Here are the photo galleries posted throughout my New York City vacation collected into a single album, enjoy. Also, the Conan O’Brien show attended on July 10th (day 4 of the vacation) will air in Sweden today (July 18th) on TV4+ around midnight, not that I’m on TV or anything, but anyway…
Browsing Posts in New York City 2008
While in New York City we made many observations about their way of life, both remarkable and strange. Here is a list of some of those observations.
- The air in Manhattan smells like one or more of the following (depending on the time of day and part of Manhattan): exhausts, household garbage, poop, fried & bbq foods, sewage, swimmingpool water (chlorine), old wet towels, vomit.
- Second to the NYC Taxicars (Ford Crown Victoria), the most common car on Manhattan is the Lincoln Towncar (also used by a limo service), they’re black and everywhere!
- There are virtually no compact cars in USA what so ever.
- Americans love cheese… served with sizzling, smuthered with or sprinkled onto any food.
- Many medium size stores have more employees than customers inside the store at any one time.
- The most common job in NYC, second to taxi driver perhaps, must be security guard.
- It is almost impossible to find healthy foods on Manhattan, everything is fast food.
- USA have the same TV shows and old re-runs as in Sweden (Friends, Simpsons, Law & Order, Star Trek, Two and a half Men, Scrubs etc).
- America loves the “Judge”-shows, such as “Judge Judy” shown in Sweden. They have alot of them on every channel!
- There are only black people working as cashiers in stores.
- In USA they don’t maintain anything, they use it until it breaks and then buy new.
- Being a pedestrian on Manhattan is much easier than in Sweden, everything flows nicely without any stops.
- Most tapwater in New York has chlorine in it, that you can taste and smell.
- The TV commercials in USA can be surprisingly bad and low-budget.
- Americans have their AC turned down way too low, it’s freezing coming in from a hot summers day.
It’s good to be home!
By the way, I updated titles, tags and permalinks on all New York City 2008 category posts and also enabled comments on all posts.
On the last day we just did our normal morning routine at Starbucks and then packed everything and checked out. We didn’t have that much money left, we donated all our coins to the homeless but we wanted to have enough bills for the taxi to Newark airport, so the guy hailing the cabs and loading our bags had to settle with only one dollar in tips, and he let us know what he thought about that, hehe. The cabdriver however was much nicer, and had relatives in Sweden, so he got the remaining cash we had.
At the airport we had to wait about 3-4 hours before we could check in, but everything went smoothly. The flight was not as exciting this time, but still it didn’t feel like it took very long, and soon enough we were back in Sweden, yay!
On the nineth day we didn’t do much, some more walking around, browsing and shopping. We had our normal lunch and dinner smutthered in cheese and watched some movies on TV.
Today we had a shopping spree at Macys, we got some nice discounts on clothes there, some clothes are only a quarter of the prices in Sweden. After lunch we walked to Times Square and saw Hellboy 2 at the movies, like everything else in US things are oversized, and so was the smallest coke at the movies, probably 0.6 litres. After the movie we didn’t do much, just some TV and then dinner and more TV.
We headed back to USA after midnight so we would be at Orange County Choppers in the morning, we visited their old site (deserted) in Montgomery and their new facility in Newburgh, met some bikers and shopped a few stuff. It was nice to see the bikes seen built on TV in real-life. We didn’t see any of the Teutuls though, we were told they still shoot the show American Choppers five days a week there. I took some pictures of the bikes but only publish some of them here.
We got back to Manhattan at lunchtime and got some more sleep.
We got the rental car early on Saturday and headed towards Niagara Falls, it took about 7-8 hours with stops, and the GPS showed us the way to the Canadian side of the falls, the customs were no problem though, Canadians are very nice and their side of the falls gave a much better view.
We ate dinner on a restaurant by the falls and then we tried our luck on a casino, slot machines and black jack. We ended up losing about $210, but atleast we had a chance at the $13.7 million jackpot.
We couldn’t decide where to stay for the night, so we decided to take turns and drive through the night, but it was too early in the evening to head back towards New York so we headed for Toronto instead and spent a few hours there, it seems to be a very nice city and people are friendly.
Contact
draupner (at) silverstone.nu
© 2010 Another 15 minutes
Magnus "Draupner" Werner, Silverstone Systems.