Tag: cities

Our last full day in New York was totally unplanned and having seen some of the bigger sites like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty already we decided to do some “mopping up” of some of the sights we hadn’t seen by taking an open top bus tour of Downtown Manhattan.

These bus tours are always really busy and often not great, but they are the easiest way to see most of the sights in a city really quickly and that’s exactly what we did.

It took us through all of the districts we hadn’t seen yet like Greenwich Village , Little Italy and East Village . We saw Wall Street , Macy’s , the Brooklyn Bridge , Ground Zero , The Waldorf Astoria and most of Broadway . I think we can say we’ve done New York (or Manhattan Island at least) quite comprehensively. The photos aren’t great but remember they were taken from inside a moving bus!

After saying goodbye to Scott who flew home today, we spent our evening watching ‘The Lion King’ on Broadway. I know it’s a bit cheesy but we’ve seen it in London too and it really is an amazing spectacle. The sets, costumes, puppetry and special effects are just so clever and the cast were excellent, from the great comic actors that play Zazu and Timone to the very talented singers who played Simba and Nala. I imagine the standing ovation they got was a nightly occurrence but it was thoroughly deserved.

 

Yesterday was our first full day in New York . We arrived on Friday having picked Scott up from the airport on our way from Philadelphia. We have hotels just off Times Square so went out for a meal and drinks on Friday ( in pouring rain and 90° heat) then met up at the Guggenheim Museum on Saturday morning.

The Guggenheim museum is a fabulous example of architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright , but we weren’t as interested in the current exhibitions so we stopped to see inside the foyer and then took a yellow cab (of course) over to Central Park and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art .

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is unbelievably huge and you could easily spend several days, if not a week, wandering around without duplicating anything. We managed to visit 5 or 6 of the halls and were amazed to see some of the most famous paintings and sculptures in the world, without glass cases or any ‘protection’ apart from a thin metal rope barrier: Monet’s “Water lillies” and “Bridge over a pond of Water Lillies”, van Gough’s “Self Portrait in a Straw Hat” and “Wheat fields with Cypresses” several Andy Warhol’s, plus, to our complete amazement, Rodin’s “The Thinker” mounted halfway up a wall (replicating, we think, its originally designed position above the gates of Hell, either that, or just putting it conveniently out of reach of visitors!)

We also spent a while in the Modern Art hall, with mixed opinions – Scott was particularly (un)impressed with a piece that looked very similar to a Dulux colour chart! (see it behind the white plaster woman in the photos below).

Our final tourist-stop on day #1 was The Top of The Rock , the observation platform at the top of the Rockerfeller Centre. Its not as high as the Empire State Building , but from it you get to see the ESB itself, and we were there at night, so the lights and colours of New York were just fantastic.

By the time we came down, it was 11pm, so the perfect time to revisit Times Square for night time photos: Another cab ride (I have no idea how they get the cars through spaces so small, it seems to defy any known laws of physics) and Jon spent a little while taking some great pictures of the neon lights, his favorites are below.

By this time our feet were exhausted and we realised we hadn’t eaten since lunch so we found a restaurant off Times Square where I had my first authentic New York bagel (toasted, cream cheese & lox (smoked salmon) with capers on the side; I could move here just for these!)

More tomorrow…

 

 

 

We’ve had two days to explore New Orleans now. We took a city bus tour yesterday but it was so bad that we decided to take another one with a different company today. The first one was rushed and so full that you couldn’t see out of both sides of the bus so we basically missed half the things the guide was talking about. Today’s tour guide however was much better, more relaxed and made three stops so we could explore a bit more.

Between the two tours and our own exploration we’ve seen a lot of New Orleans in two days and it really is an absolutely wonderful city. It has a richer history than most US cities having been ruled by the Native Americans, the French, the Spanish and then the Americans. The French Quarter is beautiful during the day and crazy after the sun goes down, the jazz clubs and street musicians are fantastic and we haven’t even had time to explore the swamps, the voodoo history, the Mississippi river or the plantations and the history of slavery here.

We did have time to explore one of the famous cemeteries though. New Orleans is built below sea level and floods so often it’s a really bad idea to bury people underground, so all the cemeteries are above ground. What’s more, space is limited so the tombs are often shared and even “rented” until space in another tomb becomes available. You can see in the photo below the rows of tombs which were built for yellow fever outbreaks when they had to quickly house hundreds of bodies! Pretty grim, but I must be slightly weird because I find cemeteries fascinating.

We also had time to check out the famous Cafe Du Monde in the French Market where they serve Beignets (pronounced ‘ben-yays’), kind of like a hot square doughnut covered in a ridiculous amount of icing sugar. I’m wondering how many I can bring home on the flight.

And now to the serious bit…

The two things you can’t avoid in New Orleans are great Jazz music and the after effects of Hurricane Katrina . It was the second of those that will leave us with probably the most powerful memories of our trip so far.

It’s six years this week since Katrina hit New Orleans and when we toured the Lower 9th Ward earlier today the trail of destruction was still evident. Some parts of the Lower 9th were under 28ft of water and much of it still looks like a ghost town. It’s an incredibly depressing sight.

80% of New Orleans was flooded and you can see it’s effects all over the city, but 1000 people died in the Lower 9th Ward and 4000 homes were destroyed, all because a boat (which shouldn’t have been there) was thrown into a levee wall and left a great big hole in it. You can still see the marks left on the empty houses where the water line came to, six years later.

Also obvious on a lot of houses are the markings left by authorities when they finally got to the lower 9th, two weeks late. Each house has spray painted markings on the front including a cross on it to show where the water level came to, a series of codes to explain the state they found the house in (e.g. TFW for ‘Total Flood Water’), the date they surveyed it and a number indicating the number of dead bodies they found inside…

Everybody you talk to in New Orleans was affected by the hurricane in some way or another, our tour guide lived on the Lower 9th, the jazz musician we went to see last night lost his father in the floods, everybody has a story to tell and it’s just such a massive shame because New Orleans was and still is such an amazing city and the people are so lovely. The way the city is being rebuilt is testament to that.

As I type this a state of emergency has been declared in New Orleans because there’s a tropical storm on it’s way this weekend and it could flood here again (not to anywhere near the same extent but still…) We’ll be fine because we’re leaving tomorrow anyway but it just seems like such a depressing cycle.

 

 

[quote]The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar. I am following the river, down the highway, through the cradle of the civil war. I’m going to Graceland.
– Paul Simon, ‘Graceland'[/quote]

 

Well, kind of… We did that journey in reverse yesterday when we drove from Memphis down to New Orleans , running parallel to the Mississippi River .

The scenery was a little dull until we hit Louisiana, but with perfect timing we arrived in ‘The Big Easy’ at sunset last night, travelling over swamps and rivers for the last 50 miles or so and Jen managed to get a few nice Sunset photos.

Today we took a photographic tour round the historical French District which was lovely, taking in St. Louis Cathedral , Jackson Square , the French Markets etc. I’ve had far more practice at landscape photography than I have at street photography but I’m fairly pleased with the results. We started very early this morning though so we’re going to get some rest before our proper city tour tomorrow.

 

 

We left Texas yesterday and drove all the way through Arkansas to Tennessee where we’re spending 2 nights in Memphis .

We’ve got more updates to come from Memphis but I thought I’d put a quick post up with a few of the photos we’ve taken so far. The night time photos are from Beale Street which is famous for being the “Home of Blues”. These days it’s still full of blues clubs and bars and looked like it would have been buzzing on a Saturday night but unfortunately it was a bit empty on a Sunday.

Anyway, I’ve just eaten a full rack of BBQ ribs so I’m off for a lie down.

 

 

 

We were supposed to be going to the Grand Canyon today but our tour company was having some technical problems so while we wait until tomorrow for that I thought I’d post a few photos and videos we took at the Bellagio Fountains and the Venetian Hotel today.

We’ve decided to stay an extra couple of days in Vegas. Partly because we wanted to see Penn & Teller on Saturday night and partly because we think we can make the time up elsewhere without missing out on anything (by driving further each day basically). So, tomorrow we move from the Luxor to the Vdara which is further up the strip. I’ll hopefully be posting some photos of the Grand Canyon tomorrow night.

 

 

So, we survived the casino crawl in Vegas (see previous post) and managed to place 14 bets on 14 different roulette tables with friends back home picking our bets. Good friends they are too as they helped us to finish the day $200 better off than we started it, which was nice.

After a day off to recover we managed to do a proper tour of the strip tonight and have some fairly nice photos to show for it.

We’re staying in the Luxor hotel , which is the big pyramid with the Sphinx in front of it and I hadn’t realised that the pyramid is actually hollow with all of the rooms on the sides. There are a couple of photos below taken from the balcony outside our room looking down into the middle of the pyramid which is quite a sight.

I played the honeymoon card again when I booked it so we have a corner room overlooking the strip on the 26th floor! This also means we have to take the special lifts which go to the top and have to travel at 45 degrees up the side of the pyramid. It’s slightly disconcerting being inside a lift which is going sideways as well as upwards but you get used to it.

Vegas is pretty much everything it’s been described as. It’s completely over the top and we both love it. Luckily, we’ve still got a few more days here.