Hello again! As I mentioned last week, today I’ll be detailing Day 2 of our trip to NYC last summer. If you missed the post about Day 1, you can read it here. Day 2 was our first full day in the city, and we learned so much about traveling around the city.
One of the first and foremost things I wanted to accomplish on our trip was to eat a traditional New York bagel! In fact, I was so serious about my bagel obsession that I researched bagel shops around our hotel and marked them on our map with their own special icon.
Ridiculous? Perhaps. But you better believe I got myself a bagel every single day.
First on the agenda for Day 1 was to see Times Square. Times Square is such an iconic spot and is so completely different from pretty much everywhere else in the world. However, we needed a way to get there. While Manhattan is extremely compact, it is not feasible to walk or drive everywhere. But luckily the subway system is perfect. I always hear New York locals complaining about the subway and the people on the subway, and I’m sure that on a daily basis it becomes a bit of a hassle. But for travelling purposes it was perfect. We bought the 7-day pass and I highly recommend it to any travelers, as opposed to having to fill the metro card up with money every day.
One word of caution about the subway though – you can’t scan your card twice within a certain number of minutes because they’re trying to prevent people passing their card back to scan multiple times. However, we Houstonians are completely unfamiliar with the concept of subways and did not realize that some stops have an entrance on one side of the street to go one way, and an entrance on the other side of the street to go the other way. We made the mistake of going in the entrance on the wrong side of the street, and once we realized our mistake we were unable to scan into the correct subway station for about 5 minutes. Oops. Learn from our mistakes 🙂
Despite these setbacks, we did eventually make it to Times Square. And it certainly did not disappoint. Even in the relatively early morning hours it was full of people, both tourists and locals, and offers a ton of stuff to see and do. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the amount of lights in one area. It’s truly different from anywhere else I’ve been.
Stop two on our trip was Central Park. Before we left for our trip, we had planned out several restaurants that we wanted to try in the area and had quite an extensive list. I was surprised to find out, though, that I didn’t really end up eating at any of the planned places. We were so busy running around the city and seeing all the sights that eating really became an afterthought! In fact, I would look at the time and realize it was like 2 or 3pm, and we hadn’t eaten lunch! There was just so much to see that I completely forgot about stopping to eat. So our lunch this day turned out to be a traditional street-food NYC hot dog in Central Park!
Honestly, they were so perfect. They are ridiculously cheap, I think it was like $1 or $2 per hot dog, and I just felt so New Yorkey eating them haha.
Central Park itself turned out to be my favorite place in the city, if not my favorite place in the entire world. I am not even exaggerating. It is so beautiful. It’s especially cool to me to be sitting in the midst of a beautiful scenic lake or something and look up and see skyscrapers at the edge of the park. Very cool.
We spent actually a lot of time just walking around the various pathways and found ourselves at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We decided to buy tickets and go on in, and I am so glad we did. Obviously Houston and any other city has museums to see, but the Met is huge and beautiful. There was one room in particular that had an Egyptian tomb set up at the time which was cool, but the room itself had floor to ceiling giant windows with amazing views of central park, and actually kind of outdid whatever exhibit was in the room at the time. It was very cool and very worth the several hours we spent there.
Between Central Park and the Met, the entire afternoon slipped by without us noticing. We had also done a lot of walking and were quite tired. Speaking of the walking – I brought “cute” tennis shoes, like white keds, because I knew I would be doing a lot of walking and thought those would be good enough. I was wrong. My feet were KILLING me by the end of day 2 from all the walking. Luckily our hotel was across the street from a pharmacy so I actually went and bought shoe inserts so I could survive the rest of the trip. Again, learn from my mistakes and just go ahead and buy inserts before you get there or wear super comfy shoes.
That wrapped up Day 2, but we still had 2 more days to go on our trip! Keep reading for more updates!
Two Traveling Peas 