Day four - Downtown

9th Jan 2010

Today we went Downtown. To get there we went on the subway, even we couldn't face the walk! The subway is hilarious, the first one we clambered on involved a massive bloke getting on and starting to sing 'Lean on Me'. Clearly this type of ordeal is normal to the New Yorkers but I found it rather startling. On another occasion 3 kids, clearly a bit hip-hop, got on and started dancing step-up style. After the Subway we got straight onto the Staten Island ferry to have a look a the statue of Liberty for free. It was nice to finally see some sky and to see the city from another angle. The statue itself was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but impressive none the less.

After getting back to the mainland we wandered off to see Ground Zero. The site itself wasn't particularly distressing as it was just a building site. The most interesting place was a nearby church that remained undamaged by the actual 9/11 event and held some memorial stuff which was sad to see. We then went to see Wall Street, I was mostly just excited to see the place wear 'Sleep Now In The Fire' was filmed with the band Rage Against the Machine.

Chinatown was next on the agenda, the contrast between regular New York and Chinatown was surreal. It literally felt like we were in a completely different place. We had a Chinese for lunch then looked at some more down town shops. Also we had been warned about people selling 'designer' bags, which meant Chinese people shuffling up to you and whispering "Prada" in your ear.

Later on we went into an amazing old school record stores, it had hundreds of cd's and vinyl's. We spent a good half hour in there trawling through all the names, I left with the Smith's greatest hits. We wanted to try some proper New York cheesecake while we were there so we went into this darling little cafe with the most incredible patisserie display. I ordered a 'Chocolate Lulu', Abbie the New York cheesecake and Alix the chocolate cheesecake. They were to die for, I could only managed a few mouthfuls of each of them.

After getting back we started to pack as tomorrow is our last day!