Biking in Brooklyn and Manhattan
So we woke up in Brooklyn, not really sure what to do first, it seemed like there was so much to see in NYC, where do we start? The night before Mark had offered us to borrow bikes from him, so we figured, why not start with that straight away. Said and done, we got on the bikes and started an exciting trip through Brooklyn towards Manhattan. There weren’t many bike paths so we just had to get along with the many cars, it was quite a ride from Prospect park to the bridge, probably took us almost an hour.
We went over the bridge and continued towards the Freedom tower, we didn’t really have any plan, but it seemed as a cool thing to do. It was actually calmer and safer to bike at Manhattan even though there were more cars, simply because they never really got up to speed like in Brooklyn where they were driving like on a highway. We got of our bikes in the 9/11 memorial park around ground zero. Also tasted a New York hot-dog from one of the food-stands before we headed back towards Brooklyn. This time we went on a different path along the water, through an are called Dumbo, which was cool.
We learned that it is really important to be cautious in the New York traffic. I lost attention for a few seconds and ended up bumping into the rear of a car (without falling or hurting myself luckily) and Adam did almost the same thing. We were riding on the road, when a car speeds up to get ahead of us, Adam looks away for a brief moment when the cars suddenly and unexpectedly breaks into a stop.
– ”ADAM! WATCH OUT”!
He panic breaks and avoids an accident in quite high speed just by a few inches… So as I said, we learned to be more cautious after that.
We spent the evening in prospect park, where an orchestra were playing, after the concert there were some fireworks as well. We had heard that an area called Williamsburg was supposed to be quite cool, so we headed over there after the concert. I think it was a bit to late, but we managed to find a few cool places. We saw a lot of Swedish things here, like Swedish snus and a Swedish Café. We ended up at a Karaoke bar, which was also an experience. We had gotten our own key so we didn’t have to wake anyone up when we got back to the house.
The Statue of Liberty
One day we headed to the Liberty Island, we got to the ferry place around noon I think, it was a lot of people there The ferry had a huge capacity so it wasn’t really a problem, although we learned that it was really hard to get tickets to go into the statue. But that didn’t really matter, its the outside you want to see anyway. After the Liberty Island, the ferry also made a stop on Ellis Island, a historical place to where all the immigrants that arrived to New York had to go. Here the authorities checked all new arrivals for diseases, criminal records and other unwanted things, like people with to little money to get along. Some people were denied entrance to the states and had to make the monthlong journey back to Europe again.
We went on by foot after arriving back to Manhattan, walked to Wall street and then grabbed some food. I think it was this afternoon that Mark took us on a guided tour on Manhattan as well, showing us places were he used to live and some pretty awesome neighborhoods that really made us feel that we weren’t in busy Manhattan, more like a smaller community feeling, pretty cool.
Bar night
That night we went out to some bars in Brooklyn with the Swedish girl that worked as an au pair for Mark and his family. It was some kind of au pair get together so there were a bunch of other people there as well. I bought some snus from Williamsburg the other day, which I offered to an Australian girl… wasn’t very clever since she started to feel sick 15 minutes later, forgot to mention the nausea detail to her… But she was soon well again, so no harm done 😉
We stayed in Brooklyn that night, its quite a travel to get into town anyway, we figured we will do that part on the weekend.
Top of the Rock
We had heard that instead of going up in the Empire state building, there was this other skyscraper called Rockefeller center, which also offered tourist to go up to the top observation deck. This was supposed to be both cheaper and less crowded and also, according to some, give you a better view of the city. We thought it sounded good so we gave it a shot and it turned out to be really cool. It also gave us a great view over central park, which I dont think you will see from the Empire State Building.
After the Rockefeller center, we walked to Time Square, which was an awesome place to go people watching, it was insanely crowded though. We also payed the bar that inspired the writers of How I Met Your Mother, which wasn’t really anything like MacLarens in the series, but still a cool place.
Harlem Sweat
On Friday we moved from Marks house to a supposed to be hostel, but what tured out to be an apartment, shared with about 12 other persons. It was quite odd but still seemed ok, at least for 2 nights of party.
We went out to a rooftop bar that night with some guys from the apartment, the rooftop bar was quite upscale and I thought at one point that we wouldn’t even be able to get in, especially not since the Mexican girl that lived in the apartment had a fake id (or borrowed ID) which didn’t look anything like her. She was 19 and as you might now, 21 is the legal drinking age in USA. We went to another place after that bar, and finally ending up getting lured into a nightclub paying 20 dollars to get in and not getting what the promoter promised us, but had a good time anyway.
That night was really hot, no AC in the room (the only room in the apartment that didn’t have an AC) meant that we were having a real warm night. Kinda sucked. But we survived and managed to get up quite early and go to central park and the Museum of natural history.
After that we walked to the east river where we saw a lot of people crossing the bridge to wards island, so we followed them. It appeared to be some sort of happening or event. After going there and not really being able to figure out what it was, except that it was 60$ to get in, which seemed a little to much for something we didn’t know what it was. After a while we asked a guy what was going on, he told us that this band called ”Fish” was playing and was super excited about it and really promoted them. ”You have to see Fish man!”, ”Its gonna be the best thing on your trip man”, ”If you like Jam”. But we don’t like Jam so we walked across the bridge to The Bronx instead. Here we saw some kids breakdancing on the street which was pretty cool but overall the area seemed to be quite dodgy, so we just headed to the closest subway station and got back to the apartment in Harlem.
That night we went downtown again, to Koreatown, Empire State Building, and time square again, this time by night. Our plane to LA was leaving 7 in the morning so we just had a few hours of sleep before we got up at 3 and made our way through the New York night towards JFK.
I really liked the city and have to go back there more since it still feels like there is so much more to see and experience. And really, if you skip London, its not that far 😀
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