After more than six months of planning and talking about our New York trip, we’re finally here!! Our trip got off to a pretty rough start- Audrey fell and screwed up her ankle and couldn’t walk, I lost my camera charger, Audrey’s iPod got lost (and found about an hour before we left), we forgot one of our New York Passes (our ticket to get into everything in NYC for “free”) and both of our flights got delayed because of massive snowstorms in the Northeast. We both came into this trip pretty tired from a long week before Spring Break. Audrey especially had a ton on her plate leading up to leaving. We packed at the last possible instant until her parents came to pick us up and take us to the airport. We grabbed a quick lunch on the way there and arrived at the airport in time to find out that our flight had been delayed by an hour- which wasn’t bad except that we had a 45 minute layover in Baltimore. Luckily, that flight got delayed too so we ended up with plenty of time to sit around and for me to get obnoxiously excited before we actually flew out. Poor Audrey put up with so much of my bouncing off the walls before we actually made it to the city.
I'm juuuuust a tad bit excited to be here
We flew in with an amazing view of Manhattan- all the lights of the city bright in the window, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building standing out on the skyline. Once we landed and got our luggage we headed out into the cold to catch a taxi to Harlem where we had our hotel. I realized I’ve been in a hundred taxis in other countries but never in one in the US. Definitely a different experience. For starters, it cost a LOT more than $2, but it also had a built in touch screen with a TV, map, and info setup for us to read through as we rode. We were way more interested in looking around than reading though. We got our first views of some of the bridges and buildings of New York although we were still pretty far North relative to all the exciting stuff.
We made it to our hotel, Aloft Harlem, without incident and made our way to the front desk. As we tried to check-in, we were shouting over the club music playing the “lounge” where a million people were hanging out, drinking, playing pool, and generally being incredibly loud. Nevertheless, we got all of the details worked out and headed up to our room. Audrey told me to stop saying it, but I couldn’t help but use the word “trendy” over and over and over to describe our hotel. Everything was sleek, modern, hip and…trendy!! From squishy gel floors in the elevator to our cone shaped sink, to the enormous TV in the room, everything was so…trendy!! Such a nice treat for our week here!
By the time we dropped our stuff off, it was 11:00 and we still hadn’t eaten dinner so we set out for our first bit of exploration around the hotel. Since New York Pizza is supposed to be pretty famous, we found a local “Italian” pizzeria which turned out to be run by a bunch of people speaking Spanish with recent Latin pop hits playing in the background (which I didn’t mind in the least). Whatever works!
Enjoying my first bite of "New York style pizza"
We came back tonight very very tired but excited to finally be here. Looking around the hotel room and realizing how much we were going to want to rest, I kept repeating “We have to actually leave the room this week!” and I was only half-joking. After a bit of an interesting start to the day, I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next seven days of exploration will hold. But for now, sleep.