So, this blog is being transformed from a France blog to a general travel blog :)
I had my interview in Rochester, NY this past Friday and took Ben with me. Since we were (semi) close to NYC, we decided to tour the city that never sleeps!
I'll start with our brief stay in Rochester. Downtown Rochester is not very big and there isn't much to do. I have a feeling that most of the young life around Rochester is located near the campus. We stayed at the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Rochester and had a nice dinner at the hotel and watched the movie, "The Proposal." I wouldn't mind spending 4 years in Rochester despite the lack of "city atmosphere." There are a lot of outdoorsy activities available and it has a great performing arts scene.
Now onto the REAL weekend. We arrived at JFK at about 10am. We then tested our public transit skills by taking the airtrain, LIRR train, bus, and subway to our hotel in Times Square, the Renaissance. We were literally in Times Square! I could look out our window and see the NY Times news ticker. After taking a quick break at the hotel, we explored a little bit of Times Square (saw the Naked Cowboy) and decided to take a bus tour of the city. This allowed us to see all the big sites--madison square gardens, empire state building, Macy's, ground zero, little italy, chinatown, soho, lower eastide, UN building, hotels, brooklyn bridge, Radio City Music Hall, central park, and everything that is NY. We also took a ferry to Liberty and Ellis Island to see the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, they weren't allowing anyone to climb up in the statue that day :(
We also stoppped at Canal St. for lunch. Canal st is where little chinese ladies show you pictures of designer purses, sunglasses, and watches and you follow them into this little room where they keep all of their merchandise. I ended up with a $30 coach purse and $10 Chanel sunglasses :) After the tour, Ben and I bought some tickets for Chicago on Broadway, went back to the hotel to change, ate some dinner (NY pizza-delicious!) and headed to the play.
Chicago was incredible! It is the best play/musical I have ever seen. The plot was great--entertaining and engaging. The costumes/acting/dancing/singing were amazing! I LOVED it. I still can't get some of the songs out of my head. After the play, Ben and I headed to a bar off of Times Square called Havana Central. They had some really good sangria and a live band. The perfect end to the perfect day.
On Sunday, we slept in and then went to lunch at an Irish pub, O'Connelys, off of 5th avenue. It was very good! I got fish and chips and Ben got a Turkey Cuban panini. We then window shopped in a couple of the stores on 5th avenue--Prada, Gucci, Tiffany's, and the apple store.
We then went and had some ice cream in Central Park--very relaxing. They were actually fliming something about global warming while we were there...interesting. After relaxing in Central Park, we headed back to Madison Avenue to continue our shopping. I found some really great deals...and shoes and purses :) After our shopping, we headed to the airport to fly back to Atlanta. Our flight was delayed 90 minutes due to rain in Atlanta.
In summary, New York was wonderful! It was everything I expected and more.
