Marc's Blog: trips - Visiting New York 7 years later

π 2011-10-08 01:01 in Ntrips, Trips

It had been 7 years since I last went to New York City. Back in 2004 I was able to go for 2 weeks of work in NYC and visit the building we had back then. I did spend the time to visit but of course hadn't seen it all back then and for the last years I had been trying to find a reason to see my friend Daniel who had since then moved to NYC.
In the end, it took for Jennifer to have a conference in DC for us to use this as an excuse for us to go to NYC after that. I went to spend the weekend with Daniel in Brooklyn where he hosted me (thanks Daniel).

Daniel and I went to visit the local Brooklyn Transit Museum, History Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The transit museum had the history of subways in Manhattan, and that was pretty cool.

the old ads were fun to see

We went to see the Brooklyn Bridge at night

I then worked at the Google office for the beginning of the week while Jennifer was in DC and we met up and used the rest of the week to visit Manhattan after she was done working. One evening before she got there, I went to see the new show from Blue Man Group: the new show was a nice refresh although it was significantly shorter than the old one I saw in 2004...

On thursday, Jennifer and I went for our touring. We did midtown first

Grand Central Terminal

Radio City Music Hall

St Patrick's Cathedral nearby

Steve Jobs had just died

We had a nice dinner at Buddakan that evening and went to see Spiderman which was entertaining.

The next day, with clear forecasts of rain, we went to visit the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Museum (each of which take more than a full day to see entirely).
The Natural History Museum has an insane amount of things to see. Along with the special expositions, it's tough to do it in one day, never mind half a day, but we got the highlights:

who knew that birds come from dinosaures?

We then crossed Central Park to get to the MET. The MET is another insane place that is impossible to see well enough in one day, never mind half a day, but we did the best we could and at least saw their impressive Greek and Egyptian collections:

They had plenty of other things though:

That evening, we had a really good tasting menu at Boulet:

The next morning, we went to the Southern Tip (Battery Garden, Wall Street, and World Trade Center) but we started with Union Square Market:

and then went down to Battery Park:

line of people going to the statue of liberty

We are the 99% were still demonstrating at Zuccotti Park

And we went to see the new WTC being built

After that, we moved on to Central Park where we rented bikes and went around:

Cathedral of St John the Devine

It's huge inside

Columbia University

That evening we had dinner at Asiate Restaurant, which was supposed to have a great view of Central Park, but due to a strict dress code that wasn't clear to us, they "nicely" seated us far away from where we could see anything and the food on its own was between average to disappointing depending on the dishes and considering the view-less price.