Since this year is the year we do the east coast, for the President's Day weekend, we made the (freakin' long) trek over to New York to scope it out.
I have to say that I liked it a whole lot more than I thought I would. I thought it'd be really big and overbearing and crowded.
Maybe because it was a holiday weekend, and insanely cold, it wasn't that crowded. It also didn't come across as being that big and scary. The grid layout makes it easy to figure out where you are in relation to where you want to be, but for someone like me, who's terrible at remembering numbers, remembering any given address is a nightmare.
We flew out from San Jose on Friday night, and arrived at 6 the next morning in Newark. My mate Andrew Calman, who's in the US for 5 weeks, tagged along and was spending the entire week in New York for work, so he had accommodation in the corporate apartment. We all headed to there and had showers and then caught up with my friend Franko, an ex-Asia Online crony, who's now living in New York. Andrew's friend Lisa flew in from London for the weekend as well, so there was quite the merry band of tourists.
First impression: extremely cold. I don't think it broke over 0 degrees Celsius much of the time. This was the first time I'd been in a city with snow, although it didn't snow while we were there. It was different to see piles of dirty snow in the gutters, and how filthy all the cars were from the snow and the salt on the roads. Crossing streets often involved negotiating a big pile of snow.
No alleys. Nowhere for rubbish but on the footpath, where it seemed to get collected very frequently. So you walk along and there's just bags and bags of crap lying around everywhere until it's picked up.
Way small apartments. Franko lives in a studio in Chelsea, the mattress is on an elevated "shelf" that you have to climb up a ladder to get to. The entire apartment is just the living room with the "loft" suspended on one side, and a tiny kitchen and bathroom off the other side. All this for about $1500 a month. Franko magnanimously slept on the couch and gave us the bed. If I had have known the apartment was that small, I wouldn't have let him put us up, or I would have insisted we brought our inflatable mattress.
After we had breakfast, we went to MoMA, which I felt was a bit expensive, at $20. At least they didn't try and charge for the cloakroom service. Highlight of that outing was seeing Jonathan Price wandering around. I recognised him instantly from Ronin, but couldn't remember either his name nor his character's name. Turns out he's been in a few other recent movies as well but I didn't recognise him.
After MoMA, we had a late lunch at a Korean place that Franko liked, and then Sarah and I took the subway to Brooklyn so Sarah could catch up with a long lost school friend she hadn't seen since high school.
After that, we went to 7B for a drink, and then Room Service for dinner. The food was great, the service less so.
I think we were dead on feet by this stage, so went back to Franko's and crashed.
On Sunday morning, we went and visited Sarah's boss, who had had an emergency appendectomy the previous week (instead of speaking at LinuxWorld) and was laid up in the Marriott Marquis, right on Times Square. Times Square was insane. I can't imagine what it must be like there for New Year's Eve. We grabbed a hot dog and a slice of pizza there for lunch, and then trekked down to Wall Street briefly. Checked out Ground Zero. That made me feel sad. Manhattan's not that big. I can appreciate how much September 11 must have rocked everybody living there.
I think we then had a power nap. Good idea that was.
We hit an underground bar somewhere I can't remember, that you really had to know about to find, and then had some dinner at a random Italian restaurant in Little Italy.
Then we hit the Empire State building. I think that cost about as much (if not more) than MoMA just to go up to the lower of the two observation decks. It was 11:30pm by this stage, and it was absolutely freezing up there. The view was pretty impressive though.
We had a drink at another fairly hard-to-find-unless-you-knew-it-was-there bar (I think it was called 3rd Floor) and called it a night.
On Monday, we headed off to Liberty Island to check out the Statue of Liberty up close and personal. As much security as the airport, just to get on the ferry. Absolutely freezing out on the island as well. We only stayed out there long enough to get on the next ferry back.
Overall, we had an excellent weekend there, and I definitely like the place. It was great having a local guide, so we got to eat and drink at some places we'd never have found otherwise. The subway system is fantastic, at $2 a ride, no matter where you go. Taxis are also a bit of a must, and didn't seem outrageously expensive. The NJ Transit train seemed like a good way to get between Manhattan and Newark airport.
I felt like it was pretty expensive city though. Everything added up, and it seemed like we were spending money hand over fist at times.
It also took a lot longer to do stuff than I'd anticipated, so we got a lot less done than we'd hoped. We were already planning on having to make at least a second trip to see the place properly. At least it'll be warmer next time.
Photos from the weekend are here.