New York City - Part 1
8/14/2006
So I drove down from Berkeley to LA a couple of days before to enjoy the weekend in LA. Taking an early morning flight out of LAX, so early that none of the coffee shops were even out in LAX. Makes you wonder how those crazy businessmen do it all the time.
Hours later, we flew into JFK. It has been years I have been to this metropolitan. My memories of New York City were not fond back then. It was HOT, HUMID, and smelled REALLY bad . But then, I was only 13, what did I know about the multicultural diversity, the fashion explosion, the rapid urban lifestyle, or even the stock market. All I remembered back then was the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Phantom of the Opera, Time Square (and this crazy Japanese group harassing one of the kids in our group), and some pizza from the chain restaurant (you know the one, red with white lettering, italian food place, found in all the malls). That time, travelling along the east coast was an interesting experience.
This time, I came into NY in a completely different way. Granted, we came by air, I've grown a lot older, and I have a college degree, a job, and some pocket money. But this time, New York has changed, hell, the whole world changed on my 18th birthday. Even that hasn't changed New York that much, or so they say.
For me, New York City has become a much bigger place, it was no longer just Broadway and Wall Street. It was Chinatown, South St. Seaport, Central Park, Washington Square, Little Italy, Greenwich Village, Midtown, Harlem, SoHo, etc. It has become Manhattan, a world in of itself, a world that could not be explored fully in a week or even a month. But 5 days is plenty for any tourist in NYC, you eventually run out of fun tourist locations and begin looking for special places that even locals visit.
But this is not all of the culture and wonders of NYC, there's Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, etc. There's just so much more to NYC than just Manhattan. As a visitor and a guest, I don't know enough about the area to say much anything compared with the NY Times and the tens of thousands of writers that have written about NYC and everything in it.
We'll just walk through this together, I'll go through my memories of NYC again, and you can come along and see.
Tonight, I'll just leave you with a picture from South St. Seaport lookin' up the river at the Brooklyn Bridge (which is not lit due to energy conservation concerns).
Posts
