Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Thanksgiving in NYC
October 14, 2010, 10:06 pm
We headed down to New York City over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, taking Tuesday off as well for a total of four days of vacation. I’ve never been on a “real” visit to NYC before, as my past experience involved a whirlwind Chinese tour in middle school (four major cities in four States in like four days). My memories from that trip consisted of the crazy taxi drivers, climbing the Statue of Liberty first thing in the morning, and driving between the World Trade towers.
Transportation
To maximize our time, we decided to take the overnight bus down on Friday night, and fly back from New York. The advantage of this is that the bus ride is cheap ($40), we save a night of hotel, and taxes are much lower flying out of NY than out of Toronto. The disadvantages, as we learned, is that traffic on a Friday of a long weekend is horrible (3 hours to get from Waterloo to Greyhound station, via 407 and TTC from Finch), and the bus lines are insane. Apparently it doesn’t matter what time you buy your bus tickets for; it’s first come first served so just get in line and get on the next available bus. So if you arrive 15 min before your scheduled time, you’re in for a loooong night (oops). Also, they may advertise free wifi, but chances are good that it won’t be working.
For the flight back, there are three airports to choose from. We booked too late to get the good Porter prices, so settled on Continental instead. They both flew out of Newark. We took the New Jersey train there out of Penn Station, and wow, the NJ trains are old. And old-fashion. They still have conductors punching your tickets at your seat, and leaving paper slips to mark your departure stop. And the lack of signs and marking on the trains themselves were annoying. Another lesson learned is to avoid propeller planes if possible, they are old, loud, and prone to mechanical issues. Our flight was delayed 2 hours, the plane hadn’t even left Toronto by our scheduled departure time from EWR, and the flight is only 1 hour!
Accommodations
On the accommodation front, a hotel in Jersey City is not a bad choice. The rates are much cheaper and the rooms are bigger. The PATH subway runs 24 hours, so as long as your hotel is near the Hoboken or Newport station, it’s fairly convenient.
Shopping
The main focus of this trip revolved around shopping and eating (we had a goal to eat something every 2 hours). We visited a bunch of speciality stores (Nintendo, Apple, Lego, FAO Schwarz Toys) and discount department stores (Filene’s Basement, Century 21).
Shopping at B&H was a pretty cool experience though. There is an overhead trolley system throughout the entire store, you place your order at a counter, your items magically rows up in a green plastic bin, it’s inspected, and then the bin is sent to the front. You get an order slip and you are free to shop at another area. At the end, you take your total to the cashier, pay, and then pick your stuff up as you exit. They already have an army of people upstairs to help customers, I can’t imagine how many people are working behind the scene in the inventory section. I mean, Mike ordered some pretty obscure products and they still appeared in minutes. If only they had tours!
Food
New York is such a food mecca but it’s still a challenge to find places to eat without pre-planning, local knowledge (or a data plan). We mostly relied on letting the locals show us around and yelp. Apparently Japanese Izakaya are pretty common there, whereas in Toronto, there’s just GUU (and apparently a few other places now that I know what to google for). On one memorable evening, we had Japanese tapas, Korean bar, and fusion dessert all within a few stores from each other. Had to decline a Belgium fries place due to lack of stomach capacity.
We also went out of our way to visit the Bouchon Bakery at the Time Warner Center and check out Per Se (to complete my photo collection). Delicious pastries for breakfast followed by a walk through Central Park.
For some reason, cupcakes are all the rage there right now. Did not appreciate.
More Lessons
- Double check if a restaurant is open for lunch. It happened twice that traveled to a restaurant to find that it only opened for dinner (Ninja and the 1st Ave Rosa Mexicano location)
- Starbucks has free wifi
- MET admission is “recommendation” only, so technically you don’t have to pay to get in
- For the subway, black dot means the station is serviced by local trains only; express train stops at white dots
- Red and green globe lights at the subway stops does not indicate the line colour as we originally thought, but whether the station is open 24 hours or not
Overall, we felt that visiting NYC is like visiting Hong Kong without the jetlag. Maybe it’s the constant walking, eating, crowding, fancy shopping, and sore throat-inducing bad air quality, it was an experience we normally associate with Asian cities than a North American one. Will definitely go back regularly though.
Photos on Facebook.
Tagged: Travels
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© Maggie Tam 2007-2011 www.onechopstick.ca
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