New York New York! My trip there…

Work have been lovely by provided me a lovely all expenses paid trip to New York. It was the first time I will be flying on an airplane and more importantly, it’s been a long time since I’ve been abroad! Most of the week was work related however during the evenings I was able to catch loads of places out and do as much touristing as I could. I believe the main theme of new york was to really abuse the tourist status as well as recreate as many things “Friends” related as possible! I don’t know but it just seemed that Friends was one of the first thing that comes to mind when you think of New York and since I’m quite a fan of the show I was hoping to do as many things that had a Friends reference. I’m going to embed them within the post, see how many you can get and post them on the comments section 😉

Airplaning
The one bit I was looking forward to, so excited that I got to sit by window for both journey to and from. The airport part was fun since I was able to do the whole metal detector thingy, was tempted to joke about bombs but I gave that a miss, I simply did a “YES” just when I got out, made sure I took my studded belt off too hehe. Take off was fun, I was quite the happy bunny when we started flying. I took some pretty nice shots outside the window but then kept all the gadgets off so it wouldn’t interfere with the airplane.

Hotelling

This was fun because I made sure I juiced the hotel by taking/using everything…newspapers, toiletries, the lot!* I also ensured that I left bang on time too at checkout, when we checked in we found out that we had to pay for the rooms since the company card wasn’t approved yet, luckily a few days later we got that sorted with a few emails here and there. The view from my window was pretty nice, nothing epic but it was nonetheless fun. The cable tv was pretty boring, I got bored instantly and just left it playing in the background, I did check out “Rock of Love 2” with Bret Michaels, it was ridiculous haha.

* = some of that is true haha

Museum of Modern art and Radio City

We tried going here but it was closed 🙁 was still worth mentioning it since we did pass it haha.

Grand Central Terminal

That was pretty epic, I took one shot of the place and was done however, we did take the subway a few times too but thats for another section hehe

Chrysler Building

This was quite funny since you can almost see it everywhere. I wasn’t keen on seeing the empire state building because this building was cooler looking. My manager was talking about how someone asked him where it was and he told her to simply look up hehe. It was just, always there.

Subway

That was cool, some of the signs were funny, the announcer guy is a lot more enthusiastic than the ones in London, he goes “STAND CLEAR BEHIND THE CLOSING DOORS”. I took a few shots at the station, not too much because people will think I’m weird, got a metro card to travel. You pay when you enter and just walk through some turnstiles when you leave, made more sense than touching in and out.

Times Square

Epic! Simply epic, ten times better than Picadilly Circus, it makes it look like a … circus really haha. Granted I didn’t do much there, was only there for some tourist shopping as well as some BBQ action. This was by far the most epic place for photo taking! Not to mention being scammed silly haha. I managed to buy myself a lovely New York statue of liberty that to go with my “I love New York” t shirt haha. I really wanted to get some ninja stars (asked people at work haha) and take a photo of a hooker but I didn’t get to 🙁

Ground ZeroJust a building site, by far the most boring place to go to, however it was quite interesting seeing a lot of stalls placed around the area selling World Trade Centre memorabilia. Got to love the money making opportunists.

The Bridge of the Brooklyn Variety

It was simply a bridge but nonetheless it was still an epic place to goto, it was fun walking it especially when we were at mid point and there was nothing but the road bridge and some sea. It was also a nice place to take photos of the New York from afar. I kept mooing at the tourists :p

Statue of Liberty

Now in order to see this in full we would need to take a ferry there but since we were leaving that day we simply saw it afar, I tried asking some random person to borrow their telezoom lens but they blanked me 🙁 I tried taking photos of the painted fake statue of liberties too but they insisted that I paid them $5 to take it, the ones at covent garden did it for free 🙁

Food

This will most likely be an epic section on it’s own. Food seemed to be quite an adventure since I tried visiting different places for food each day. Apart from Breakfast where we either went to Hungry Johns or the Hotel Cafe (Raffles) for full english breakfasts, everywhere else was different each time. For breakfast I managed to get a lot of pancake, waffle, french toast, bacon and eggs action. My first visit I got to order a cup of “CWOORRFEE” hehe. Everything was extra fluffy and nice hehe.

For evenings we went to an array of dinners, restaurants and food places:

We went to some random local pizza place for some pizza (double pizza!), everything is bigger and nicer, I also got to go to s’barros which was apparently a big pizza chain
Went to some random thai place and had thai duck, was quite nice but they asked for a 15% tip! Evil!
Goodburger, nice place for lunch, had a yummy milkshake with that too!
Some french cafe place, had satay chicken and a fruit salad, weird combination I must say.
For a work night out we went to some mexican place, there was some club night going on where we got a few promiscuous girls dancing about and the odd shot girl asking us to buy jelly vodka (they can fuck right off!) I had an AWESOME medium rare steak, man it was juicy! Quite an epic bill at the end though!
One of the lunches I walked 18 blocks to find a Wendys, I also went to the back of a Wendys… for a wee 🙁
At the same day for lunch (yes I had two lunches to make sure I got the most of the food) I went to a dunkin donuts for donuts and a pizza haha.
Last night we had some epic BBQ food. The wings were monster like! That was for starters too, luckily my pork ribs and pork thingy was alright to finish, but nonetheless an epic win for eating it all haha, we were given TOWELS instead of napkins for the meal, I understood why when the food came, man it was bbq sauce city! The guy next to us was a right bastard, he kept taking the piss out of the waiters and had an annoying laugh.
Starbucks, exactly the same as UK, disturbing.

Here are the photos of food..