preencess’s blog

Last full day in NYC for the weekend!

There was a nice little surprise for us when we started our day off today. There was a little street fair at Lexington Ave that was a few blocks long. There were food stalls and other goodies, so we decided to walk around and check it out before heading off to our planned destinations for the day. I ended up getting a dress and my friend ended up getting a handmade necklace. We decided to try out Arepas and she also had a burrito. After walking along the street, we went into Duane Reade to get ourselves water for the day, and I got a free Duane Read card, so the water was a bit cheaper with it since it was on special or something.

We made our way to a few places that I wanted to go and check out quickly. We went into St. Bart's, which had a really cool ceiling and a stained glass window that reminded me of the one at Notre Dame. After that, we headed to St. Patrick's, but just quickly walked in and out since there was a mass going on. It looked very pretty as well, though. The New York Palace hotel was right accross the church, so we took some photos there. (Gossip Girl, anyone? Haha) We were on our way to Kinokuya bookstore, but we spotted Magnolia Bakery along the way! We walked in and got one cupcake to share, crossed the street and sat near the fountain that was in front of... this building (haha, will find out proper name later). The cupcake icing was super sweet, but it's alright since we only shared one anyway.

After that, my friend went into Crumbs and got herself an Americano before we ended up at Bryant Park. It's a really nice park with really tall trees and a nice lawn, some people were playing table tennis and others were enjoying just sitting around in the shade as it was rather sunny at the time. We left the park and found Kinokuya, which has a lot of Japanese merchandise/books, so I was super excited! I managed to get a J-magazine that was a few months old with Koda Kumi on the cover for only $3.50, which is not bad at all. Importing the mags here from Asia costs a lot more. We headed upstairs and I had Japanese curry with chicken at their cozy little cafe called Cafe Zaiya. After having that for lunch, we walked around the bookstore a little more and saw some cute Holga cameras and checked out the Design section. There were a lot of Japanese tourists there and the employees always started off talking to me in Japanese, but for simplicity's sake I just spoke to them in English to avoid any communication difficulties. Haha.

We bought our MetroCard for the day and started taking the subway to reach the other places we wanted to check out. Our next destination was the Upper East side to check out the Guggenheim Museum. Once we got there, we walked around the museum (which was having it's 50th anniversary celebration, by the way) to see the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit and other galleries along the way. The FLW exhibit was pretty interesting, I think it would be something that my dad would have appreciated as well, seeing all those blueprints and plans. Ironically enough, it was Father's Day and that popped into my mind. Haha. Coincidence.

After the Guggenheim museum, we walked south a couple of blocks down Museum Mile to go sit on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. Our feet were once again starting to hurt so we decided to take a little break before moving on with our 'itinerary' for the day. While we were sitting there, a st reet performance by Afrobatz was supposed to start, but unfortunately it started to rain really hard so they had to stop performing and people started to leave as well. I think there were a few umbrella vendors that were giving away umbrellas for free? Or at a discount? I'm not sure, I heard someone say "free umbrellas!" as we were getting up, but I saw people that were still paying, so I'm not sure.

We walked around Upper East Side some more to the nearest station to make our way back down Midtown. Before heading into the station, We made a quick stop at Strawberry and Victoria's Secret. We didn't really see anything we wanted there and I was reminded of La Senza stuff anyway, so off we went to catch the train again.

We went into Bloomingdale's and checked out to see what kind of shoes they had and my friend ended up buying wedges. I think my feet were swollen from all the walking these past couple of days because the 7's didn't wanna fit my feet at all. Haha. Not to mention, when we were checking out shoes in other stores as well, most of the display sizes were a 6. Do women over here have smaller feet on average or something? Regardless, I didn't buy any footwear because I knew I wasn't going to have room for it in my luggage and I just bought two pairs before heading to NYC.

We were going to actually go into the Apple Store today, but by the time my friend was done with her purchase, Bloomingdale's was closing, so we figured that the Apple Store would be the same (but we were wrong because it's actually open 24/365... FAIL! Haaahahaha. Oh well.) The weather was starting to act up again after calming down for a bit, so we deicded to just grab dinner at Goodburger. I had a cheeseburger with the works (no tomatoes and onions though, so my friend corrected me and said that technically, I'm not having the works. lol), cheese fries and a vanilla milkshake. We were supposed to head off to Top Of The Rock to see NYC from a top view, but it started to pour again after we finished eating. I had a few things I needed to get around Times Square, so we braved through the rain and joined the umbrella parade to finish off shopping around NYC. Whewww. Needless to say, it comepletely tired us out.

Before heading back, we saw someone dressed up in a Hello Kitty costume so I asked if I can take a picture. "Hello Kitty" had a  little pouch hung around it's neck and my friend said, "I think it's trying to give you something" while I was walking away so I turned around and saw it holding the bag open, so I reached in and it closed the bag and pulled my hand out to see if I was holding anything. I  had no idea what was going on and then it finally hit me that I was supposed to put money in the bag. OH MAN. Hahaha! Poor Hello Kitty probably thoguht I was going to take it's hard-earned money. I was thrown off by what my friend said so that's why I reached in first. It sucks because I was trying to figure out what was going on, but it coudln't talk to me. So funny. I grabbed some change from my bag put it into the bag and went off to take the train back to our hotel.

Since we didn't get to go to Top of The Rock to see the view, we decided to head up to the rooftop of our hotel to check out what we can see from up there. It wasn't what we would have seen up at TOTR, but it was still something, I guess! We snapped a few photos and headed back to our toom to start packing since we're leaving tomorrow morning.

Good times, NYC. I still haven't seen or done everything I wanted, so... maybe sometime again soon!

Today, I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. It was a phone call from home, but unfortunately I either pressed 'end' or let it ring for too long. Whoops.

My friend was already up, but she wasn't in our room so I started trying to get ready while listening to the news on TV. A few minutes later, she came in with a Winnie the Pooh balloon to greet me a Happy Birthday. Cute! So we got ready to head out and headed to the concierge to ask them for directions since we were going to use the NY Subway System for the first time. Dun dun dun!

After they gave us directions on how to get ourselves to the Staten Island Ferry, we bought our all-day Metro Pass so we can get unlimited rides and hop on the train instead of adding blisters over blisters. It was raining a bit, but the weather forecast for tomorrow was rain as well, so there was no point in switching our plans for today to tomorrow. So off we went on the 5 down to Bowling Green. The train was actually pretty decent! Once we got there, we walked down a few blocks to the Staten Island Ferry docking area, but the rain was a bit heavier now. Not a good day to wear flip flops, but my blisters would probably just have come to life and eat me whole if I were to give them more grief. I also noticed that the bruise I felt yesterday while we were at pinkberry was there. I have a bruise on my left calf from my rolling luggage hitting me repeatedly at random times yesterday while we were walking. I bruise pretty easily and this totally proves it.

We didn't get a chance to grab breakfast yet since we headed out a bit later than we had planned, but we both got some quick brekkie to eat (she got a plain croissant with an Americano and I got a ham and swiss croissant with a Hazelnut Iced Coffee). They were really yummy! The croissants were crispy yet fluffy, and the ham and swiss on mine was pretty delish. The Iced Coffee was juuust right. We sat at the waiting area and ate our food before boarding the ferry. The ferry was free and it took us to Staten Island and we got to see The Statue of Liberty along the way. Too bad it was still raining so I didn't stay out on the observation deck. Besides, it was packed with people.

We got to Staten Island, but we couldn't really find anything within walking distance that we wanted to go to, so we just waited for the next ferry. While waiting (in both sides, actually) some really talented musicians were playing instruments. The musician at Manhattan was playing the guitar and the musician at Staten Island was playing the violin. He started to play a Frank Sinatra song that I know the melody to, but only knew random lyrics. Once we got back to Manhattan, I made a quick call home and also re-confirmed our reservations at Koi for dinner.

We took the subway again and went east to Brooklyn. My friend wanted to go to this flea market there. There was a Fort Greene Place and Greene Ave, so that confused us for a bit. We finally got there, but because of the rain, there weren't a lot of vendors, so we decided to just head back and cross the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan. It stopped raining for a bit while we were walking over the bridge, so that was nice. Once we reached Manhattan again, we took the train to Canal Street to see the shops there.

Canal Street was pretty busy. Lots of people walking and some street vendors who stand around and announce their goods to people passing by. My cousin told me about this before coming here, but It was a little unexpected to see so many! Wow. We saw some really cool rings that we liked, but they were too big for us (I joked that our fingers must have lost weight from all the walking, ha-ha...) We stopped by a store where I ended up getting a dress that I wore later on for dinner. My friend was getting really hungry since she didn't want to eat lunch earlier while we were in Brooklyn (we were going to head to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory before crossing the bridge, but it was a bit far) so we went to go find her some food to eat. While she was eating, I received a call from my dad so we chatted for a few minutes while I was waiting for my friend to finish her late lunch... at five in the evening or so. Haha.

I was trying to look for the stores I plotted on our Google map on the text file I had my friend copy+paste while I was getting ready that morning, but I couldn't find the ones I wanted to go to on the list. We ended up heading to TopShop (which had some "free bike rental" event) and Uniqlo and I ended up purchasing some bottoms to wear to work. I chatted with the cashier after she commented on liking my hair colour and discussed the hassles of dyeing asian hair and having it turn brassy or orange. Haha. She was pretty nice. I couldn't find my friend after that and my phone was about to die, but she luckily returned my call and said she was in the fitting rooms. After she payed for her stuff, we headed back up north and hopped on the 6 to get back to our hotel.

We had reservations for Koi Restaurant at 8, so we had to hussle our bums back to the hotel and sped walk a couple of blocks to get back and get changed. I called up the restaurant to say we might be about 5-10 minutes late and thankfully they were okay with it. After rushing to get dressed up, we waited for the elevator (which took forever to come) and took a taxi to our restaurant.

The restaurant was really spectacular. I had made a reservation for us through Open Table and that went really smoothly. We were seated at this little balcony area near the sushi bar, overlooking the other tables below. I really liked the interior design of the place, but the food! Let me tell you about the food. It was a-mazing.

I had read up on a couple of reviews online so I knew I had to get the Crispy Rice with Spicy Tuna for sure. I also ended up getting Kobe Beef Carpaccio with Shiitake Mushrooms as well as Unagi sushi (yummy sea urchin! My aunt totally got me liking this after getting me some in Japan). The Kobe Beef was super delicious! I've never had Shiitake Mushrooms that were shredded into bits with sauce, but it was really good too. The Crispy Rice was ridiculously mouthwatering, it was this contrast of crunchy and chewy rice with melt-in-your-mouth spicy tuna on top. I'm so glad people recommended this because it would've been a shame to have missed that. After that, the sushi my friend ordered came along with my unagi. Not too shabby. We also had some sake with our meal, so it tied everything up together pretty nicely.

The dessert was... incredible. We had these three ice-cream bars that just kept outdoing themselves as we tried one after finishing the previous. The first was this cherry ice cream encased in dark chocolate, the second one was peanut butter in milk chocolate, with a bit of hazelnut, and the last one was Thai iced tea in white chocolate with a bit of coconut. It was sooo... so so good.

After dinner, we met up with my friend's friend who happened to be in the city as well visiting his girlfriend (who's a fashion intern, way cool) to have some late-night drinks. It started to rain again and we completely forgot our umbrellas so we walked while it was still bearable until we found a vendor who sold umbrellas for five bucks. Not the best umbrella but it did its job! After we met up with them and chatted about how her internship was going and living in New York (which was really interesting to listen to), we walked around to find a bar. We couldn't really find anything and they left it up to me to decide, "since it's my birthday" so we ended up at this place called Kenka, which was not so much a bar, but just a late-night, eat-and-chill place. I guess?

We waited for a bit to get seated since they were pretty busy. Once we were seated, we ordered a couple of drinks to get started. My friend's friend ended up ordering us shots of soju as well for one round, but the shot glasses were... not shot glasses. They were huge! Haha. If you don't know me, you probably don't know that I don't like to drink much and when I do, I either get really chill and/or sleepy instead of getting all rambunctious. Not necessarily a bad thing because I'd rather not get myself into trouble, you know.

I saw okonomiyaki and takoyaki on the menu and I said I'd get an order of takoyaki for everyone if they wanted to try it. My friend doesn't like seafood so she didn't like it much, but her friend said it wasn't bad. There was a little fiasco that went on a couple of tables down from us, but they later made up and all was good. This place was so so so random, but I think that's the charm of it. I didn't know if they were going to like the place, since I haven't been there before either and I saw it as an Editor's Pick on NY Mag, but they said it wasn't a problem. Phew!

When we got our bill, we got these little cups of yellow sugar that were supposed to be used for the cotton candy machine outside! Did I not tell you how random this place was? So funny! So we went out after paying to try the machine out and eat our cotton candy before heading our separate ways and going back to our hotel to call it a night.

,,,Did I mention that they served bull penis at Kenka? None of us were gutsy enough to try it, but I just thought I'd let you know for kicks. Haha!

Wow. What a long day!

We got to Manhattan at around 8:30am. I had broken sleep on the bus, so I was still a bit tired to soak everything in once we got off and started walking around with our luggages.

First stop was at Cafe Metro to have some breakfast. Being the newbies that we are, (well... this is my first trip to NYC anyway) We ended up saying our order to the cashier first instead of getting it made. Haha. So for a while we were just standing there wondering why everyone else was getting their orders before us. I almost also forgot to take my Iced Tea with me too until the cashier reminded me that I ordered a drink. Sleepy, much? Oh man. Breakfast was rather good, we have eggs and bacon on french toast with potatoes as well as pancakes (we shared). After satisfying our breakfast craving, and my friend getting an Americano at a Macaron place (wanted to grab some, but not today), we went off to B&H photo video!

B&H Photo Video was pretty awesome. They had all these cool gadgets and electronics everywhere. I ended up getting a 50mm 1.8 lens for my KissX2/XSi, and a few other accessories for my DSLR. The guy that was helping us chatted with us a bit about Toronto, and he was amazed when I told him that people actually take the stairs up the tower for a fundraising event. Anyway, they had these little candies in bowls everywhere too. There's conveyor belt stuff above that brings your purchases down for you to pay for and pick-up, which was really neat!

It was starting to get really hot, so we decided to head on over to our hotel to see if we can check-in a little ealrier than we're supposed to. We snapped photos along the way as we saw different sights around the city and finally arrive at our hotel. thankfully enough, we were allowed to check in two hours before we were supposed to, so we got to change before heading out once again... this time in clothes fit for the warm weather!

We were supposed to have lunch but my friend was really craving for pinkberry so we ended up there. I ended up getting a green tea frozen yogurt with mochi and kiwi, which was a little sour but very delicious! We continued to walk north hoping to go to the Apple Store for the iPhone 3GS launch, but after seeing the lineup... we decided to go to FAO Schwartz instead.

After sepnding some time walking around and taking photos of the toys at FAO Schwartz (there was an area were you can hold a baby while you're sitting in a white chair and an employee dressed up as a nurse can pose with you. HAHA! Too bad I don't share this inside joke with the friend I'm with, otherwise I would've taken that picture for fun...) we ended up at Central Park.

We walked around for quite a while in there. At first, we were ok in terms of knowing where we were, but the farther in we got, the harder it was to navigate because the maps were so sparse and they didnt have directional arrows saying what was ahead when paths split. Confusing! So after a while of walking, seeing a few newlyweds taking their photos at the park (how nice that must be as memorabilia!) and trying not to make eye contact with pedicab drivers because I felt bad for rejecting their offer to drive us around the park (one of them even mentioned something about a TV show, I thought he was just trying to get our attention, but it turns out when we saw him later that they were filiming something! Haha, whoops...)

We ended up losing our way trying to look for Strawberry Fields and the Bethesda Fountain. I still wanted to try to find the fountain after we finally managed to stumble upon Strawberry Fields, but we were both getting so worn out from walking and our feet and legs were starting to hate us for all the walking we've been doing so far.

Now here comes the fun part (depending on how you look at it). For some reason, we ended up getting ourselves walking the opposite way of where we were supposed to be headed (MoMA) and I didn't realize it (my friend didn't either since she was just following me) until I read the streets and they said 'west' before their numbers. Ohhh crap. Unhappy feet and walking the wrong way do not mix! We were supposed to be heading east to MoMA! So we did something that our legs were thankful for (for that short period of time, anyway): hailed a taxicab.

It's actually not that bad and it isn't super expensive as people usually assume it would be to take a taxi in NYC. After saving time and our poor aching legs and feet by taking the cab, we headed into MoMA and took a quick look around. We were there for about an hour or so, but we were literally dragging our feet to get from room to room and we had to hurry since we had a show on Broadway to catch at 8pm.

So It's around 7:15pm when we finally leave MoMA and took another taxi to Broadway because our legs were still protesting from all that walking we've been doing all day. Traffic was a bit heavy when we got close to Broadway, so the taxi driver asked us if we wanted to get off and walk to the next block. We did so, but amidst the hustle and bustle, we once again overshot by one street and ended up looking for the theatre one street more south than where we were supposed to be looking! Oi vey. This was about 15-20 minutes before the show started so I asked one of the police men if he can tell us where it was located and that's when we realized we were on the wrong street.

Luckily we didn't end up wandering off too far and manage to get there on time to see The Little Mermaid! I really enjoyed it since it's my favourite Disney movie. It was so colourful, the actors and actresses were great and the band was wonderful! We were seated right in the middle of the second row in orchestra, so it was really cool seeing it that close. Drew Seeley was actually playing the prince's part for our show, so that was an interesting tidbit! They also had a technical difficulty (haha, I never expected this to happen while I was watching a show on Broadway, but it's alright) so the second act had a little unintended five-minute break. Whoops! Haha. Still really cool, though!

After our show ended, we ended up walking around Times Square for a bit before deciding to get something to eat because we haven't had dinner yet and only had Pinkberry for lunch (oh my). We decide to walk to the area where our hotel is located so it would be easier for us to get back that way. Unfortunately, this was at around 11pm and a lot of the places that weren't close to Times Square were starting to close! After taking some quick snaps in front of Radio City Hall (where a kind man saw us taking individual pics and offered to take one for us... unfortunately it didn't work even when he tried twice, but it's the good intention that counts! Actually, I was also kind of apprehensive because it was my DSLR and I can't run after him in the condition I was in if he were to take it. But good thing he didn't! Just wanted to help.) After walking around even more than more, we ended up eating some yummy pizza with cream soda drinks. Thank goodness we decided to go in there as they were about to close as well. We were extremely famished!

Continuing on our way back to our hotel, two guys came up to us and asked if we're from here because they were looking for an area. I knew where it was because we were headed the same way, so I told them to keep going but then somehow they just disappeared behind us as we were getting closer to the area we were going to. Random... hopefully they found it. Because we did. Haha. We walked a bit too far. Again. What is up with this?! I was doing so well navigating in the morning, but maybe that's because my legs weren't hurting yet and I was actually paying attention fully. When your exhausted and sleepy, all you wanna do is get back to wherever it is you wanted to go back to. Ahhh, finally!

So we took quick (individual, duh!) showers and I came back into our room after midnight. Officially my birthday, yay! I checked my phone and saw that some of my parents and old-time friends greeted me for my birthday already, which was very sweet! It helped cheer me up a little bit knowing that they would still greet me even though I'm not around there right now.

I have three painful blisters and we have quite a day tomorrow too. What am I gonna do~ ahhh! Hopefully it gets better by tomorrow. Oh, and the weather too! Please be nice to us. Pretty please?

Greetings from the other side of the Canada/US border! We're passing through Buffalo right now, and I just thought I'd update this while I still have some remaining battery life left on my trusty little Powerbook *patpat*. I'm on the top deck of a megabus and my friend Lainey is one seat behind me since the bus isn't full right now.

We're going to get there fairly early in the morning so we're gonna walk around for a bit since check-in isn't until sometime in the afternoon. I called the hotel though and they said we can leave our luggage there so we don't have to lug them around with us while we're not checked in yet. Awesome.

We're going to be stopping at the airport next and then a 20-minute stopover. I'm actually rather sleepy so I guess I'll end it off here for now. I'll try to post a few photos and update at the end of each night, if we're not exhausted by then. Haha! Have a good night, everyone