A TRIP TO THE CONCRETE JUNGLE: PART 1

Sometime in October, I received an email notification from Southwest about a fantastic airfare sale. I immediately hit up Kristen,a fellow med student who happens to be a very good friend (and who also happens to also be on vacation this month), and we scored $99 one-way tickets to Long Island. Thus, a trip to NYC in December was born.



We left early Monday morning and had the pleasure of devoting an entire day to travel. (One of the many perks of a cheap flight...) While I slept most of the way, Kristen managed to strike up a conversation with a female passenger on one of our connecting flights. As it turns out, she was a pediatrician and, upon our arrival to the next airport, she gave us four coupons for free in-flight drinks. This was extremely generous, considering that alcohol in-flight is around $5 per drink.

We both tried coffee and Bailey's Irish cream. It was much stronger and less glamorous than I had imagined. In fact, I think I grew a little chest hair with the burn of each sip.

I think I will stick to hot chocolate from now on.



Upon arriving in Long Island, we took a shuttle to the closest train station and then boarded a train for a one-and-a-half hour trip to Manhattan. From the train station in Manhattan, we purchased our MetroCards for the NY subway and then were off to our hostel in Brooklyn. We arrived at the hostel around 8:30pm, unloaded our luggage, and then decided to tackle the first thing on our NYC agenda: dinner.

We found a pizza place called Chubsy Wubsy's Pizza and Chicken within walking distance from the hostel. I have been to NYC once before, and let me just say this: no pizza in Oklahoma compares to this delectable, thin-crusted piece of heaven. And it's cheap, too. This humongantic piece came with a drink for the grand price of $3.00, and it was SO GOOD. I haven't decided if I would gain or lose weight if I lived here, but I guess the pizza consumption-to-walking ratio would probably determine the outcome.



After dinner, we hopped on the subway to Manhattan to explore for about an hour or so. The beauty of no agenda combined with a mass transit system is that getting lost has minimal consequences. (Thanks to the handy iPhone GPS and compass applications, getting lost was actually kind of FUN!) Not that you can really get lost in Manhattan, because the city is constantly full of hustle-and-bustle, particularly in the most touristy parts.

A pic of Radio City Music Hall. The Rockettes, unfortunately, did not make it on the itinerary.



This is located somewhere near the Rockefeller Center/ Radio City block. Christmas-time in NYC is absolutely the best!



We only had two full days in NYC to explore and found information about a NYC sightseeing hop-on/hop-off bus tour online. You even save five bucks if you purchase online, but make sure you print the confirmation page -- even though the site explicitly states that you only have to have the itinerary number upon arrival -- because they will try to tell you that you have to pay for internet to print off the voucher. But I'm not bitter or anything. Aside from any negative initial experiences, this happened to be the best way for Kristen and I to efficiently make it around the various parts of Manhattan without collapsing from exhaustion. The tour buses have seats at the top level that are open to the skyline and cityscape for optimal sightseeing and picture-taking.



What about rain? Well, the top-level of other buses were covered in some portions to protect passengers from inclement weather conditions. However, these covered portions weren't the best for pictures, as demonstrated by this one. See the scratches from the tree branches?



The biggest advantage of the buses was that we could hop off at any designated stop if we wanted to stop and look around, and a different bus would arrive in a short period of time to pick us up. Many of the pictures you see in this blog were taken while riding, and we would have never found our way to the many very cool places that we did.

The Dakota, Yoko Ono's place of residence, is one of those gems that we would have never discovered on our own. John Lennon lived here during the last few years of his life and was murdered here on December 8, 1980.



Across the street at Central Park is a memorial dedicated to Lennon called Strawberry Fields.



The date of our visit happened to be exactly 29 years to the date of Lennon's tragic death. Fans had started to place flowers and candles at the site, and we were told that a memorial service would be held later in the evening. The mood was somber, and it was an honor to be there.



Recognize this hot dog chain from any movie/television series? This is one of the few places that Kristen and I had placed on our imaginary itinerary before coming to visit. I'm not sure we would have made it if it weren't for the bus, since there is so much to do in NYC that I often found myself asking, "Now, what was it that we said we were going to do after this?"



NYC is the worst place if you have any hint of ADD, apparently.