I returned from my trip to New York with my sister yesterday, and being quite jet-lagged, I’ve decided to take it easy today and reflect on my experience of the city that never sleeps.
I had been wanting to visit New York for a long time and when we found cheap flights, we just decided to book (now or never, right?) Our cousin Elisa also conveniently lives a 45minute train journey from the city, meaning free accommodation for the week. It was just an opportunity we couldn’t miss out on.
It would take too long for me to talk about everything we did in New York as we did EVERYTHING (honestly I’m so tired, we did over 30,000 steps on our longest day in the city).
So I’m just going to briefly explain my highlights and my future self can come back to read this and reminisce.
Times Square
What an amazing area. Times Square is full of life and feels like two different places in the day and at night. Being fairly close to Grand Central Station, this was one of the first areas of NYC we saw and we were so taken-aback by the huge, tower LED screens, it felt like we were in a film set. For one of the nights on this trip, we booked room in Hotel Shocard, about a 1 minute walk from Times Square as we wanted the full NYC experience. On the day before out night here, we stayed up until 12am (with jet-lag and 30,000 steps this was hard) to see an electronic art show I had read about online. Unfortunately it we didn’t get to see it as I later found out it is only displayed on the first day of each month. But it was still and experience to be in Times Square at midnight.
The Museums & Art galleries
New York has so much to offer when it comes to seeing world famous paintings and ground-breaking contemporary art, and I was not going to miss out on any of it. Throughout the week, we visited The MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum, The Guggenheim and The Drawing Centre. The MoMA was by the best in my opinion and requires a good few hours to see everything inside. There is so much I could talk about when it comes to the art I saw in NY so I’m going to do a separate blog post for that. Just to do a brief overview, we saw work by Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Dali, Magritte, Pollock and more. We also visited the Museum of Natural History with Elisa and her family. There was so much to see and do in this museum, I recommend it if you haven’t been before.
Upstate New York
My cousin lives in an area called Chappaqua, which I’m not sure would exactly be considered “upstate” but has a completely different landscape to New York City. I was in awe of the houses here, all being extremely detached and having unique architecture. Being March, the trees had all lost their leaves so the most prominent colour in the landscape was brown. However, the lakes and streams kept the beauty of the area. On one of the days, Elisa took us up to Connecticut to visit a beach, which if I’m being honest, wasn’t too dissimilar to parts Borth beach. On another day, Elisa’s husband took us for a hike in a woodland not far from where they live. We didn’t get to see any turtles he said live in the reservoir there, but at one point some deer ran past quite close to us.
Central Park and Top of the Rock
I am putting these two experiences together and part of my experience of Central Park was seeing it from the top of the Rockefeller Centre and putting it’s size into perspective. Central Park is an area of New York I have seen so many times in films, so I had very high expectations. On the two days we wondered around this area, the weather was on the rainy side, so we didn’t exactly get a great impression, but I definitely want to come back when the sun is out and all the flowers have bloomed because I imagine it would be so incredible.
Whilst at the top of the Rockefeller, I realised I wasn’t as scared of heights as I thought I was and stood in awe of the scale of the city. Seeing New York from above is a must and makes you really appreciate just how small we really are in the grand scheme of things.
Brooklyn
My favourite area of New York has to be Brooklyn/Dumbo. Being across the river from NYC, it felt so calm and tranquil, and yet has the best skyline views we saw all week. I wish we had more time to explore this area but coming across Brooklyn Bridge in the late afternoon so we could see the skyline in the day and at night was the best idea. I think you can get the feel of Brooklyn just from the photos I took:
Overall, my trip to New York was breath taking, inspiring and exciting, and experience I will never forget. 'Til next time.
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