New York City - Part 1

Last September, I headed to my very first trip to the Big Apple and it was just an amazing experience overall! We took a red eye flight Thursday night and arrived at JFK Friday morning--3 AM Pacific time! Needless to say I was a bit disoriented upon landing, but with excitement rushing through and the power of Dunkin Donuts, Ryan and I managed to navigate our way through the subway system and make it to our hotel in one piece.

Fodor's recommends doing the Statue of Liberty tour pretty early in the day, since lines get very long and unforgiving as the day progresses. Lady Liberty was incredibly massive and surely deserves her iconic status! I was so pumped to get to strike an item off my bucket list--visiting a UNESCO World Heritage site--booyah! We also breezed through Ellis Island (at my nagging) despite being on the verge of collapsing from a sleep attack. Factoring in ZERO sleep into an equation filled with a lot of standing and waiting, we were more than ready to rest our heads on the nearest set of pillows. However I couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit an important cornerstone of American history, especially since I'm an immigrant myself. The great hall pictured below is the Registry Room, where immigrants queued to be interrogated and verified by an official.

Also featured on the photos below are the Manhattan skyline and the One World Trade Center. It may not look it but the latter is dubbed to be the tallest skyscraper in the Western hemisphere!

If anyone's curious, we stayed at the Larchmont Hotel in Greenwich Village. It may have been the cheapest option we found (New York and cheap do not go together) but it had the right amount of charm we were looking for. The next few hours were spent getting some overdue sleep.

You can't go to New York and NOT have pizza. But with over 400 pizzerias across the city, where do you go? Our choice was Joe's Pizza, an A-list spot if the rows of celebrity photos that gilded the walls speak for something. It was a tasty bite without the 2-hour wait time (I'm looking at you, Grimaldi's). We ordered slices of pepperoni and mozarella, both folding nicely as NY pizzas should. It makes Pizza Hut look phony and Domino's a joke.

To me, Times Square at night was reminiscent of the Vegas strip, only with a crowd less seedy and more sober. Big bright lights, hordes of people, mad traffic, and a mixed bag of street performers littered the streets. We only stayed long enough to snap a few photos, and then quickly escaped this dizzying scene.

We were making our trek back to our hotel, dejected from our failed attempt to get inside this one Irish bar (the place was packed to the brim), when suddenly, the glowing lights of Papaya King caught my wandering eyes. I've been acquainted with this New York institution after a feature from Anthony Bourdain, instantly adding it to my checklist. Papaya King serves good, cheap hotdogs with practically unlimited toppings. But the shining star of their menu, unabashedly, is the papaya drink! I had a cup of a similar drink from the corner hotdog place earlier that day, and it was not even in the same league. The closest thing I can describe it to is a frothy agua fresca. I had so much papaya drink during our trip, if it got me drunk I'd be long passed out on the floor!

To be continued...