turn of the year though and I wake up to snow. WTF. This does not bode well on nye celebrations, at least though, it's not raining, although some others prefer rain to snow, I'd rather get slightly colder than slightly wet. Although a low of -10 is dumb.

So what's happened so far? And why am I writing about it while I'm still there? The former coming in a min, the latter, well, I guess I have a free moment to update, and what better than while it's still fresh in my mind? (I know, preposterous)

So after leaving Toronto late on a Megabus (a double decker!) and being delayed at customs in Buffalo (close to 2 hours!) I finally make it to NYC 11 hours later. Thankfully I had a row of seats to myself and could kind of get some sleep on the way there. Anywho, the first day there I spent wandering around 42nd st which was near my hostel, so basically:

Times Square, which was less of a square that I thought it was going to be. It wasn't all that exciting to be completely honest. I went into the info centre which had up on display the new years ball from 2007/2008 and every half hour would do a count down with the lights going etc, apparently this year is a WHOLE NEW EXCITING BALL that will be revealed tonight =O What was also neat was they had a wishing wall where people would write their resolutions or wishes etc on bits of paper that would be collected up and used as confetti on the night, sweet. Other than that the so called square was less exciting and more flashy than expected.

Grand Central Station, which was a pretty neat structure, loved the archways and stairwells, they also had every half hour some kaleidoscope show where they would do pretty lights etc on the inside walls for 8 mins, some really nice patterns, yay lights?

Rockerfeller Centre, which spanned like 4 blocks I think, there were some pretty neat designs/carvings scattered around on various buildings. I went and saw the tree there with the trumpeting angels, tried to get some good photos but there were "pictures with the tree" staff wandering around trying to sell the space to tourists for $40 a photo or something rediculous, so I may have some random strangers in there. It was way crowded that Sunday, mainly because they were opening the skating rink just below the tree, I'm pretty sure it's the only one in the city besides the one in Central Park.

Then I wandered around to Union Square, and on recommendation went to Wholefoods for lunch. It was basically a supermarket, but all organic etc and has this amazing salad bar. They were so busy that they had like 30 checkouts or something silly, and they had a weird/smart system for it where there were 2 groups of 5 lines, each line had a colour. Basically you would chose the shortest line and each line of colour on the screen would light up whichever cashier was free and so on. Weird. It's also funny that I told Tasha (the girl I'm spending new years with here from Chicago) that I was told to go to Wholefoods as a must do while I was here as she has it also in Chicago and never really thought of it as a destination, although it is pretty good. So I ate lunch in the park, wandered around the stalls there then made my way up to Strand Bookstore to browse a million used/new books. They basically had every book on everything you ever want, which was troublesome because I really had no idea what I was looking for. But it was fun nonetheless.

Afterwards I just headed back to the hostel and magically it turned into the next day.

Day 2!

Day two finds me making my way to Hostelling International to see what time check in is, and if I can leave my bag there while I go out exploring. Turns out that check in is not until 4pm, and sure I can leave my bag there, "just remember to put your bag inside BEFORE you put in your $5"... wait, what? $5 for a locker? Wow. Nevermind then, I'll be back later.

So I spend most of Monday with both my bags on looking homeless (a pretty kind of homeless carying an expensive camera under my coat) wandering around Central Park before making my way to Brooklyn. Central Park during the winter is not so pretty, though I did get some nice photos over the resevoir. I navigate my way over to Bedford ave in Brooklyn, both bags in tow, in aims of browsing record stores and finding some mysterious band from the 80s for Karen called The Normil Hawaiians. With 3 in the vicinity, all with a pretty good reccommendation, no luck! Although I did buy a compilation cd with all sorts of good people on there. Bedford is a pretty cool ave, apparently pretty hip, didn't get much of a chance to browse around, but little did I know I would be back later... dun dun dun.

So anywho, the rest of the plan was to make my way over to the Brooklyn Bridge and walk over it, so 3 different trains and transfers later I was there! It was pretty busy and windy, but neat. After that I decide to skip Wall St as planned because it was getting late and headed straight for the Staten Island Ferry instead to catch the Statue of Liberty in the beautiful orange of dusk. Aww.

So it's about 6:30 by the time I reach the mainland again and I decide that that was a good time to go ahead and check in to HI. Basically hung out there waiting for Tasha to show up, although poor her, left late because her friend got called into court that morning (he's a lawyer) and they didn't leave til about 11:30am, which meant she got in at about 3am, which also included them getting lost trying to find some other place and finding parking in Brooklyn and then finding her way up to the Upper West Side... whew.

Tuesday!

Tuesday Tasha and I make our way back to Brooklyn to put our stuff in her car and most of the day was spent panicing about this guy we were staying with not calling us back about it, and also wandering around Brooklyn and the downtown area, and trying to find Williamsburg thinking it was walkable when really it wasn't. Nothing really mentionable happened most of the day, we went to lunch/breakfast at Perch on 5th Ave, walked around, took the subway random places, until we ended up again on 5th Ave at Bar Ries which we decided to stop at and wait until we heard from Matt, our host for the next couple of days. The bartender there was pretty cool, Tasha and I were sitting there with our drinks at the bar and our map out trying to decide on plans for the following day and what ever were we going to do for new years? When suddenly! Or perhaps more with ease our bartender asked where we were going, so we explained about our perdicament and ta-da! He was going to a 1929 new years party, with a passcode and masks and everything and if we wanted to go he would fwd an email on to us (sweet!) so afterwards we preceded to talk about random things like how we met if we were from Chicago and Toronto/NZ and about NZ and Montreal and Chicago and Music and also if we wanted to share any of his Chinese food that he ordered just after we arrived. After a couple of drinks and a phone call from Matt later (whew) we find out that he's not back until 10:30 so Bedford is a good place to hang out while we waited. By then it was about 8:30/9 and we hadn't eaten yet so it was goodbye and thanks to the bartender (after we fixed his fridge door that had fallen in from being sat on by him) and off to Bedford for dinner. A whole meal and a half later, and also a coffee we get a call with directions to Matt's house, hooray!
Did I mention how terrible those directions were? I think we spent about an hour traversing the area of Williamsburg, unable to get a hold of Matt for proper directions, and trying to decipher what information we had been given. After a really long while I get a reply as to the address of the place and by that time we had found a dairy not even close to where we were meant to be and borrowed a phone which of course left us no point in trying to call him. Luckily though we were just in time to exit the dairy before 3 police cars show up outside and walk in after us... whew.
So finally we make it, Matt with a look of confusement as to what took us so long to get there and us with a shrug of shoulders as we had previously discussed not to bring up his giant amount of fail... since of course he was doing us a favour, and of course neither of us knew him that well, Tasha only through working with his mother. So all settled in and ready for a fun day tomorrow.

Aww.

I was so tempted to edit some of that and add in things like LITTLE DID WE KNOW THAT WOULD BE OUR DOWNFALL... and things like BUT OF COURSE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN...
But I'll leave that as is.

Chapter two next!