Woke up bright and early on Friday to catch a flight to NYC. First time ever being there, so was pretty excited. Just thinking about the stuff we had planned though was tiring! So much to do, in some little time. Today we would see, Battery Park, Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Financial District, Ground Zero, Bloomingdales, and Empire State Building - all in the span of 12 hours!After landing at the airport in EWR, found out neko's plane got delayed. So while waiting, scouted the airport and found some info about NYC, and also finally finished looked and sorted through the wedding pics.
After rendevouzing with neko, we went to the hotel to drop off our bags, then off we went to the subway to head to downtown NYC! Just like with Vanc, the buying of a subway ticket is ever so perplexing. Must have spent at least 5 minutes figuring out how to pay for the pass... First we went to the booth to ask what the best value would be (after staring at the sign for like a minute), then I pull out a credit card -- to be pointed to the machine since the booths do not take credit card. I get to the booth and try to stick the card in, and it does not recognize it. Try to stick in cash, but machine doesn't return change more than $20... So we went back to the booth to pay for the pass... lol. Either I am very dumb with subways, or it's just EXTREMELY difficult to understand...lol
First stop was getting to Battery Park to hop onto a ferry to the island with Statue of Liberty. So here we were, lining up for the ferry, and we see the audio tour and an ferry ride ticket. Thinking 'oh, it'd be nice to have an audio tour of the Statue of Liberty', here some history, etc., we spent $8 more to get this 'audio' package. WE get on the ferry, get to the island, and then realize that apparently, you can't actually go into the Statue of Liberty unless you book in advance... So we ended up just walking around the island, taking pictures of the Statue outside... all the while with these $8 headsets... Feel so jibbed!
Visited Ellis Island afterwards, and that was pretty interesting. The audio tour was very useful there. Spent a good hour I think there. Returning back to the main downtown island around 6ish, headed up the financial district and saw the bull. Lots of people were taking pictures of the front of it, but not so much the back... Dropped by ground zero as well -- only to realize that ground zero was no longer ground zero anymore. On top of where it is, they were building the new thing on top of it, but knowing the history and looking at the size of the construction site... can only imagine how scary and shocking it was when the building collapsed that day...
After strolling around, we headed up to the bloomingdale mall area, only to realize most of the shops were closed by 8ish. There were a few places opened though - so we looked at a few. I ended up buying a much needed new pair of jeans from Old Navy for $14.50 w/tax! Loooove half price sales!
After the 10 hours worth of walking, we headed back to the hotel for a quick break, before heading out for some food and the Empire State Building. It was actually a pretty hot day - I felt very sticky and gross, and I keep thinking if it's because of the big city and all the pollution/smog that must be there.
We arrived at the Empire State building at around midnight - only in NYC will an 'attraction' be opened till 2am in the morning! Turns out the place we were staying at was only 2 blocks from it. So walking to there was a breeze. There were soo many people still at lined up at this hour. The good thing though was that it wasn't too cold up at the top of the Empire State building -- that or I just was very happily playing with my camera and lens taking pictures of the night lights of NYC. It took awhile for me to find myself a temporary tripod so I could get a nice picture - good thing Neko's camera pouch came to the rescue! With it, I was able to set the camera still on a slightly declining angle, so I could take pictures of the city. More pics of today to come later once I upload them onto SkyDrive. 
After I think a good hour or two up there taking pictures... we headed back down, and then called it a night. The plan originally would have had us waking up at 9am or something like that, but with my great persuasion skills, we set the alarm for 10am! wuhahaha!
To be continued...
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