NYC Day 2

Friday December 19

Our original plan for Day 2 was waking up at the crack of dawn and heading out to Ellis Island/Liberty Island, but that plan changed fast when we decided we'd rather sleep in.

Instead we woke up at 11, went to a bagel place called "Ess-a-bagel" where some angry Jewish dudes were serving up some of the most delicious bagels I've ever tasted. Mmm. I got the Cinnamon Raisin Bagel, toasted with butter. There was probably a whole stick of butter on my bagel- and it was worth every gram of saturated fat.

Next we took a trek down to Ground Zero and Wall Street. Last time I came to NYC there was a little more to see at Ground Zero, but since they have started construction on the new buildings, there really is just a big space down there. The weather was also blizzard-like, so it wasn't the most condusive for exploring. Matt did take my picture in front of GZ.

As you can see, I was very happy about it.


NYSE/Wall Street!

Peter and Brooke arrived around 1pm on Friday, and we ended our Wall Street trek to go meet them for Lunch at John's Pizzeria in the Theater District. Also highly recommended.


There's Matt and Peter at John's. Afterwards we wanted Matt and Peter to see the ginormous Macy's with 3 or 4 different Starbuck's inside, so we walked the overly crowded streets of Times Square in the freezing snow/slush, and everyone's feet were wet by the end of the afternoon.

After a little shopping, we went back to the hotel to rest for a little bit before we headed out for dinner, and what an event this was! Before our trip, I bought a highly recommended "Not For Tourists Guide to NYC..."and actually went to three different bookstores to find it. So, we used the trusty book to find a restaurant we wanted to go to called Grand Sichuan Int'l...Chinese food.

Brooke had a craving, and well, she's pregnant, so she was pretty much determined to eat Chinese food that night, and there was no stopping her. The rest of us wanted to earn our dinner, so we hiked about 7 long city blocks from out hotel to the restaurant. (I almost fell and broke my neck like 25 times because of the ice but that's another story.) You can imagine how happy we were to reach the destination (9th Ave and 50th St) only to find that the Grand Sichuan Int'l was nowhere to be found. Let's just say it put Peter in a good mood.

Not. He would have burned my NFT book if I had let him get a hold of it. It got worse before it got better. Thanks to the trusty Blackberry, we were able to get the Restaurant's number and figure out the address, which was nowhere near where we were. So we got in a taxi, gave him the address, and he dropped us off at the wrong location. We of course got out, and it took us about 20 more minutes to figure out where we were and what we were doing. We tried several times to change the plan and just try something nearby, but as I said before... Brooke + pregnant + craving = determination. We tried to consult the NFT and a concierge in vain. Fortunately, all it took was one more taxi ride, and we finally got to THE Grand Sichuan Int'l! Also fortunately for Brooke, it was a hit. I'm afraid to think of how Peter would have reacted if it had been a bust.

The funniest part was that we kept asking the people at the location we ended up at if they had moved or if they had shut down a location, and they just looked at us like they didn't know what we were talking about. Well, all you have to do is google "Grand Sichuan Int'l" to see that the location we originally tried to go to was shut down a year or so ago by the health dept. Whatev.

It was totally worth it. Afterwards we made Matt ride in the front of a Taxi back to our hotel so that he could have the full experience. They didn't make me ride in the front because they knew I'd have a heart attack.