New York : the city of lights, tall old buildings, bridges, subways, suits and dark glasses, and fashion on the streets. This never sleeping city also has narrow crowded roads, honking yellow taxi cabs, roadside vendors. After a continuous work week of about 45-50 days I really needed a break, planned for the NewYork trip. Though this could not the ideal vacation when you want get away from everyone and everything (probably I needed a vacation in a beach)...but it worked out pretty well. Came back tired but yet rejuvinated.

Day 1:

We started from Denver in the evening and reached New York La Guardia airport at about midnight. The view of the glimmering city below from the airplane was awesome. It was a neverending canopy of light. Funny thing was though when we tried to identify the Brooklyn bridge from the top, we really got confused.. all the bridges looked beautiful , huge and covered with green lights and all of them looked almost the same. Finally we let go of the curiosity of ours, and decided to wait to see the bridge in the daylight. We checked in our hotel, which was in the center of Manhattan; the room was really small and clumsy even though the hotel was a four star and I had read a pretty good review. I knew New York and especially Manhattan would be costly and clumsy, this was a bit too much for my expectation. The room was neat though and the service was pretty good. Another boo was, there was no free internet.. later turned out that was a blessing in disguise. Life without cellphone, pager and internet ... now that is a vacation!! However we paid about ten bucks and took internet on the last day, when we needed to check out online for our flight to denver and needed some help from Google map. Well that night, we did not worry much about the room and internet and the next days plan and just dashed into the bed.

Day 2:

Got up at about 8:00 am, got ready, had some quick breakfast and Statue of liberty was on our list first, as it was a friday we expected the crowd to be a bit less on that day, and that turned out to be true. We checked with the hotel consigliere, and he suggested us to take the subway to go to the Battery park from where we can take the ferry to Statue of Liberty. The subway was just outside the hotel, we bought a one day unlimited metro pass each, and boarded the metro train. And yes, we took a map of NY and toutist guide from the hotel reception, which was very helpful during our entire trip. The metro train was pretty crowded, which was expected, it being a work day and ofcourse peak hour. My first impression on the NY subway, it was old and unclean (when things get so old, it really difficult to keep them clean - that was my friend's logic), there were grafittis all ober the underground walls. But I have to admit, subway makes the commute in NY so much easier and convenient. It is like an underground grid, which covers almost the entire city. And you can find metro staions every cuple of blocks, especially in the busy areas.

Well, lets get back to our trip. We could find Battery park quite easily, got the tickets, and stood in the queue for the ferry. The crowd seemed quite a lot, but when we saw the ferry we realized, it really not one of busiest of days. Just after one hour of reaching battery park we were in the ferry, security checking time included. It was cold, cloudy, foggy and a bit windy. But have survived Denver cold, we really did not care for the weather in NY. And the sun kept coming out of the clouds once in a while, making it quite more pleasant. We got to the top floor of the ferry, and finally we were able to see the real Brooklyn bridge . And ofcourse Statue of Libetry and Ellis island; which relates to the history of US immigration. It took us about 15-20 minutes to reach the Liberty island. We could get into the monument; the pedestal of the statue. There was a small museum inside, with the history of the statue and how it was designed, built and assembled in ths island. We climbed about 300 steps to reach the top of the pedestal and just below the feet of the statue. That is how far the visitors can get to, there are steps within the statue to get to the crown of the statue.. but thats closed for visitors, probably only the maintenance crew can get to the top. We could see the entire island and Newyork skyline from the top (of the pedestal), the view was lovely. The best part was it was not too crowded, thanks to our plan of coming here on a weekday.

We spent there couple of hours and took the ferry, which has another stop at Ellis island. We decided not to get down there, as we were getting hungry and were not really in a mood for another museum on the very first day. Another reason was we did not have much to do with US immigration history.. none of our forefathers came to US and setteled here. We took the ferry back to the city and went to Wall street, the financial district. First thing and probably only thing you would notice there is.. its all black. Limos, suits, dark glasses everything was black and people were in such a hurry as if the entire world's operating machine runs from here. Streets were narrow as usual and buildings were tall; sunlight could barely touch the ground. We walked past those busy bustling street and went to the WTC site, now which is just a construction site for the new WTC; which is being planned to be built in a bigger and more vibrant fashion than the earlier one.

I had always wanted to try the street food in New York, but most of it being meat was a real constraint. While roaming around near the WTC site, suddenly the aroma of hot and yummy falafel distracted us. Without any difficulty we found out the mobile food station, and we ordered some falafel combo. The order and delivery was fast, and we sat on the marble chairs nearby under the open sky (whatever piece of it was visible from the concrete jungle) and enjoyed our late lunch. Ah! the food was heavenly (some contribution was of our very hungry tummys). With our stomach full, we roamed around a bit.. did some window shopping and started for the Brooklyn bridge. We had to walk a bit more this time to find out the bridge...but streets of NY
would never let you get bored. The bridge was evidently very old and the had a rustic and romantic feeling about; I still could not point a finger at the exact reason of my feeling so though. We just took a walk along the bridge, while sun went down; and I could feel the bridge is so serene and peaceful even being inside one of the busiest cities in the world, and among the bustling traffic over it.

It was getting dark when walked back from the bridge, we were quite tired to visit any other places. We just went to 5th avenue, the shopping district and did some window shopping on guess what.. some jewelery stores (which none of were are even remotely in to). But it just happened that we got down from the metro and ended up in that jewelery street and really did not put much effort to get out of there. So we just roamed around for a while and got back to hotel. After getting freshened up and taking rest for could of hours we went out in search of some good food. Did not have to go too far, just below our hotel was a Greek restaurant. Food was okay, but I could not get some proper dessert as it was too late and they were out of stock (dessert ). All I could get was chocolate ice cream, which was not so bad either.

So there ended the second day at NY, it was a day well spent, though tiring. We all went to bed to gain back our energy for the next day..............