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The Woolleys, all four of them, Martin, Marina, Bekky and Jack, flew to New York on the 27th December and checked into the Grand Hyatt hotel, sandwiched in between the famous Chrysler Building and the quite splendid Grand Central station in Midtown West. After checking in, we had a wander.... basically this was the girls' way of mapping out the key shopping locations :-) Afte rthat we just chilled out in the hotel room and fell asleep quite early (New York is 5 hours behind London).
After a great breakfast, Marina and Bekky headed straight to Macy's and Bloomingdale's whilst Martin and Jack headed across to 9th to visit the truly awesome B&H Photo and Video shop that Martin's friend Michael McNally had recommended. Martin bought a new Canon EFS 17-85mm lense for his camera and Jack bought a memory card for his phone so he can fit more Trivium and Slipknot onto it.
After shopping, we all met outside Madison Square Garden where we had tickets to see New York's famous basketball team The Knicks play against the Denver Nuggets. It was a great game in a packed arena... but sadly the Knicks lost!
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Jack with our hotel and the Chrysler Building in the background. |
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Grand Central Station. |
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The Chrysler Building again. |
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The Empire State Building which Martin and Jack walked past on the way to B&H. |
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Madison Square Garden |
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The Knicks! | ||
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Knicks 110, Nuggets 117 :-( |
Monday's highlights were going to the mind-numbingly bizzare "M&M World", seeing the Broadway show Wicked and meeting up with Michael McNally, his daughter Katie and her New Yorker friend Dan for dinner at the wonderful little Moustache restaurant in Greenwich Village. After dinner, Michael drove us around various spots of interest, including South Street Seaport where we had a great view of Brooklyn across the river (and expert commentary from local boy Dan) and the DUMBO neighbourhood in Brooklyn itself, where we could look back across the river at Manhattan island.
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Grand Central Station, the Grand Hyatt Hotel and the Chrysler Building. |
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Buildings by Bryant Park. |
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Crossing 7th avenue near Times Square. |
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Cool truck! |
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Mmmmmmm..... M&Ms! |
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Lots of them...! |
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Look closer..... |
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...and closer...! |
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Buildings visible from our hotel room.... |
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New York has the best architecture.... |
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Today's plan was to visit Ellis Island. So we bought subway tickets and travelled down to Bowling Green station by Battery Park, which is where the ferry travels from. However.... it turned out that we had to queue up for over an hour just to buy ferry tickets and then were faced with queueing for another 2-3 hours to catch the ferry. And it was *bitterly* cold. So instead, Martin queued for tickets and bought ones for a specific, reserved time of 10a.m. the next day. This meant we could just turn up tomorrow and go straight into the much shorter queue for people with reservations.
After buying tickets for Ellis Island, we walked through the streets around Wall Street and saw the New York Stock Exchange and the Charging Bull statue. Unfortunately the statue was completely crawling with tourists and it wasn't possible to see it properly and certainly not to photograph it.
We continued on foot over to South Street Seaport where we'd learned the night before, an exhibition called Bodies was showing. The exhibition is all about the human body... and features dissections of 20 real human cadavers. And it was fascinating.
Marina, Bekky and Jack went to Ground Zero and then to Times Square for more shopping. Martin walked back to the hotel on foot, all the way from South Street Seaport, up through Soho, Greenwich Village, the Flatiron district and back into Midtown, taking photos.
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From the hotel room again |
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And again |
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The East Coast Memorial in Battery Park. |
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The Ney York Stock Exchange |
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Tall ships at the South Street Seaport | ||
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The Brooklyn Bridge |
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Empire State Building |
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The wonderful Flatiron Building | |
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Armed with our reserved tickets, we once again travelled down to Battery Park on the subway and this time boarded the ferry to Ellis Island. The ferry first stops at the Status of Liberty island so we had a very good view of the statue on the way over. Ellis Island itself was absolutely fascinating and in some ways quite inspiring. We went on a ranger guided tour (Ellis Island is operated by the National Park Service so it has rangers stationed there) which was quite brilliant; packed with information but funny too.
Oh by the way... it was snowing and *really* cold!
After the Ellis Island trip, we travelled up to the east side of Central Park and visited the Guggenheim Museum. It's more of an art gallery than a museum and to be honest it wasn't that impressive compared to say the Tate Modern in London or the Pompidou Centre in Paris. But there was a series of exhibitions by American photographer Catherine Opie and Martin liked her "Freeways" collection and her photographs of Wall Street. He also liked the Picassos. Marina, Bekky and Jack were on the whole unimpressed!
It was of course New Year's Eve. America celebrates the event at a massive gathering of people in and around Times Square in Manhattan, only a 5 minute walk from our hotel. But we'd read that to get a place where you can see anything, you need to grab your spot and stand there at about 3pm. And it was *really* cold. So we decided we'd have much more fun "partying" in our hotel room and watching the celebration on TV. So that's just what we did :-)
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The Sphere. Salvaged from the World Trade Centre. |
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On the way out to Ellis Island looking back at Manhattan under a stormy sky. |
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The Statue of Liberty of course... |
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The main processing hall where would be immigrants were subject to a 60 second medical examination and a 2 minute legal interview, in any one of the numerous languages that the translators spoke. |
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Our Ranger guide doing going through the legal interview process. | ||
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The Guggenheim Museum |
Marina, Bekky and Jack headed over to our favourite breakfast spot, the Metro Cafe on East 42nd street and Martin popped into Grand Central Station to take some photos. Due to a complete schoolboy error, all of the photos taken were poor... the least poor are shown below. Grand Central Station is a great building, well worth a visit.
After breakfast, Marina and Bekky went shopping one more time and Martin and Jack headed on up to Central Park for a wander. After walking for a while, we left the park and went to the American Museum of Natural History and looked at dinosaur bones :-)
After the museum, Martin and Jack went back to the Times Square Virgin megastore so that Jack could spend more of his xmas money. That done, we met the girls back at the hotel.
To end our holiday, we found ourselves an excellent "Irish" pub just off of Times Square and had a very good meal there.
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Grand Central Station |
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The aftermath of new year's eve |
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Jack in a central park tunnel | |
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Sights in and from central park.... |
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Ice! |
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The natural history museum |
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