New York City!

New York! … Where do we even start?!

First off, I LOOOOOOOVE New York, it’s literally one of my all time favourite cities! It’s like its own world and there’s this feeling you get from it that I’ve never felt in any other city. The lights, the buildings, the rush of the people, it’s just unlike any other place we’ve been. I could probably go 1000 times and never get sick of it.

It was actually our first real trip out of the country this year. Because of Will’s visa process, he hasn’t been able to leave the country until he got his PR card. Honestly, this whole visa process has been like shackles around the ankles of our forever itchy feet! But I won’t get into that now.

We had a total of 5 days plus the morning of the day we flew home. Three of these days were taken up by me being in a course (a sugar flower course ran by Ron Ben Israel himself), but we took advantage of the evenings, doing things that we could do when I finished for the day. We then had two full days after my course, which we of course jam packed full of things we wanted to do.

We flew on a Thursday night and as soon as we got to the hotel, we dropped our bags and headed out. Luckily we were only a few blocks from Times Square so we couldn’t not go check it out on our first night!

Our first full day was spent with me in class until 5pm and Will took in a bit more of the city and went to check out B&H, the most epic electronics/camera store we’ve ever seen! In the evening we went to Urbanspace Vanderbilt for dinner.

Day two was spent in class again, leaving Will to fend for himself for the day and plan what we’d do that evening.

After class we ended up going over to Brooklyn to go to the pop-up installation, Museum of Pizza. This place was pretty sweet! If you ever saw the videos of the Museum of Ice Cream circulating around social media than you might have seen this one too.

It was basically an immersive art installation all for the love of Pizza, and who doesn’t love Pizza!

Oh and did I mention, there was also free pizza at the end of it!

The Museum of Pizza is only open till 7pm in November, so with the night still early we headed back to Manhattan and headed up town, just a few blocks past Times Square to a place called Ellen’s Stardust Diner.

Ellen’s is an American style diner with singing waiters/waitresses. It’s definitely a can’t miss! The staff here are trying to find their way onto Broadway. So you pretty much get dinner and a show.

Side note: the line can get pretty long but it moves relatively quickly. We only waited about 20 minutes.

I will say though, that you’re mostly going just for the atmosphere because the food isn’t that great. It’s your typical American diner type food, that could use some improving. Although they do serve waffle fries with everything, and my love for waffle fries knows no bounds.

One thing that was at the top of our To-Do list for New York was to get a bird’s-eye view of the city at night. I knew I wanted to do the Top of the Rock during the day, so we decided to go up the Empire State Building in the evening the day I finished my course.

We decided to head to Tacombi for dinner since it was literally right under the Empire State building. If you ever go to Tacombi, definitely get the Berkshire pork carnitas and the Baja crispy fish! Props to anyone who can eat the crispy fish without making an embarrassingly big mess.

I don’t know if we were just lucky or if going in the evening is always a quiet time to go up the Empire State building, but we didn’t wait in line for anything. We went from buying tickets to the top in under 10 minutes.

Fun Fact: Did you know the Empire State Building was built in like, 1 year and 20-ish days in 1930/31?! How crazy is that!

With only two full days we decided to split up what we wanted to do by area. So on Monday we spent our time downtown and in Brooklyn, and on Tuesday we stayed uptown and around Times Square.

On Monday morning we woke up to a very cloudy, very rainy Manhattan. Of course! The first full day we have and it’s raining! But we weren’t going to let a little rain stop us.

We headed downtown for our cruise to see the Statue of Liberty, stopping for breakfast at Citizens of Chelsea, walking down Wall Street, and stopping by the big bull along the way.

We decided to just do a short 60 minute cruise to see the Statue of Liberty for several reasons, a) we wanted to save time as most of the other options were a lot longer, b) it was one of the cheapest options, and c) we wanted to get as close as possible but weren’t too bothered about actually going on to Liberty Island itself.

After seeing the Statue of Liberty we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Brooklyn for lunch at Grimaldi’s.

Grimaldi’s is a two-story Italian style restaurant that only serves pizza, coal brick oven pizza to be exact. And it’s totally worth the walk across the bridge.

After lunch the rain had come back so we took a quick detour to Dumbo for a photo-op and then abandoned our plans for the rest of the day and headed back to Manhattan.

If we thought the rain was bad on Monday we were sourly mistaken. Tuesday’s rain was so bad we completely abandoned all of our plans. We were out of the hotel for maybe 2 hours and got totally and complete soaked! So we just spend the early afternoon packing and killing time at the hotel, until it was time to go to The Lion King!

Our biggest and only splurge of the trip was seeing the Lion King on Broadway and it was SO worth it! The tickets are pretty pricey if you’re wanting to sit relatively close but its worth every penny, and to be honest, there isn’t a bad seat in the house. Except maybe if you’re sat at the verrrrrry very back.

We knew the weather on our final day was going to be clear and sunny but that we only had the morning to be able to do anything as we were leaving for the airport at 1pm. So, we got up early and headed for the Top of the Rock, and we’re so glad we waited and didn’t do it while it was raining, because the views were worth the wait!