Our first day in NYC we decided to explore the area around our hotel. We stayed at the Wall Street Inn, which was, you guessed it, near Wall Street! Strangely, it wasn’t actually on Wall Street, but was very close. The surrounding area was the Financial District, which was very business-centric. I don’t think a lot of people actually live in the area, but our first day was on Friday, so there were lots of people around.
First up we visited Century 21, which is a popular discount designer store. I didn’t really see much there that I liked, and what I did see was too expensive anyways. Is it just me, or is digging through a messy store to buy something for $500 just not really appealing? If I’m going to spend $500 on something, I’d really like to go into a nice store and feel fancy. This store was the opposite of fancy and was kind of disappointing. We didn’t stay long and I didn’t take any photos!
After the store we headed over to the Brooklyn Bridge and walked half-way across and back, here we are:
Around the corner was Ground Zero. We were in total awe of the new tower going up at the site. It was so incredibly tall and it isn’t even completed yet. My brain could hardly process the sheer magnitude of it. Unfortunately we weren’t able to visit the 9/11 memorial, we didn’t know that you needed tickets (albeit free ones) in advance. Oh well. We did go to the church nearby which served as a resting place for many 9/11 rescue workers. They had many interesting things on display, like all of these crests/badges from different cities’ rescue workers. We were able to find one from the RCMP and one from the Ottawa Fire Department. One the way out we lit a candle and left a donation. It felt very emotional.
We ate lunch at a pizza place overlooking Ground Zero. It wasn’t anything special, and wasn’t on the list of best pizza in NY or anything, but it was pretty awesome anyways. The pizza was LOADED with toppings and super delicious. We ate the whole thing. Ooops. I wasn’t even that hungry!
After lunch we went to the Museum of American Finance. It was an activity my husband wanted to do and I begrudgingly went along, but it was actually really fun and interesting! There was a gold plated monopoly game there. It was insane. The die were encrusted with diamonds. Wow. How amazing and frivolous all at the same time!
That night we had reservations at Harry’s Café and Steak. It was our “official” anniversary dinner, and we went all out. The restaurant was really interesting. You ordered your steak, and then you ordered sides separately. The sides were served family style, so we could share. The baked potato was massive, and fully loaded. We ordered some asparagus to go with it, which came in a yummy cream sauce, I think it was a hollandaise but I am not sure. We also had some delicious red wine. To top it all off, we ordered the cheesecake for dessert and shared it. What an awesome meal. I didn’t take any pictures because it just seemed kind of weird to pull out my giant camera in a nice restaurant. Trust me though, it looked and tasted amazing!
After dinner we took the Staten Island ferry to get some views of the Statue of Liberty and the skyline at night, all lit up. The ferry is free, and comes pretty close to the statue, but not quite close enough to get a good photo. I really need to think about a telephoto lens for my camera. Below are some of the better shots I got. Shooting at night is pretty tricky, especially for a newbie like me, but I took all of these photos with no flash and on manual, so I am still pretty proud of them. The Statue of Liberty photo is very blurry but it shows how close we got and was the best I could do!
That concludes my day 1 recap! Stay tuned for more, on day 2 we explored Chinatown, and the Upper East Side, including a lunch at Serendipity 3 (spoiler – it was delicious!!!).
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