New York City - 30.03. - 03.04.

After my arrival in New York on the 30th of March 2013 i had a hard time to find the hostel, in which i would stay for the last 4 days of my long lasting journey. The hostel was somwhere out of Manhatten in the district of "Queens" very close to a highway. On the internet page of this hostel there was no description at all how to get there the easiest way by public transportation. So i had to figure it out somehow on my own. First after i arrived in the city, i bought a 7 day ticket for the city. Then i tried to take a subway to the closest possible location on the map (relative to the hostel).
Arriving at this subway station which seemed to be not too far away, i tried to find out whether there is was a bus to make the last distance, which was left between me and the hostel. I asked around everwhere for like 1 hour. Noone could help me, not even the people who worked for the the subway. Then i decided to go to the Dunkin Donuts around the corner, which had free wifi,  and look for buses on the internet. But this was not very successful either. So i don't know... after 2 or 3 hours of trying to find a bus, i finally gave up and decided to walk to the hostel. This took me another 1-2 hours. I had arrived at 11 o'clock in the morning in New York, and at the time when i got to this hostel it was already 5pm!!
After checking in into the hostel i first of all took a shower. Then i decided to go to town to some of the famous locations which you should see as a tourist. The first place which i decided to go to is the "Times Square". On this day the time Square was overfull, because (i didn't know at this point) it was the easter weekend. If you travel too long you don't seem to think about these events.

The Times Square on my first evening in New York

The Times Square on my first evening in New York

On my last day in New York i went to the Times Square again and took another picture, because we had quite nice weather that day, with lots of sunshine :). If you compare it to the pictures of my first day in NY you see that it's a lot emptier.

The Times Square on my last day in New York

On my second day in New York i decided to see some more "have to" sights in the city. One of them is the 9/11 memorial. To get there was a horrible torture. First of all i had to wait at least for 1 hour in a queue, in order to get into an airport-like security control. I cannot tell whether it was 1 or 2 hours, but it was really annoying. So after a very long time of waiting i was finally allowed to enter the memorial area. The memorial consists of two square shaped pools which are supposibly exactly at the location where the old world trade centre twin towers used to stand.

the 9/11 memorial

Not far from the memorial you can see how they already build up the new World Trade centre. It's interesting to see how fast this whole thing progressed! The terrorists were like, " ha ha you fu**in' captialism asses, we kicked down one of the most important buildings of the financial district in New York!!" And approximately 10 years later this is the answer of the capitalsm people: They simply built a new one which is even nicer and taller then the old world trade centre. As you can see on the picture the building is not yet 100% complete. But almost. Until the completion of the new World Trade Centre the Empire State Building is offically the tallest building in town.

the new World Trade Centre (still under construction)

Right after my visit of the 9/11 memorial i decided to take the ferry to Staten Island (which is for free :D ) , from which you can see the Statue of Liberty, as people told me. From this ferry you also have a very nice view on the Skyline of New York. At the time when i got to the ferry it was already about 5 o'clock pm i guess. This shows how long i had to wait just in order to see this 9/11 memorial.

Skyline of New York as seen from the Staten Island ferry

The Statue of Liberty as you might see on the picture, in reality, looks a bit smaller than i would have imagined it from the movies. The yellow ferry which you can see on the picture looks exactly like the ferry i was standing on while taking the picture. A ferry like this can probably easily transport about 1000 people at once.

The Statue of Liberty

On my 3rd day in New York i decided to go to the Bronx with 2 people from my hostel. First of all took the subway to the Yankee stadium, because we wanted to see the stadium, as noone of us had ever seen a baseball stadium before. When we arrived at the stadium we were really surprised because there were thousands of people. The reason for that was, that on this day it was the first game of the year / of the new season. Some people in front of the Stadium tried to sell us tickets for 150$ each. Because we were not nuts we went to the ticket office and asked whether they still had tickets. Tickets usually cost around 30$ as we found out. Unfortunately all the tickets were sold out at this time. This explained why people were trying to sell their tickets for 150$.  However ... 150$ is way too expensive, so we decided to do something else.

After our visit of the Yankee Stadium we decided to go to the botanic garden, which is also located in the Bronx. After we had arrived their we saw that an antry ticket to the garden was 25$. This really pissed me off, because i had travelled all around the world and been to many botanic gardens. And never ever did i have to pay a single cent to get in.

So after our unsucessful try to go to the botanic garden we returned to Manhatten. There we decided to go for a little walk in China Town and Little Italy. My two mates were from Italy and they assured me that Little Italy doesn't look like Italy at all. It's all tourist crap. However from the street where we walked in we could see the Empire State building :).

street with Empire State Building in New York

The next thing we tried to do, is to get to the Empire State Building to see how much it costs to go to the top of the building. I think it was something between 40$ and 50 dollars and we were all to proud to spend the money to go up there. On top of that you have to keep in mind:  If you go to the top in order to see the city, you will se the city -but without the Empire State building!

The next thing which we did was a georgeous idea of one of my mates. You probably know that TV series "How i met your mother". So the idea was to go to that Irish Pub of the TV series. The pub was quite easy to find. It's called "Mc Gee's Irish Pub". Of course this is not the Irish pub where the recorded all the Episodes - this pub only exists in a hollywood studio... But the Irish pub of the series and many of the stories were orignally inspired by this pub. So this is the real, original Mc Gees Irish pub :) .

me and one of my mates in the Mc Gee's pub from "How I met your mother"

After our visit of Mc Gee's we headed over to a skybar. We didn't have to pay any admission to get up there, which was a great thing :) ! From the top of this skybar we could see almost the whole city, including the Empire state building.

New York City as seen from the rooftop of a Skybar at night

On my 4th day in New York i decided to see some more last sights, like for example Central Statoin and the Central Park of New York. I am not 100% sure but i think the Central the park is the same park where they made some of the scences of "Alone in New York" in the past. I really loved this movie as a child , so i had to go to this park. From the park i also had a nice view on the Skyline of NY. I bet the Park looks a lot more beautiful in summer, when the trees have leaves and so on. However, i was lucky with the weather.

The Central Park in New York

I didn't have that much time this day to see more of the city, because on my first day i had bought a ticket for one of theses broadway musicals at the Times Square. The musical i had chosen is called "Wicked". I chose this, because i had never seen it before. So it was a nice surprise :).  The name of the theatre as far as i remember was "Gershwin Theatre".

Advertising Sign for the Wicket Musical

Infront of the musical Theatre

Elphaba the witch in the Musical Wicked

On my last day in New York,  the 3rd of April, i went to the Bronx Zoo with my two room mates from the hostel, which was for free that day, because it's for free every wednesday of the week :).
So this visit was quite nice, especially because it was for free. I didn't have much else to do anyway, and this was a nice idea, because my flight was in the evening at  8:40 pm, so i had time almost the whole day. Well in the end i couldn't stay as long as i had expected because to get to the Zoo from the hostel was around 1,5 hours! So i had to calculate some time to get back to the hostel, and then from there to the airport, wich probably also took 1 to 1,5 hours...

Entrance Gate of the Bronx Zoo

Grizzly Bear in the Bronx Zoo