After a rather dodgy start to my trip (read all about it here!), I did eventually make it to New York! I had to fly to Dublin first and then to Stewart airport in Newburgh / New Windsor. From there it was an hour and a half on the shuttle bus to Manhattan and another 45 minutes in a cab to Brooklyn to my Airbnb. It was a long day! And I lost a day and a half in New York, so I had some catching up to do.

Getting Around in NYC

Using the subway is super easy! Even with luggage, I managed it without any issues. I never took it between 5 and 7 though, that’s supposed to be the busy time, so it may be quite a bit more crowded then, but if you can survive the London Underground, you can manage this. Something I love about subways is that they’re basically all the same. If you understand the system, you can go anywhere in the world on the underground.

I did find, though, that the trains were a bit outdated. Very few of them had maps in the cars and often, if there was one, it was a map of the whole subway system. Each station was announced by an incoherent speaker system and only once did I see a train that had an electronic board that listed the stops and showed you where you were and what the next stop was going to be. Most of the stops on it were wrong as the train was taking a diverted route.

To use the trains, you need to get a Metrocard. You can buy this at pretty much any subway station, there are machines that you buy them from and it’s quite straight forward. When you top it up more than $5, you get a discount, like if you put $10 dollars in it, you get $10.50 credit. When you want to top it up, you can either add value or add time. If you top up with your card, instead of cash, it’ll ask you for your zip code. If you don’t come from the states, you can just enter 99999 and it works.

Don’t select add time unless you’re here for more than a week and you plan to use the subway loads. Once you’re in Manhattan, if you’ve planned your day well, you won’t need it again. You can pretty much walk between most things, e.g. If you’re at the statue of liberty, you can walk from there to Wall street and from there to the 9/11 museums. If you’re uptown, you can walk between the Rockefeller Centre, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station and Central Park. I only really used the trains to get in and out of Brooklyn.

Things To Do

If you’re spending a few days in New York city, then you should definitely look up the City Pass https://www.citypass.com/new-york and the City Explorer Card. These are prepaid cards that get you discounts on tonnes of stuff throughout the city. They are very slightly different so take a look at them both and see which one suits you best. I took the City Explorer card and paid for 5 events. This averages each event out at around $30 so if the thing you want to do is more than that, e.g. the 9/11 memorial tribute tour that’s $48 dollars, I used the pass to book it. For things that were less, like the trip to Liberty Island that’s only $26, I paid for that.

Walking Food Tour

In NYC, there are so many things to eat! It’s one of the things I love about it. There are so many influences as well from all over the world, especially Europe, due to the high immigration rate there in the past. The best way to try a good range of things is to take a walking food tour and there are a whole bunch to choose from. I took the lower east side tour, so we walked around Manhattan, learning a little of its history and trying out new foods that I hadn’t even heard of. We started with Knish, apparently a Jewish traditional food even though the group from Israel had never had it before. It’s basically a tonne of mashed potato stuffed into a thin dough, kinda like calzone dough, but thinner and round. I also discovered pudding and while I still don’t really understand what it is, I love it! 

Grand Central Station

Of course, I had to go see Grand Central Station. It took me a while to find the place! Google kept taking me to the wrong place and insisting that I had arrived and even when I did find the entrance, it’s not so obvious. It’s still a working train station so you can walk past it and miss it if you’re not paying attention. It is beautiful though, with the carvings and the zodiac starts across a sea green ceiling. Definitely worth a stop in, but don’t expect it to take very long.

Visit Wall Street

This is one of those things that you feel you need to do because everyone, everywhere knows about Wall Street. It’s very possibly the most famous street in the world. But it’s also just that; a street. There was traffic on it and people wandering about, the Trump Building was under some kind of construction and it just wasn’t anything special I thought. The coolest part was that there are wooden foundations in the ground from the original wall that was built there (hence why it’s called Wall Street). The wall was made because the immigrants bought the land of lower Manhattan from the natives by exchanging gifts for it, like axes and tools. However, the natives didn’t understand the concept of owning land, so they didn’t understand that they had sold the land. The immigrants, mostly from Europe, who had bought Manhattan then built a wall to separate “their” land and keep the natives out. Over time, though, the area became way too populated and the wall had to come down so that they could spread north.

The Statue of Liberty

Of course, there’s no going to New York City and not seeing the Statue of Liberty. To get there, you take a short boat ride from Battery Park in Lower Manhattan and it takes about 20 minutes. You’ll probably spend more time queueing that actually on the boat. Once over there, you can walk around the entire statue and take a tour inside her! This statue was atually designed and constructed by the same engineer who designed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. This becomes really obvious from the inside when you see it from the inside and see that iron cross-cross structure. The outside is made of copper so when she first arrived, she was copper coloured. It took about 30 years for the whole thing to oxidise and turn green. It was also originally shipped over from France, in 350 pieces in 214, and assembled here in New York like a giant jigsaw and took just over a yer to put together in 1885-1886. Although it is a super touristy thing to do, I’d highly recommend it. You get a great view of the Manhattan skyline from Liberty Island.

Ellis Island

Ellis Island suprised me beceause I hadn’t really heard of it before and yet it was one of the most interesting things I did in New York City. It’s just a hop over on another ferry boat from Liberty Island so I thought why not, while I was there anyway.

In the late 1800s, New York was struggling with the mass immigration from Europe and as a result a federal immigration centre was constructed on Ellis Island to process them and over the next few decades, around 12 million immigrants would pass through it. Of course, this didn’t include anyone that had arrived by a first class ticket as they were thought to be affluent enough to not be a legal or financial burden to the USA. Anyone who was poor or who might be sick was sent to Ellis Isand for further inspection. Doctors would breifly inspect each arrival and then a legal team would go through their documents before deciding whether to let them carry on into the States.

During the first and second world wars, Ellis Isand was used as a military base, for the army, the navy and the coast guard, as well as being used as an interrment centre for prisoners of war.

As you walk through, you can still see some of the original ship manifsests with the names and details of every immmigrant transported and examined at Ellis Isand (after 1897 anyway, any before that were destroyed in a fire) as well as information on the kinds of tests that took place there. It’s a really interesting part of the history of the Port of New York and how the population of Ney York city came to be so diverse. It’s definitely worth a couple of hours to explore.

9/11 Memorial Tour

A visit to Ground Zero of the 9/11 disaster feels like one of those things you can’t go to NYC and skip. There’s a a museum built at the site that contains stories and memorabilia from the day; parts of teh building that survived, photos of people who were working there that day and were never seen again, recordings of the final phone calls some made to loved ones… It’s a tough walk through, but the that’s not the way to experience this. Book the Memorial Tour and get a personal insite into how that day affected people left behind. Each tour is given by someone with a connection to the Twin Towers and the tragedy and each tour is unique to that guide. My guide told me how she worked at the Twin Tours and by pure chance, she wasn’t in the office that Tuesday. She was one of the people on the ground afterwards who walked through the rubble looking for survivors. She volunteered in shelters, sourcing blankets for people who’s lives had been destroyed. She told me how it wasn’t known at the time that the combination of the plane fuel and materials in the buildings was highly toxic and most of the people who were there early have all died of cancer. We walked around the memorial of the names of the people lost that day and she pointed out her friends, told me about their lives. There was only one Scottish person on that list, Derek Sword, who was engaged to a woman from NYC and was planning their wedding. It’s a very emotional way to learn more about what happened that day and in the aftermath and I’m so grateful that I did it. It was an experience that I’ll never forget.

New York City has so much to offer. These were just the highlights from my first visit there. If you’re visiting, I hope this gives you a starting point to pick your activities, but I promise you will never be bored in the city that never sleeps.