So I’ve been thinking a lot about writing an actual blog post regarding my trip to New York. And here it is at last! Just to put you a little bit in context, we spent a total of 4 nights and 5 days over there. We got there early in the morning of December 13, and flew back to Orlando December 17 late at night.
Day 1 – Arrival and Empire State
Yup, as soon as we got to Newark at around 11 am we took an uber straight to Manhattan. Like literally, straight to Times Square were we decided to grab some lunch since we were starving. In case you were wondering why on earth would we fly to Newark instead of La Guardia or JFK, it was basically for financial reasons (it was just cheaper let’s say it out loud). But yeah, as soon as we got to Times Square and we were done having some lunch, we decided to head to our airbnb which was located on 9th avenue, not far from Times Square itself.
My friends and I aren’t rich. We love traveling but we do have our limitations and here is were the worst part of the trip falls. We decided to rent a room through airbnb instead of staying at a hotel since these in downtown Manhattan were ridiculously expensive. But you can already guess what the room looked like. It was worse than horrible. It was a combination of gross, disgusting and creepy at the same time. Who on earth has paintings of Jesus Christ and magazines with a big fat headline wondering if “[Does] the devil really exist?” to welcome tourists? We were extremely creeped out. But the worst was yet to come… We encountered numerous roaches and struggled with the toilet itself since we couldn’t flush our own excrements… The airbnb was a real life lesson. Now, don’t take me wrong, there are really well taken care off rooms that you can rent through airbnb, we just picked the wrong one. This, however, wouldn’t stop us from having an amazing time in the big city.
As soon as we left our suitcases in our room, we head back straight to times square again since we were stunned from all those screens hanging from incredibly tall high skies. We came to the big city with a big list of things that we wanted to visit. However, we were unsure of where to begin. So we literally just decided to start big. We head on to the Empire State Building.
Now, I just noticed that I forgot to mention how cold it was. December 13, winter, New York. Yeah, trust me, it was freezing. But if it was already freezing at ground level, you have no idea of how cold we were on top of the building.
Just another every day view right? No… The moment we stepped a foot out I told myself two things:
1- I’m freezing and I might not survive this.
2- I need to take a good look. I need to enjoy this because this happens once in a lifetime. People live 80 years and they don’t get to experience this at all. And trust me, I will remember this.
Now. Listen very carefully because this was an incredible fun but creepy day in the big city. What I’m about to say is true and I’m attaching a link to a reliable source as proof. After being creeped out at our nasty looking room, we were even more scared on top of that building. A military looking plane throwing off some black smoke was flying literally ON TOP OF US. ON TOP OF US. And to finish off the party, we saw security guards talking to each other and wondering why the hell was there a military airplane flying on top of the empire state building. Let’s be honest, New York city isn’t a good friend of airplanes and we got extremely scared. That lead us to spend only around twenty minutes on top of the big building. Since we wanted to live to tell the tail, we decided to head over to fifth avenue.
We walked around manhattan for a little bit, had dinner at a pizza hut in times square and concluded the night with this beautiful view.
It was a long day and therefore we sort of went back a little early to our room. We were exhausted, cold and tired at the same time. It didn’t take us too long to fall asleep. My two friends got waken up at around 2am by to Chinese roommates living in the other room. I was snoring to hard though to even notice though.
Author: Tony Lewis
Marketing nerd, blockchain enthusiast and part-time planet Earth explorer. I like building (and acquiring) long-lasting assets.
I loved your blog, Tony! Keep them coming!