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