Recently I made a great trip to America's largest city, the heart of world finances, famous around the world: New York City. In the following posts I will report of my first but definitely not last visit to the city. New York is also known as Big Apple and I just got my first bite of it - it's delicious, maybe a little sour every once in a while, but if life was only sweet we would not know that it was!
Friday, 02.13.09
We had left Lexington Thursday at 9.00 p.m. but there’s quite a distance between Kentucky and New York and so it took as about 12 hours to get there. So we got to NYC in the morning on Friday.
Already on our way towards the city we could see the famous skyline towering over the wide Hudson River, it looked really impressive and all the bridges that were connected Manhattan Island with the land just contributed to the great view.
We had left Lexington Thursday at 9.00 p.m. but there’s quite a distance between Kentucky and New York and so it took as about 12 hours to get there. So we got to NYC in the morning on Friday.
Already on our way towards the city we could see the famous skyline towering over the wide Hudson River, it looked really impressive and all the bridges that were connected Manhattan Island with the land just contributed to the great view.
To get on the Island we had of course, as everyone else, cross the Hudson River and we crossed it beyond the water: Our way to Manhattan, today as on the following days was the Lincoln tunnel a three tube tunnel connecting New Jersey with Manhattan. Right before we went underground we also passed the town of Hoboken, NJ, where on December, 12, 1915 Frank Sinatra was born.
Finally we could leave the tunnel, it took us quite a while in the morning traffic and the first thing that we got to see right after leaving the tunnel was a street sign: “42nd Street” Wow. We where in New York and I still couldn’t believe it. We actually dived right into the labyrinth of “Big Apple” and we would never really leave it for long till our departure on Sunday.
Our first stop on Friday morning were the NBC studios. NBC, the abbreviation for National Broadcasting Company is one of the biggest News and Entertainment networks in the US and has its headquarters right in the famous Rockefeller center in Manhattan. We took a very interesting tour through the studios, saw a late night news newsroom and the set for the famous show “Saturday Night Life” notorious especially for their great parody of Sarah Pallin in the recent presidential election campaign (done by Tina Fey). After that we had some spare time to spend and could enjoy the great sunny yet cold weather and observe the pulsing life of America’s biggest city. Right in front of the Rockefeller center there was an ice rink on a lower level and from above we could observe the fashionable New Yorkers skating and showing off their new clothes which certainly looked all a bit more trendy than I was used to.
Finally our whole group was collected and we made our first walk, some five blocks down the road thereby passing 6th Avenue and the NYC headquarter of Chase Bank, founded in 1799! I hardly ever got my mouth closed again. Finally, after getting almost hit by several of the crazy New York cabs and also gladly recognizing the huge and glamorous Audi branch in the middle of the city, we reached our destination Grand Central Station. Earlier in the last century the station was a huge subway hub, today it is still somewhat important but its main purpose shifted to a huge food court, a place where the hungry person can get pretty much every kind of food they desire as long as it doesn’t require a long time to prepare. Also in the station there is a so called word wall, a big cavern built with special bricks so that a person can talk to the wall in one corner and the person in the other corner several feet away can understand what is said despite the ongoing traffic noise. It is said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt lead conversations with his secret service agents at this place.
After everyone had eaten we got back on the bus and went out of town to our hotel in Fairfield, NJ. If we had not realized it yet we finally learned that New York is a place where everything and everyone is in a rush or as our teacher put it: “In NYC a minute has only fifty seconds if you’re lucky and forty on a usual day” she called those minutes “New York minutes”. We got to our hotel considerably late and had very little time to shower and get dressed for our event at night: We were going to visit the musical Mamma Mia with the hits of ABBA right on Broadway!! Of course we were exited, rushed as much as possible and still didn’t get ready on time.
Therefore and because of a traffic yam, obviously more people than just us had had the idea of going downtown for Friday night, we got late to the city and could not eat at the famous Hardrock Café right on times square. However we got to see Times Square at night for the first time although it doesn’t really matter whether you go there at day or night ‘cause it’s always as bright as midday. It was amazing! And still got better: The musical was just great; the performance took everyone of us back in the dancing era of the 70s. Our moods jumped high up in the theater air.
After the show we got finally to eat our Burgers from the Hardrock Café and they were not too bad considering that they had been sitting in their boxes for several hours just the French fries were not that convincing and so our trash can in the hotel got some nourishment as well.
After this great first day we all fell into our beds like dead men we were just really tired but still excited and looking forward to our second day.
