the adventures of pinkaholic girl

Today's theme is... Queueing!

Woke up late again, but on the plus side it was finally sunny in New York! Woohoo! We ate breakfast at Cranberry Gourmet, the fantastic deli next door to the hostel and had a bacon, egg and cheese wrap. Mmmmm... I love New York delis! They serve everything in convenient, single-use (but very environmentally unfriendly) take away portions which is perfect for the traveller. And if you're feeling a bit indecisive, you can take advantage of the salad bar which is 5.49/pound - and there are 2.2 pounds to a kilo, if you didn't know (which I didn't really) - so you only buy what you want to eat, and can stop feeling guilty about not eating a balanced diet by putting a few lettuce leaves on your plate. But don't get U.S. yoghurt. It tastes funny.

We went to the Statue of Liberty. It was Saturday (you tend to forget the days when you're on holiday, because who needs to know what day it is?) so it was actually a stupid day to go because there were lots of queues, and lots of people. And there was subway trackwork, so we got delayed by shuttle buses, etc. That was a nice reminder of cityrail weekends at home.

We finally found Ken! Yay! We all caught the ferry to Liberty Island & got lots of good photos, but unfortunately we didn't have time to go to Ellis Island, which was the immigration point for millions of americans in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. Apparently 40% of the population of the U.S. descends from someone who went through Ellis Island.

The whole Statue of Liberty thing took much longer than we expected, so by the time we were back on Manhattan it was 4pm. We tried to go to Serendipity again (forgetting it was Saturday) and this time it was a 2 hour wait for the table! :( So we let it go.

Instead we showed Ken the Apple store and FAO Schwarz. We found some sour liquid warheads which was amusing, and I bought some as gifts for people.

Despite the fact that the weather was good, the day felt very unproductive. :( and because of a group vote that Alison & I wasn't listening to, we ate at the SAME vietnamese restaurant as yesterday... I mean, really, on the entire island of Manhattan we couldn't find anything else to interest us enough?!

ahem.

After dinner we headed up the Empire State building which is the inspiration for the title of my post today. Those guys are the tricksters of queues. First you have to queue to get to the security gate (our second of the day). Then you queue to get a ticket. Then you queue to get through a turnstile, walk a bit, and end up in another queue for an elevator to the 80th floor. This is not the end of the queueing. You get out of the 80th floor elevator, and go around a corner to seen an entire room of queue for a different lift to the 86th floor. It's evil! I think we would have enjoyed it much more if we'd known about the queueing in advance. Maybe a pamphlet or something would have been good. I bought some shiny holographic postcards which look really cool.

We went to Nelson's 30th drinks after the empire state, but left Ken to his devices shortly after. We have to get up early for Central Park tomorrow!

N.B. taxis are super cheap in New York compared to Sydney, no wonder people use them all the time!

posted by d @ 2:00 pm