Sunday, NYC

After a really long day yesterday and late night, we just slept til we woke up.  Left the room and went back to McDonald's for breakfast.  I think Ronnie had dreamed about the Bacon, Egg and Cheese biscuit that he knew was close by.  After eating, we decided we needed to go back to the room and get our jackets...cooler than it was yesterday.  Then we set out.

Freedom Tower

Used our Hop On Hop Off Tickets that we bought online today...we got the All Tour 48 hour...gave us the Downtown, Uptown, Nighttime (not a HOHO), and Brooklyn and Bronx Tours.  We did the Downtown (lower end of Manhattan) and the Uptown (Central Park area).  We decided to just stay on the bus all day and then go back tomorrow to see a certain area if we wanted.



Greenwich Village

So, we got on the Downtown bus (upper tier/open air) and drove.  Went thru Times Square (again--we've spent entirely too much time in that busy place), Greenwich Village, SoHo, Battery Park, Wall Street, Freedom Tower, South Street Seaport, Chinatown, Little Italy, East Village, United Nations Headquarters, back to the TSq area.  It was  a cool tour.  Our guide was Jamaican (or similar) and talked fast and faster--when in the faster mode, his dialect really came out and he was hard to understand.  We got the gist of his spiel, but not all.  This tour without any hopping off took about 2 1/2 hours or so. 

Chinatown

Bill Cosby got his start here-Greenwich Village

When we got off, we got a drink and walked a few blocks and got on the Uptown Bus.  My favorite.  We had an excellent guide.  She spoke slowly and without any accent.  Gave good history and we understood every word.  We left and started out toward Central Park....packed with people:  riding in horse drawn carriages, biking, walking, playing frisbie, all kinds of things cooking, musical acts...you name it.   We went up on the Upper West Side first where normal New Yorkers live.  Nice neighborhoods with stores lined along the area.  Highrise apartments with a shop/store underneath.   We saw the apartment buildings that Denzil Washington and other notables either own or live in....too much information to absorb.  Drove by Museum of Natural History, Grant's Tomb, the Cathedral of St John Divine (huge--too big to even begin to get in the camera frame), Washington Bridge.

SCENES FROM HARLEM

Then we entered Harlem....not at all what we expected.  Clean, neat, safe looking.  I'm thinking EAST Harlem is the area to avoid and we didn't go there.  She mentioned that the boundaries of Harlem had been pushed back after the crime was cleaned up in the 90's.  She showed us the building where Clinton put in an office (to make "a statement") and since then has driven small business owners out and fewer apartment rentals because his action drove the prices up so much.

SCENES FROM UPPER WEST SIDE:

Grant's Tomb



Jackie Kennedy's apartment  1040 5th Avenue across from Central Park

Then we came down 5th Avenue on the Upper East Side where $$$$$'s float down from heaven

Upper East Side Apartments

or Wall Street, wherever.  Apartments, if you can find one, run $50,000 and up a month.  Several million to buy.  Jackie Kennedy lived here.  Joan Rivers has an apartment just off 5th.  The guide commented that the normal (whatever is called normal when you can afford to live here) people really don't like for the celebrities to live in the area because of the attention it brings in.  But there are several that do live in this area. 

The Chinese couple with whom we had dinner one night on the cruise lives in an apartment in this area....3rd and 65th.  We drove past 65th while on 5th and looked down a couple of blocks.  There were two buildings tall enough to be the one they live in.  Very, very interesting.

I really enjoyed this section of the tour where people live...not anything like we live.  They were out walking their dogs, shopping, doing normal things, but so different than our way of life.

There are 8 million plus people living in NYC.  I think, as we drove through all the different neighborhoods that we did today, we must have seen all 8 million.  It's hard to describe the number of people we saw.  Each neighborhood had it's unique food smells.  What a city.

Metropolitan Museum

The Uptown Tour took us to almost 5 p.m. It was getting really chilly on the bus.  There were some areas where the wind just came whistling down through the buildings.  It ended on 47th street and we walked back to 42nd where we had spied earlier the Dallas BBQ Restaurant.  That was where we ate dinner.  Wonderfully good BBQ.  Just right sauce....rivals Mean Pig, Scott.

Walked back to the hotel by 6 p.m and showered and calling it a day.  Not sure what's on the agenda for tomorrow.  I do want to go back to Central Park area ...love looking at the Upper East Side apartment buildings.  I know I'll be watching more and more of "Selling New York" on HGTV now--might even know where the neighborhood is that they are talking about.

Young designers get their start here near the Fashion District

Our hotel is on the edge of the Fashion District and we've seen scattered fabric shops on our routes.  I want to walk a little deeper into the District just to see what's there.  We touched on another edge of it today on one of the tours.

NYC is very easy to walk.  After getting our bearings the first day, we've not needed the GPS on the phone at all.  The avenues are numbered and run North and South.  The streets are numbered and run East and West with 5th avenue dividing east from west.  Broadway throws a kink into that grid by running diagonally across, but it's so congested down there, you just try to get out and then re-group. 

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