"New Year in New York" a New York City Travel Page by reeka

I promised myself that one day I would return to New York, that day finally came on the 28th of December 2001.
This time, however, 2 of my friends came along, my aim was to convince them what a great city this was.

Let me begin by telling you the story of how we actually made it to NY, it wasn't the easiest of trips and telling it is rather long, so bear with me!!

Originally I had planned to go with a good friend fo mine who I hadn't seen since we went to Edinburgh together to celebrate the Millenium new year's.

However a week before we flew out she decided against going for her own personal reasons.

During the time of booking the flight and actually going I had started university in Oxford. It was here that I met Beez and we immediately hit if off.

I told her that I was going to NY for new year's and after much debating and late nights considering it she decided to join us.

On the day of her booking the flight at the local travel agent's in Oxford another one of our friends joined us claiming that she had shopping to get, little did we know that as we were heading back home later that afternoon we found that there were 4 of us going to NY.

Now this in itself wouldn't have been too bad, except for the fact that Beez, this other girl and me had virtually no contact with eachother until the day before we set off for the trip.

Upon which we discovered that she hadn't booked any accommodation and this was 9 hours before we were due to set off for the airport.
Now normally I'm kind of a placid person letting things go over my head but this angered me. Later that evening as I was having dinner at the table I got up too abruptly hitting my thigh on the edge of the table. A sharp pain! I saw that a piece of wood was sticking through my trousers which I pulled out. However as I was walking back to my room it still felt rather uncomfortable in my thigh.

After much probing and prodding with my eyebrow tweezers I still had no luck getting the darn piece out, Beez even offered to perform a minor operation with my toenail scissors. There was no way I was going to let her near my leg, especially if you knew how many self operations she had performed on her own toes!!! I will say no more. hehehe

Anyway after a trip to the university's computer room to try and sort the accommodation problem out, which we eventually did, even if the rate of the room suspiciously went up.
I relented and went to the casualty department of the John Radcliffe Hospital at midnight. A full 5 hours before setting off, and I still hadn't finished packing!
4 1/2 hours later I was seen and the doctor managed to get the remainder of the splinter (which was the size of a toothpick, I may add) out. She offered to give it to me as a momento, suffice to say I declined.

In a rush and amid heated arguments we finally did make it to the airport and the check in on time.

I even remarked as we were queing that nothing else could go wrong. How utterly wrong I was!!!

Now remember in the beginning of this I told you that one of the girls cancelled a few days before.

Well as I got to the ticket desk, the clerk kindly informed me that my ticket had been cancelled!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Were we ever gonna have any luck?!?

Many phone calls later she managed to find me a seat on the flight after all, however I did not have one on our return journey but I was just glad to be able to get out to NY.

The flight itself was pretty unsuccessful. Right up until the landing that is. When the plane had to land on a different runway because of the high winds which literally made the plane dive suddenly and then back up again a few times. The situation was not helped when people started to scream, but I guess each and everyone of us had the sad events of September 11 at the back of our minds, I had my sick bag handy just in case too.

Luckily it was not needed and the plane landed safely if a bit bumpy, we were on New York soil! FINALLY!!!

As we got off the plane we had to take the free bus to the subway station. As the bus departed we took our seats, after only a few minutes the engine of the bus cut out. The driver managed to restart it again after fiddling with the ignition for a while, we were back on our way. However after a further few minutes the same thing happened again. Once more the driver got it sorted, but this carried on throughout the whole journey. A journey which was only supposed to last for approximately 10 minutes ended up lasting for over half an hour.
By this time we were in hysterics because everything that could go wrong had gone wrong for us. The rest of the holiday however proved to pass by successfully. PHEW!!!

We were real tourists and visited all the major tourist attractions.

We visited the Statue of Liberty on a bitterly cold day. We took the ferry from the pier in Battery Park to Liberty Island, where we wandered for a while taking in the sight of the impressive statue and the stunning views of Manhattan Island itself.
Unfortunately we couldn't go up the statue itself, it was still closed for security reasons.
I did take some photographs of the statue, however, all of them came out with the head cut off, and I thought my photography skills had improved since my childhood days. :-)

After a short break for hot chocolate to try and warm ourselves up again we took the ferry onto Ellis Island, which until 1954 was used as an immigration station. It was originally called Gibbet Island by the English who used it for punishing pirates.

The central part of the building houses the Museum of Immigration which holds films and tapes. There is a huge vaulted Registry Room which consists of a couple of inspectors' desks and has a series of interview rooms. Each section of the complex holds recorded voices of those who passed through the island, as well as photographs, small artefacts and informative explanatory texts.

We queued for approximately 2 hours to get to the top of the Empire State Building. It was soooooo cold and the wind was such that your face just hurt from it. Subsequently we only stayed long enough on the top to get a good look of New York from all sides and take a couple of photo's, then we hurriedly made our way back down.

We stayed in a big hostel just a few streets off Times Square. There we met a variety of people including the Flying Dutchman, you know who you are! who was, how can I put it, simply crazy and who could exhaust you in 5 minutes by just talking to him. We met others too, and a group of us decided to go the Bronx Zoo on a Wednesday as we were told entry would be free.

We started our journey by taking the bus, which took us an hour and a half, good for the sightseeing though! When we finally got there at lunch time we saw a sign in the ticket booth that any donations would be welcome, however the attendant wouldn't let us in if we did not pay a donation of $7. So much for the free Wednesday!!

Once we finally got in and found our bearings we straight away noticed a distinct lack of animals in the areas near the entrance, we looked at one animal called rapunzel, a strange looking thing from the picture of the accompanying board, don't even know what it was, but it was missing, nowhere to be seen.
Undeterred we made our way to the cantine where I'm convinced we ate Rapunzel. Whatever it was, and however gross it looked, I rather enjoyed it!

The more we ventured into the zoo, the less animals we saw, no gorillas, no tigers, no deer, although we saw plenty of black squirrels and a normal housecat.

I think the moral of this story is that to not go to the zoo in winter, and don't take any notice of a guidebook that says entrance free on Wednesdays, as there is no such thing, as a free Wednesday!!!