This blog post is dedicated to Alex and Jing, who we stayed with for our jaunt in New York City – thank you so much for looking after us! We had the best time 😀
If you’re ever driving in to NYC on a road trip like ours, a good tip (thanks to our friend Jin for this one) is to leave your car at a budget long stay car park outside the city, then take the subway in to Manhattan; driving there would be a big mistake. Even driving to the car park in Brooklyn was a serious test of our patience and sanity.
After we dropped our stuff off at Jing and Alex’s beautiful apartment we ambled around the classics: the Public Library, Times Square, Grand Central Station, the Rockefeller Center…
Having just spent significant amounts of time hiking through wilderness and serene parks, taking a walk through the bustling streets of Manhattan was anxiety-inducing to say the least, and it actually took us a while to readjust to jostling through baffled tourists and angry commuters.
The rest of our visit in New York City was, for the most part, exquisitely food-centric. Catching up with Jing and Alex over late-night pizza was followed up by a day of Manhattan’s food meccas: Katz’s Deli for reubens, Eileen’s for cheesecake and awesome Korean BBQ at Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong. Good job we’d gone for a run around Central Park that morning!
Having been on my USA bucket list for a long time, we finally got to experience Smorgasburg the next morning. Yes, more food. The ultimate hipster food market, located in Williamsburg, we sampled everything from gargantuan beef ribs to sumptuous deep-fried cookie dough. A must-see for NYC in my opinion!
We walked off our luxurious breakfast with a visit to Brooklyn Bridge. Easier said than done, it turned out; it took me and Aleks about an hour to find the start of the bridge so that we could walk across!
A drizzly dawdle around a quiet Wall Street (it was a Saturday) was followed up by a reunion with some of my old colleagues for dinner, drinks, and given we were in Brooklyn again, a Blockchain party, of course. Organising dinner may have felt like herding cats (as if I needed a reminder about why I left…), but we had a fun night that was totally worth it!
The hazy Sunday that followed was spent eating bagels at the legendary Ess-a-bagel and browsing the art pieces at MoMA. Another top tip, from our resident New Yorkers: instead of queuing for an hour for a table, you can walk straight to the back of the bakery and ask for the exact same ingredients everyone else is getting (bagels, salmon and cream cheese) with no wait-time at all, ready to assemble and consume outside. Couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw Alex and Jing pull this off – and neither could the people waiting in line! Ha.
In case we hadn’t eaten enough, we capped off our stay in NYC with some sensational noodles at Xi’an Famous Foods, a fast-growing Chinese food chain. I had a bowl so huge that I ate the leftovers in the car as we drove north out of New York – no mean feat with noodle soup! A beautiful ending to a long weekend of culinary exploration.
The Big Adventure 