Part 1 New York, New York!
After 32 hours of very unpleasant air travel I arrived in
New York. I’d been subject to overbooked flights, nearby passengers who got
drunk and sick (gross), a side trip to Boston where we sat on the tarmac for 2
hours and a few dozen laps of the runway at JFK. But I had arrived and that was
the important thing. After a knuckle-whitening cab trip with an angry Sikh cab
driver who swore at every car we passed, I arrived at the Hotel Stanford in
midtown and fell relieved into the arms of my partner who had been anxiously
awaiting my arrival.
After washing all that plane ick off me we went in search of
the nearest NYC pizza joint. I was delighted that only a block away was the
Little Italy pizza shop. Damn they make good pizza! But this was only the
beginning. My mission was to eat pizza everyday, multiple times a day if
possible – that’s a bit odd, you may say
but let me give you some backstory. I love pizza. I think it is the best food in
the world. If I was stuck on a desert island and I could only eat 1 food for
the rest of my life it would be Margherita pizza. I know I wouldn’t survive
that long but damn I’d be happy. At home I am only allowed to eat pizza once a
week – New York was the exception to this rule. Not only did I want to make the
most of my time there and eat as much of the best pizza in the world as I
could, but I also wanted to prove my partner wrong when she said there was no
way I could eat it every day.
We spent our time seeing all the sights. For me it was my 2nd
visit to the city that never sleeps, but my partner, who is an amazing
photographer, was seeing it all for the very first time. Funnily enough, on our
first day out and about she asked if we could go to New Jersey.
No that’s not a typo, she wanted to leave the glorious city
of New York to go to Hoboken New Jersey to see Buddy at Carlo’s bakery. If that
means nothing to you, check out the tv show Cake Boss on foxtel – it’s awesome.
So after being disappointed at not being able to see Ground Zero because of all
the scaffolding around the freedom tower, we hopped in a cab (again with a
crazy driver that looked like a homeless guy) and paid him way too much to take
us to Hoboken, NJ.
We arrived at the little bakery thinking we might have a
short wait to get in. We were horrified when we saw that the wait time was
approximately 2 hours. Now I love cake Boss, but seriously, I was giving up
Manhattan time for this. Nevertheless, we took our place at the end of the line
where we chatted to the other Americans who marvelled at our accents and
couldn’t believe we’d come all the way from Australia to visit a cake shop in
New Jersey!
2 very hot and sweaty hours later we got in. We spent about
30 more minutes in the crush waiting to be served and left with a T-shirt, a photo of Mary (Buddy’s sister), a tiramisu
cake and what were allegedly the best cannoli’s ever. We found a spot on the
waterfront and gobbled down our treats with a beautiful view of the east side
of Manhattan. The Cannoli’s were amazing – so amazing that we suffered a
massive belly ache for the rest of the day from all the cream, but it was totally worth
it!
After about 3 days of coming and going from our midtown
hotel, we were walking to the trusty local pizza shop for yet another slice of
Manhattan’s finest, when I looked up. And what do you know – on the street
behind ours there was the Empire State Building. We’d been up it the night
before at about 1am (way cooler at night than during the day), we’d walked up
and down the street multiple times a day and only just realised it. As a
result, every subsequent time we passed it one of us said to the other “holy
crap babe, did you know the Empire State Building was there?” To which we would
dissolve into a fit of laughter at how dumb we were not to have realised it
earlier.
One of my very important missions while in NYC was to find a
killer pair of sneakers (shoes are so much cheaper in the US and the dollar was
at $1.10 or something). We decided after
being denied entry to Toys R Us in Times
Square by the bomb squad (it’s Times Square, I didn’t think it was too weird at
the time) that we’d pop into Foot Locker to see what they had. About 5 minutes
later, the bomb squad bursts into Foot Locker telling us all to get out
immediately. No one knew what was happening. I asked the security guards and
they said there had been a bomb threat on the subway – UH OH! There were cops
everywhere trying to empty out Times Square. It was early August. I’d never
seen so many people in the one place. It was like every tourist that was in NYC
had come to Times Square that night. We were herded down Broadway by mounted
police, as 90% of people demanded to be let back into stores or tried to take
photos of the cops. Way to go guys! With all these angry tourists clogging the
streets, we figured we’d head home for the night. We were staying only 10
blocks away, if Times Square blew up in the night, we’d know about it.
Our 4th day in New York was a pretty important
one –we were getting married (for the first time) on the steps of the New York
City Public library (where Carrie was supposed to marry Big before he freaked
out and stood her up). Why for the first time you ask? When organising our trip
we had already booked and paid for a ceremony on the beach in Hawaii. About a
week before we arrived in New York, gay marriage was legalised there. We felt
that we needed to be a part of something so momentous, and wanted it at least
to be legal somewhere! And so at 10am on August 4, we met with the beautiful
Reverend Annie Lawrence at one of Manhattans most iconic buildings, dressed in
thongs and T-shirts and said “I do”.
We spent the rest of the day listening to the live
performances by Broadway stars in Bryant Park, hanging with the dinosaurs in
the Museum of Natural history, saw a guy propose to his girlfriend in Central
Park, lazed around on the great lawn (I was having 3 men and a baby flashbacks)
and ended the evening with cocktails and a Broadway show (Addams Family –
fantastic!)
Friday night and we were off to the ball game! The Yankees
weren’t playing at home for the whole time we were in NYC, so being a massive
baseball nut I bought tickets to see the Mets. (We were originally going to the
Wednesday night game, but after arriving and waiting 2 and a half hours in the
rain, buying exorbitantly priced rain ponchos, and some really bad vegetarian
hotdogs and beer, they cancelled the game. We weren’t sure why they made us
wait that long to decide but for anybody who goes in future – baseball players
are wimps and don’t play in the rain). Long story short, the Atlanta braves
kicked the Mets asses in a serious way.
It was still good fun though. Especially as our section had an awesome
beer vender with a Queens accent yelling “Budd, Budd light! Who wants it? Speak
up! You gotta speak up!” He would then attempt to make eye contact and stare
you down until you bought a beer! And he hated it when the pretzel guy got in
his way!
7 days after arriving in the Big Apple I had eaten copious
amounts of delicious pizza, visited all of the obligatory New York icons
(including getting lost in the bowels of Rockafeller centre where I had a
little sense of humour failure), got hugged and subsequently felt up by an
Asian Cookie Monster (can’t believe the cheeky bastard went for the boob grab!),
survived a bomb scare, stuffed my face with Whole Foods goodness resulting in a
permanent craving for Granola and Fizzy Izze’s, rode the Toys R US Ferris
Wheel, bought the most amazing pair of Nikes
I’ve ever seen, gotten way too excited when we found the HBO True Blood
store, struggled to get the machines to work in a Chinese Laundromat, realised
that the Mets suck, eaten more peanut butter M & M’s than would be
considered reasonable by any insurance policy and married the love of my life –
legally.
Oh and guys, when you’re next in Manhattan make sure you
visit The Counter: Custom built burgers in Times Square... mmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!
