a bus tour with linguistic problems and other New York City, NY Tourist Trap Tips

We like to take bus tours of different cities that we go to. We normally make this one of our first activities so that we can get to know the city a little bit. But this time we took the tour after we had stayed in the city a few days. We walked over to the Empire State Building to catch this bus tour and we went for the downtown loop with a company called Gray Line tours. The tickets cost us 37$ per person and you can hop on and of as the bus goes around the downtown area. We got a seat on the top floor of the double decker bus after a few minutes and we were ready to get some in depth information about New York. But we were a bit disappointed. The first guide that we had didn’t speak English that well and we had trouble understanding what she said. On other buses it was hard to hear the guide at all. I was hoping to get something back for the 37$ but the guides did not give us that much information that we hadn’t already read in our guidebook. Well, the bus tour that we took went to places like Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, past Wall Street and the Financial District, Battery Park, South Street Seaport, Times Square etc. If you are going to take it, take it when you first come to NYC.

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At Least Do This: Make sure to get on a bus that has seats on the top floor so that you can enjoy the view while you travel…remember to put some sunscreen on so that you don’t get fried in the sun…and hold on to your hats…the branches along the route can get pretty close :-)
Alternative: Get a guide book, prepare your trip and use the subway to travel around town