WE SPENT THE REST OF THE WEEKEND GOING IN EVERY DIRECTION POSSIBLE TO SEE AS MUCH AS WE COULD IN OUR SHORT TIME OF BEING THERE.
THROUGH THE EYES OF FIRST-TIME VISITORS
A JOURNEY TO THE
CONCRETE JUNGLE
/// BY RACHEL WILLIAMS
The City That Never Sleeps is a very understandable nickname now that we’ ve traveled over to the east coast for the weekend.“ The Big Apple,”“ NYC,”“ The Melting Pot,” or whatever you’ d like to call it – New York City is simply incredible.
As my fiancé Danny Mun and I arrived to the Port Authority bus terminal, we knew only the advice of our friends and family— to be VERY careful and watch for pick-pockets. So you can maybe have some kind of idea how concerned we were, as a young couple. Holding our bags tightly to our chests, we walked up the stairs to the sounds of car horns and the smell of something indescribable; so many smells at once. Not a very bad scent, I suppose.
With our phones out, ready to take pictures of the first thing we saw, we were almost ran over by the bustling crowd. It was a Friday morning around 7:30 in Manhattan, which means: If you don’ t move your feet, step back because people have places to be! Quickly, we realized
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our photography must be postponed for later as we didn’ t have much of an idea where our hotel was, and we needed to get a move on.
Luckily, I had it all mapped out ahead of time, a“ how-to” on getting to our hotel from the bus station. With a couple of assists from the NYPD, we found ourselves in the middle of Times Square, which is just where we needed to be. As much as we wanted to explore everything right then and there, we were dying for a hot shower and to get those heavy bags off our hands. Our hotel was easy to find with its big, spinning red“ W,” attached to the front of the 53-story building.
The Hotel W Times Square is beautiful. The staff was wonderful, making us comfortable, and were so nice as to upgrade our room to the cool“ Corner Room, Hudson River View.” We were 30 stories high with a beautiful view of Times Square out one window and a breathtaking sunset view over the Hudson River through the other. We were given warm cotton robes with a“ W” patched on the arm, a refrigerator stocked full of a variety of drinks, the classic“ Bliss” spa products which are featured in every W
Hotel and so forth. Once we took all of this in, we rushed to shower and got ready as quickly as possible, eager to see what awaited us below.
By the time we walked onto Times Square, it was around 10:30 a. m. with the entire day before us. We were not going to let sleep deprivation stop us from exploring Manhattan! The first thing that caught our eye was the Times Square New Years ball. It was big and blue, shining in the middle of it all with“ 2016” lit up directly underneath it. It was something that I’ d forgotten was even there until it was right in front of my eyes – definitely an experience. After that, we walked a bit
WE SPENT THE REST OF THE WEEKEND GOING IN EVERY DIRECTION POSSIBLE TO SEE AS MUCH AS WE COULD IN OUR SHORT TIME OF BEING THERE.