Checking out the Big Apple

Last week, I flew from Atlanta to join my family in New York City for a short vacation. The last time I was in NYC was when I was about 6 or 7, when my aunt was still living there. However, I don't think the city has changed much since then, except maybe grown taller and more populated. We flew in at night, and seeing the city skyline while taking the taxi from the airport to our hotel reminded me of Atlanta. This post just shows some of the highlights from our vacation.

Here is a picture that I took of the nearest major intersection to our hotel. Yellow cabs were always everywhere, but we unfortunately never found the Cash Cab guy :(

We wandered around the city, and my parents stopped to ask for directions like every 5 minutes. So touristy. We passed the Empire State Building, but didn't go up there. And I realized that NYC is a Pepsi town, boo...

The above photo was taken near Madison Square Garden, which is like the famous arena area in downtown NYC. They have lots of concerts and events there.

The Chinatown in Manhattan was not very exciting, reminded me a lot of San Francisco's Chinatown (except not as exciting). The shops in Chinatown were nowhere near as good as the street market stalls in Beijing, but I suppose its not very realistic to compare Chinatown to China.

We went by the old Trinity Church on Broadway. It was hard to take photos of the large church from so close up, I should have taken this from across the street.

Then we walked around the famous Wall Street, home of the nation's top investment banking firms.

I forgot what the name of this musem is, but it is right across from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall St.

And here is the front of the New York Stock Exchange, my parents wanted to go inside and check it out but unfortunately you are only allowed inside if you are an employee. I guess they want to keep all the crazy tourist crowds away from the craziness of the trading floor.

From Wall St, we walked over to where you can take ferries to Staten Island, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. If you look on the bottom right of this photo, you can see my dad wearing his awful safari hat and my sister's light purple backpack.

I love street performers that get all dressed up like this, except they try to scam tourists and charge like $5 for a photo with them. I took a quick photo of this guy anyways.

After waiting in a ridiculous line that went through airport-style security, my sister and I took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

Here is what the military monument looked like from our ferry.

The NYC skyline in the distance looked really awesome, as seen from the ferry.

On the way to the Statue of Liberty, we passed Ellis Island. Ellis Island used to be the first place that immigrants stepped on American soil, up until 1954.

The Statue of Liberty is huge when you get close up, you can see all the little people at the bottom of the statue walking around the island look like little dots.

My sister and I also went to go see the musical Wicked at the Gerswhin Theater. Its a story about the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, and the show was great.

Then we walked down Broadway, through Times Square. There are a ton of shops along Broadway street and it really shows the hustle and bustle of NYC with all the tourists.

We went to the Hershey's store (on the right hand side of the above photo), where I found a GIANT bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup :)

We also checked out the M&M store, which incidentally was right across the street from Hershey's.

I really liked how they dressed up the M&M characters, like this green one.

And they had giant m&m's at each cash register. My sister likes the blue one.

We also walked around Central Park. We were originally going to rent bikes and bike around, but renting a bike cost $15 per hour (which was a ridiculous rip-off).

Here is the famous green lawn part of the park where people lay out in their swimsuits.

We passed a bunch of guys breakdancing in the park, trying to make money from people's donations. They weren't that impressive, this is pretty standard stuff. Of course, after seeing Step Up 3 and going to school in Atlanta for the last 4 years, I may have higher standards for breakdancing haha (though I can't do it myself).