Our vacation in New York City - Day One

[trogdor]

Last Wednesday, we went to New York City. We've been there before a couple of times, so we knew we weren't going to get to stay in Manhattan (are you MAD?) without either paying through the nose, or paying through the nose for a walk-in closet with nice wallpaper. So we stayed...in...Yonkers. Yonkers is a decaying husk of a city surrounded by (mostly) tidy suburbs inhabited by people who wanted to live near New York City without paying $3000 a month to live in a broom closet with nice wallpaper. There is nothing exciting about Yonkers, so I won't go into too much detail about the place. My apologies (and condolences) to anyone reading this who actually lives there.

So why Yonkers? Because we stayed in New Jersey a couple of times and were kind of underwhelmed. Northern New Jersey is, as far as we have seen, exactly like the opening montage of The Sopranos - filthy and full of ugly industrial debris that used to be perfectly good factories.

So once we've landed in Yonkers, we decided to check out the Bronx Zoo before ehecking in. The Bronx Zoo is nice, unlike any other zoo we've ever seen. It's really spacious, and strolling through it is more like a walk in the woods than the usual 60's Planet of the Apes concrete setup. We got to see a tiger taking a whiz in front of about a hundred spectators with an expression on his face like he'd be flipping us all off if he had hands instead of paws. I recommend checking out the the monkey house. Monkeys are cool.

After the zoo trip, we checked into the hotel. It was, um, okay. I guess. Nothing exceptional to write home about. The Italian joint behind the lobby was mentioned in Zagats (more about that later), so that must be something, right? Once checked in, I wanted a drink, so I got in the car and looked for a liquor store. It was then that I found out how easy it was to get lost in Yonkers. Besides the fact that the place was built on a frickin' mountain, the streets went every which way, unlike New York, which was thoughtfully designed in 1811 to be user-friendly. So it was really easy to get lost there. I stopped for gas and asked the nice Middle Eastern types running the place for directions, and it turned out I wasn't really that lost at all.

So there ya go. Yonkers is a clusterfuck, but the people are nice. Nighty-nite.

[tigereye]

1. hmmm

something to ponder next time we go to NYC. I stayed in Greenpoint last time I was there. The view from the roof was stellar, and I got to hear great music pretty much all night long.