New York City

One of the great things about living in Boston is that you can take a bus to NYC for $15 one way – it is a short 4 hour ride in relative comfort. Natasha’s job hadn’t started, so we decided to get this in while we still could.

We rode the Lucky Star bus down to Koreatown in Manhattan. We went south through Connecticut, passing through the Bronx, and caught some wicked views of the skyline:

The skyline extends forever in both directions…you really have to see it to comprehend how large it is, especially compared to most other “big cities.”

From Koreatown it was a short hop on the subway (complete with infamous unintelligible announcements) to our hotel, the Ace. We’ve stayed with Ace now at three of their four locations (Seattle, Portland, NYC and still to go, Palm Springs). They’re a good chain that caters to the younger crowd. From our window, we had an unparalleled view of the Empire State building (need some office space?):

Speaking of the subway, we noticed a quote from Herodotus on the back of our subway ticket:

If you can’t read it, it says: “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all; the conscientious historian will correct these defects.” Way to go NYC, keep learning alive!

It was fairly late when we got in, so we only had time to visit a single place, Strand Books, which is justly famous for being “18 miles of books.” This was during the controversy surrounding the Iranian elections, so we were able to see a protest in support of the challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi:

Green is a sacred color in Islam, and was thus widely adopted in the worldwide protests surrounding the election.

We got back to our hotel at night – and got this shot of the Empire State Building lit up at night:

Apparently they light up the building with more and more colors as July 4th approaches, and it is fully red, white, and blue by the 4th. Here you see it as we did, merely red and white.

Click here for Day 2 or here for Day 3!