Wanderer Photography

This is the last part of the 2013 summer trip that I did with my parents. After visiting me in Seattle and we went on our awesome Hawaii – Vegas – Zion – Grand Canyon – Seattle trip, we decided to add one more flag to the map of visited cities (this is a figure of speech, but I actually have a map of Romania and I have marked on it all the trips that I have taken as a kid with my parents in Romania – it’s pretty cool and full).

This trip began on a Thursday evening / night when we left Seattle and caught a red-eye (overnight) flight to New York. My parents would then follow their path back to Bucharest and I would fly back to Seattle. Anyway…

We flew for 5 hours, meaning that we had to get at most that much sleep – it was not easy or comfortable. We got in New York around 8AM local time (5AM Seattle time) after only a couple of hours of sleep. We took a cab to our hotel (in Manhattan) and since the room was not ready, we had to go start visiting.

Short definition: New York has multiple boroughs – Manhattan being just one of them. The others are Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

So, we got breakfast (and MUCH NEEDED coffee) and we did what any tourist does – get tickets for a hop-on hop-off in the city and start visiting. We got on a bus with plans to head over to see the Statue of Liberty and possibly Ellis Island. Of course was not a good enough stimulant, so I fell asleep on the top level of a double-decker and I woke up with the sign above approaching me at a pretty high velocity (fortunately, it was a bit higher).

We got off the bus in Lower Manhattan, close to Wall Street and took a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, in order to actually climb in it, you need to book in advance – and moreover, the Statue was closed just until a day before due to Sandy (the hurricane). So, we strolled around for a bit.

That guy above ruins a pretty awesome pic. And below: Mom and Dad after a sleepless night, Lady Liberty and a bit of rain.

The Statue was nice, but it was also a bit disappointing. The statue is such a landmark that appears in so many movies – at least the ones that I watched as a kid – and it looks so impressive … and then you’re there and … it’s just not the same. I am pretty sure that all the movies just want to make it look bigger. Especially by putting the city with the skyscrapers in the background – see here:

As I mentioned, the island was just opening that week and you can see people were still working on remodeling after the hurricane.

After a while, we came back to the city and went through the city – just outside Times Square I got my very own version of the posters one can see everywhere with the yellow cabs:

Riding in the bus was pretty fun – on the one hand, you have a good perspective of the people on the street, of the buildings and everything going on around you. On the other hand, New York-ers look to be not so shy, so they don’t mind snapping photos of them.

In the picture above, there is so much stuff going on – first the person waiting while everyone else is moving, then the flag, then the blue building squeezed between the other two gray ones and the “American DollHouses” sign.

Even though we didn’t have the best weather for outdoors visiting – the clouds were pretty bad, but it did not rain – the trip was fun.

Switching to inside for the next post.

/cd