New York, USA, 17.-27.6.2012, Day 4.

The 4th day of our trip marked the beginning of a crazy heatwave in New York. It was so hot, around 37 C with no wind...You could barely walk from place A to place B without fainting. We took it easy and stopped many times along the way, whether it was for ice cream, drinks or a proper meal. Couldn't have made it otherwise!

So, the plan for the day was to explore Chelsea and West Village - areas that I already fell in love with on my previous trip to New York. As our hotel was pretty close to these places, we just walked all day instead of taking the subway. In my opinion, walking in NYC is a good idea as that way you get to see how different two parts of the city right next to each other can be, and obviously get a significantly better picture of where you actually are on the map. So, after breakfast, we walked along 5th Avenue down to Flatiron Building, which is one of my favourite buildings in New York.

Breakfast, yum!

Madison Square Park.

Flatiron Building!

My mum and I in front of Flatiron Building.
From here, we turned right to West 23rd Street and were in Chelsea in no time. Satu managed to find a shop where she bought several pairs of Converse sneakers and it was actually nice to spend time in the shop because of their AC! Goodbye to heat for a few minutes! But then it was that much more horrible to venture out into the free outdoors sauna  again once Satu was done with her shopping...urgh. Horrible weather! Not sure which is worse - hot days in New York or freezing cold days in Finland!

Anyway, on to our first actual sight, the Chelsea Hotel. For those unfamiliar with it, it used to be where many famous people lived as long-term residents back in the 1960s and 1970s. People like Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, for example, were among these residents, and of course Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious's girlfriend, was found stabbed to death here in 1978. Usually, you can go and see the lobby, which is filled with crazy art, but at the moment, the hotel is closed for renovations and so unfortunately we couldn't go in this time.

There are various signs like this on both sides of the main entrance to the hotel.

222 West 23rd Street. And my mum's trying to get in...:D



By this point, I felt like dying (I don't do well with heat, I have to say), and so we stopped for ice cream. Usually I wouldn't post this picture, but now I just have to. I mean, LOOK AT ME! I look dreadful, I'm all red and look like I'm suffering very badly, which I was! Try and avoid having to go outside in NYC on days like this! It felt like breathing a fireplace into your lungs!


And on we went. Our next destination was Carrie's house from Sex & The City and we needed another stop before we made it there. Chelsea and West Village are amazing places filled with coffee shops, restaurants and nice little bars so you definitely want to stop every once in a while to have a little something somewhere. These areas, especially Chelsea, it seems, are also the gay areas of NYC so you'll see lots of rainbow flags all over the place, and gay coffee shops, bars and clubs. The atmosphere is definitely very nice!

Frozen strawberry margaritas at a diner in West Village. Very frozen indeed :D!

One World Trade Center.

Tiles for America, a memorial for the victims of 9/11.




Carrie's house can be found at 66 Perry Street while another famous building, the house from Friends, is in the corner of Grove and Bedford, not far from Carrie's house.

Me in front of Carrie's house.

Perry Street.

The Friends house.

A random street picture. 

In West Village, you can also find Christopher Park and its Gay Liberation Monument, whose history you can familiarise yourself with here. It happened to be Pride week in NYC when we were there, by the way, and many stores, not only in West Village but all over the city, had decorated their windows with pride colours. Fun! Even the Empire State Building bathed in the colours of the rainbow that week, which I thought was pretty impressive. I love places where love and acceptance are promoted like this! More about this topic later, though, as we also went to see the Pride parade on the 24th, which was amazing!

The entrance to Christopher Park.

The monument.

The legendary Stonewall Inn.



Then it was time to have lunch as we were just about starving! We went to Riviera Cafe, which was a really nice sportsbar type of restaurant. I had this:


We spent quite a long time at this restaurant as they had air conditioning, too, and we were in no hurry to leave the luxury of that behind. When we eventually did leave, though, we went straight to the hotel, took a shower, and then me and Satu went to check out Macy's department store very quickly. I didn't like it at all - maybe it was just this summer's trends or something, but I just hated everything they had on offer and could never have worn any of it. So, I went to get some sushi instead and then spent the rest of the evening in the room, watching a documentary called Justin Bieber: Around the World :D!

Comments

  1. Did you go in the Stonewall Inn? We did the first time we went to NYC...
    Wow... I have still not seen Carrie's house or the FRIENDS building....
    Looks amazing xx

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  2. That looks a lot like the pictures we took when we visited in June. Im really sad that we didnt make it to Chelsea now I will have to visit the next time I go. It all looks great!

    ReplyDelete

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