Category: travel

First full day in the city has come and gone, and my feet are very glad that I’m done walking for the night. We left the hotel around 930 and went in search of a bagel place for breakfast. After 15 minutes of unsuccessful looking we finally found a place (which according to Jeremy is very odd, as usually there are bagel shops on every corner in the city, apparently just not around our hotel). Bagels were good (had my usual everything bagel with veggie cream cheese) and fueled with my cup of coffee for the day we headed to the Bronx zoo.
After a 45 minute train ride we got to the zoo around 1115 and we spent the entire day there. It’s probably the biggest zoo I’ve ever been to. It has a cool monorail and a lot more “cohabitation” areas with 3 or 4 different kinds of animal in one exhibit, so it was cool to see the animals in a bit more of a “natural” setting. After 300 pictures or so we headed out, stopping at Grand Central Station (I’d never been in there before so we stopped in and took some pictures) before meeting up with my friend Mike for dinner at Scarlattos, a good (and reasonably priced) Italian place just a few steps from Times Square.
We split a fried calamari and zuchinni appetizer (it had both the calamari rings and little tiny tentacles deep fried, hadn’t had those before, pretty weird looking but it was quite tasty) and I had a scallop and asparagus risotto for the main course and a saffron creme brûlée for dessert (both also tasty, didn’t really get the saffron flavor in the dessert but you definitely got the color). Had a great time with Mike, catching up and reminiscing about college for about two hours, at which point the manager asked us if he gave us a free round of drinks at the bar would we move from our table because they had a party of 50 (yes, five-oh) coming in in a few minutes, so we moved over to the bar and chatted more and enjoyed a free glass of merlot.
After that we decided to go back out to Times Square and take some photos of there at night (I had not seen it at night before). The city has recently opened this big staircase/platform thing in the middle of the square that provides a good view if the whole intersection so we climbed up there and sat and talked for a while longer, I took a few more pictures, and then we decided it was probably a good time to call it a night. We said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel.
Tomorrow is museum day and lunch with another friend of mine from college, then dinner at Craft in the evening, fun!
Photo count: 348

So I figured I would do a mini travel blog again during this trip to New Tork City since I’ve been rather delinquent with posting lately. Jeremy and I decided to come up for memorial day weekend so I’m going to try and document all the goings on, hopefully it will help me remember and catalogue all the pictures I will take too 😉
We left Richmond at 4pm and landed a brief hour later at laguardia. The whole flight I was watching out the window trying to figure out what we were flying over at that particular moment. Noticed there are a lot of circular tracks on the way up here, don’t know if they were race tracks or what but there were dozens on the few hundred miles I was gazing out the window, weird.
Anyway, we landed, hopped on the M60 with just about the entire rest of the airport and took a bus ride through the Bronx, over the bridge to manhattan, where we got on the subway to our hotel. Now here’s the great thing about our hotel, the Cosmopolitan in TriBeCa, it is right next to the Chambers street subway stop, yay for short walks to the subway! So after dropping off our bags, Jeremy and I went in search of dinner. I had been to Chinatown for lunch the last time I was in the city and, since we are within walking distance of there from our hotel, we decided to go pick a random place there to have some dinner. We wandered around a bit, past multiple fruit stands and one smelly fish market and ended up at a little noodle shop that had a huge menu and was relatively tourist-free. I had shanghai noodles with roast pork and dumplings and jeremy had sweet and sour chicken, both were very good. I can’t quite place what the flavor was in the noodle broth, maybe just miso, but it was really tasty. After dinner it was about 8:30 so we decided to hop on the subway and pay homage to the 5th avenue Apple store and walk around and look in the windows of all the über expensive stores of 5th Avenue. By that time we were both getting pretty tired so we decided to head back to the hotel for the night. Noticed on the way back we were “going home” just as most of the folks our age are getting ready to “go out”, am I getting old or what? 😉
Tomorrow if the weather is nice I think we’re gonna go to the Bronx zoo (if not then museums) then we’re meeting up with my college friend Mike for dinner at an Italian place that he highly reccomends, should be a lot of fun. For now? definitely time for bed, g’night all.

Today we visited the grand palace at Versailles about ten miles outside of Paris. I think it takes the prize as my favorite spot in France that we visited (with St. Chapelle coming in second). There were seemingly miles of sumptuously decorated rooms in the palace, then literally miles of exquisite gardens with perfectly manicured shrubs and flowers dotted with various sized fountains (which were on at various points today as it was a weekend, they were a beautiful sight). For lunch I had a cheese sandwich on a baguette and a butter-sugar crepe for dessert, yum! (and yay for getting in a few “typical” French menu items).
So lots of pictures were taken today (around 200), I was just blown away by the sheer magnitude of it all, just one of the gardens we saw was more varied than a botanical garden, and there were ten other gardens to see. Each had it’s own style, some very simple and small with an acre of shrubs and grass and a fountain, while others were many acres with dozens of different flowers planted in various patterns and groupings.
The palace closed at 1730 and so we headed out around 1700, but wanted to stick around town and have dinner, unfortunately in Europe that means waiting around until 1900, so we meandered about the area near the restaurant recommended by our guidebook Chez Lazare, and boy am I glad we waited around.
The food was great, classic French, cozy atmosphere, and not intimidating like the place we ate the night before. The place specialized in grilled foods and fish, they had an open charcoal grill just inside the dining room so you could watch everuthing being cooked. We split a half liter of white wine (light, fruity, but not too sweet, very good). Jeremy ordered a mini ravioli appetizer that came in a tasty butter-cheese sauce (very good for dipping chewy French bread into), then we both had grilled Atlantic salmon with buerre blanc sauce, yum! For a side I ended up having a baked potato (I saw “pommes” something on the menu and figured, I like potatoes, can’t go wrong with that), which was also really good, different than one in the states, it wasn’t a typical “baking” potato but a large white potato with what I assume is the French variation on sour cream, it was a bit thinner and had more of a citrus-y tang to it than American sour cream, but very tasty. And to finish things off jeremy had the creme brûlée (which was excellent) and I had “fromage blanc” with a berry coulis, which was really good, the cheese was very creamy, like thick yougurt, and similar in taste to plain yougurt, a little tangy and not too sweet, a very yummy end to the evening.
The train ride back had some good people watching, there was a cute two year old that was bouncing and jumping on the seat in front of us just giggling away and next to us two college kids were chatting, him in French and her in English, so that was fun to listen to the multi-lingual conversation.
Overall this has been a fantastic trip, got to see lots of stuff, have some tasty food, take lots of pictures, and have a really fun time in the process.
Tomorrow our flight leaves Charles de Gaulle around 1230 and we will say au revoir to Europe, until next time 😉

So our train arrived about two hours late from Florence. We got in around 1100, found the metro and after checking with the information desk to get directions and a map of the city we found our way to our hotel. They weren’t ready for us to check into our room yet but said they could have another ready for us in 30 minutes or so, we waited in the bar/lounge (which I love the décor of, dark wood tables, blue chairs, large white vases) and utilized the wifi wntil they were ready for us.
We cleaned up once we got into the room and headed out to see Notre Dame and St. Chappelle, since by then it was already 1400 and going to the museums wouldn’t have given us much time since they close at 1800. We acquired a two day Paris Museum Pass (thanks for the reccomendation Meghan!) and headed to St. Chappelle first since it was supposed to close an hour earlier than Notre Dame.
Unfortunately there was about a thirty minute wait to go through a security check but we had some excitement while in line, a large tour group of teenagers had started milling about near the entrance to the church and apparently the tour guide had inserted herself in line and then tried to usher in her entire tour group in her place. There was a big uproar from some older tourists behind them which resulted in about half a dozen Paris police officers coming over to settle down the commotion. After about ten minutes thing had quieted down, the tour guide relented (with much yelling and hand gesturing at the older tourists) and the line started moving again. Ironically, once we got inside the tour group was already in, guess they used a different entrance, and they were in and out in under fifteen minutes.
Jeremy and I spent over half an hour in the little chapel, it was gorgeous. The stained glass covers nearly all the walls and is amazing. Afterwards we made our way to Notre Dame only to find it had closed early, apparently the Pope is coming tomorrow so both churches are closed tomorrow and part of Saturday, figures :-p We could sort of see inside Notre Dame this time because they kept the main doors open but gated, unfortunately if we want to see inside we’ll have to pay again since our pass expires before it reopens on Saturday, oh well, the outside was still very impressive.
I was starving by this point (around 1730) but most places don’t open for dinner until 1930 so we ended up heading back towards our hotel and grabbing a quick (but tasty) sandwich at the train station. I sorted through pictures when we got back to the room (I have about 420 so far) and then we watched Amelie, which I had never seen before, it was really cute.
Tomorrow will be museum day. We’re hoping to hit the Louvre first thing in the morning then perhaps a few others in the afternoon (Orsay, Orangerie). On Fridays many of the museums are open until 2100 so we shouldn’t have to rush through too much, and hopefully tomorrow we can enjoy some tasty French food as well. They’re calling for rain tomorrow but hopefully we will be able to walk around outside and take some pictures as well, we shall see. Until then, au revoir!