New York New York!

A little belated, but now that our pictures are posted, I'll fill you in on our New York Trip. Some important points and highlights:

1) We drove into Manhattan. DROVE into Manhattan. INTO it. As in, we passed the empire state building on our way to our hotel. Seriously. As we drove over the bridge into Manhattan, and the city appeared over the horizon I felt fear like no other. We just kept yelling at each other "what are we doing?!?" "we are crazy people driving in Manhattan!" I have to say that, aside from looking for parking it was actually not that bad. There were ALOT of pedestrians who leapt out infront of vehicles at random moments. There were some who were just chilling in the middle of an intersection, only becoming visible when the car next to you veered into you to avoid running them over. There were lots of cabs, and yes, they drove like maniacs...but what we found was we kind of got into it. I would step on the gas and pull infront of a cab and slam the brakes on once in, and much to my surprise the cab would not hit me, and in fact seemed completely non-plussed by it. Then I would look at Daryl and say "Did you SEE what I just did!!?" It was intense, but almost in a good way. But very exhausting. Anyhoo....

2) This is the place we stayed in. It was central to everything right in the centre of Manhattan. It was beautiful, and really reasonable - if you're ever in New York stay there! It is a row of beautiful brownstones, gorgeous, vaulted ceilings and beautifully decorated. Ours even had a garden area out back!

3) Our favorite annecdote. As we proceeded through Connecticut on our way to New York, I realized I had to pee SO badly. So, I got off the highway, and we ended up on some parkway where there was no where to pee. We were looking around and I said to Daryl "Wow, I wonder what city this is...It's really big!" Then we passed the following sign: "Welcome to the Bronx." Guess what the big city was. Stellar. No, my sense of direction has never, and never will get better.

4) We had the true NY experience at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village. We went to a neat cafe across the street for amazing hot cocoa, then to the 11pm show in the Cellar. The scheduled comics ran till about 1:30am, but then Dave Chappelle showed up after the show and did about an hour long set. That was excellent. The other comics were okay, but there was a lot of vulgar, less intelligent humor, with a lot of audience ridicule (we escaped it thankfully). You could definitely see a difference between the experienced comics like Dave Attell, and Dave Chappelle and the others. After the show, we wandered through the village, and even at 2:30am you could still hear jazz music wafting up the stairwells of many clubs, and there were many people out and about. It was SO freezing cold though that after a few blocks of walking we decided to opt out and have our first NY Cab experience.

5) NY Subways are not scary. At all. Okay, well, Manhattan Subways between the financial district, Chelsea, and times square are not scary. I felt safer on them than I do on the sky train normally! Same thing with Manhattan. I saw no sign of drugs, violence, come to think of it I don't even think I saw one panhandler even anyone who looked homeless. I'm sure they were there, but I have seen a lot more of that stuff in Van or Victoria than I did while there. Again though, we were only there for a really short time, and in all the touristy area, so...

So it was great! Check out the pictures here. Click on New York Trip.