A story of two little pigs and their travels: New York, New York!

Manhattan as viewed from Brooklyn

Next stop after Philly was New York City. After the not so good experience on Greyhound, we were happy to be catching the Amtrak train from Philly to NYC. It was a much more enjoyable ride!

New York City was everything we had hoped it would be. The hostel we were staying at was located on 103rd and Broadway. This meant that it was further out from the downtown area, yet close to Central Park. It was also very residential and reminded us a lot of Seseme Street! High rise living, with children playing in local playgrounds together becuase they don't have their own backyards. Although this was really novel, we are still both thankful that we have the space in Australia to have backyards!

View of Harlem, which was not too far from our hostel

Two little pigs exploring NYC

The subway was also amazing and we were easily able to get from one place to another, although as expected it was absolutely filthy and very hot!

View of the subway

So our adventures in NYC started with a nice walk through the local neighbourhood our hostel was located in and then a strole through Central Park. Central Park is really the only green looking part of the highly urbanised city. Many New Yorkers escape to Central Park to go jogging, cycling, pram pushing, picknicking and even sun bathing. The movie Enchanted is set in New York City and in one scene they are singing and dancing in Central Park, so we looked out for the famous sights that are found in that movie.

Central Park

This is the bridge that the prince jumps off in Enchanted, only to be hit by cyclists

Us in Central Park. Apparently the building in the background is the Dakota Building, where John Lennon was killed.

After exploring Central Park, we moved on to the rest of the city. We discovered well-known places like Trump Towers, Madison Square Garden, Columbus Circle and waited in a very long line to go up the Empire State Building. The view from the top was amazing and well worth the wait.

Madison Square Garden

Trump Tower

The iconic New York cab

The Empire State Building

Various views of Manhattan from the Empire State Building - Downtown, Uptown and Midtown

The Chrysler Building

Ahhh, to be a pidgeon in New York City

We ventured on to Times Square which was an amazing overload of shinny, lit up, advertisements. Consumerism at its best. But really it was incredible, and kinda smaller that we thought it would be. While we were hanging out in Times Square I (Candice) also stole a snap shot with the NYPD!!

Times Square

A pig and two pigs. But really, they were lovely.

Even McDonalds was lit up

As we were in NYC for the 4th of July, American Independence Day, we decided to crack it out and go on a 4th of July New York City tour. This invloved an amazing 12 hours of walking around the city checking out places like Brooklyn Heights, The Brooklyn Bridge, Ground Zero (where 9/11 happened), Wall Street, The Statue of Liberty and some of the oldest buildings in NYC. Our tour guide was on fire! He was a retired local New Yorker, who had lived there all his life and had more energy than all of us in his tour group! We finished the tour off with mediochre fire works, (the Disneyland fireworks were so much more incredible) and then some famous New York pizza.