Explore :: New York City

New York has always been on my list of places to visit one day. Although I never really knew what to expect. Everyone who has been has said how amazing it is, but a part of me felt slightly intimidated by the huge city. I'd always imagined I'd be in New York in the winter. Visions of the thanksgiving day parade, ice rinks, snow and giant Christmas trees lined my thoughts of how I'd spend my first visit to NYC. Basically Home Alone: Lost in New York with less drama. However, last month I made my first visit to New York City, in the heat of June.

I landed in JFK and made my way through the city traffic to meet the girls at our Air BnB apartment. We headed straight to Central Park, picked up a pretzel from one of the dodgy looking street venders and wandered around taking in the sights. We had tickets that evening to see Aladdin on Broadway, which was definitely one of the best shows I've seen. The genie was hilarious and fully deserved his Tony award. If you're in New York in the near future, definitely purchase some tickets. After the show, we explored Time Square at night. I feel Time Square is something that would have been amazing 5+ years ago, but with the rest of the world catching up with technology it was slightly underwhelming. Plus there were extremely creepy dressed up characters. which I was not a fan of.

The next day we had a typical New York tourist day. We started our day with an iced latte from Dunkin' Donuts and took a boat ride over to see the Statue of Liberty. The three of us are big Friends fans, so it was no question that we needed to buy Chandler style Statue of Liberty hats. Happily exclaiming that "New York is awesome!".

Having taken as many photos as possible of the iconic landmark, we made our way to Chelsea Market for lunch. We were a bit spoilt for choice, so decided on pizza and some doughnuts from Doughnuttery. We climbed up the steps to the Highline to eat our food and enjoy the New York sunshine, with a quick stop at the gelato stand of course.

Exploring more of New York, we went in search for Carrie's NYC apartment and had cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery. We even tracked down the Friends apartment after looking at a whole street of what seemed to be identical buildings.

With tired feet, we made our way back to the apartment to get ready for our last evening in New York. We had reservations for Top of the Rock, which we'd purposely booked so we could watch the sunset whilst we were there. I'm so glad we did, as we got to see the cityscape in both day, dusk and night. It was a great way to end the New York part of our adventure.