No time to sleep in after being out late last night - too much to see & do in our few days in New York! Back to Times Square again - pretty wild even first thing in the morning. In fact, 7am is probably just about time to start winding down after a big night for some of these people. There is a big glass ball on a rod at the top of one of the buildings, and right on midnight at the New Year's Eve, it drops down to mark the start of the New Year. Thouands & thousands of people go along to Time Square to watch, and there's a huge party. The ball is there & lit up all year round - the colours change constantly and it looks really cool.
Our hotel is just around the edge of Times Square and the Fashion District, where a lot of clothing designers and manufacturers used to live and work. Within 2 blocks of the hotel there must be at least a dozen fabric shops, many of them specialising in wedding dress fabric, or lace, or other fashion essentials. Not to mention the specialist button shops!
The weather was grey & cooler today but not actually raining. We caught the hop-on, hop-off bus to right near Union Square, where they have a farmer's market several days every week. Lots of beautiful vegetables, quite a different side of American food to last night's dinner!
Also this rather cross tomato:
And this one, which looked a lot more cheerful although not too bright:
We bought organic bread, cheese, salad and fruit for a picnic later in the day.
Our 2-day hop-on, hop-off bus tickets included a Brooklyn tour so that was our next step. The bus went over Manhattan Bridge, with spectacular views over the river towards the Brooklyn Bridge, and we could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
Brooklyn is undergoing a lot of development at the moment but there are a lot of beautiful old shops and townhouses as well as the new highrise apartment blocks.
Brooklyn is also home to some lovely parks and gardens.
The trip back from Brooklyn to Manhattan was amazing, watching all the sky-scrapers looming larger & larger as we approached.
...and rejoined the Downtown loop bus right near where the new World Trade Centre building is coming up.
We headed around Wall Street...
This area has a lot of very modern sky-scrapers but also a lot of older buildings and churches.
And even the office blocks have some colour.
Headed back up to Central Park - we saw this on the way, but didn't stop...
We took our Union Square greenmarket goodies and had a lovely picnic in the park, joined by this little fellow-
,Central Park is just amazing. It covers 840 acres - to put that in perspective, Sydney Botanic Gardens are around 74 acres and Melbourne's around 94 (thanks, Google). There are sweeping lawns, rambling paths, great big rocks to climb on, playing fields, several lakes, lots of playgrounds... we could easily spend our whole 3 days in there. As it was, we saw only a very small amount.
There's even a castle, with a lovely view.
We had a play at one of the playgrounds and also saw the Alice in Wonderland statue.
Such a beautiful park, we didn't want to leave.
Eventually, though, we had to head back to our hotel for a quick break, then out for our last hop-on, hop-off bus trip - the night tour. This was spectacular - it followed a similar route to the Brooklyn loop for some of the way so we could see the bridges by night and look back from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
San Genarro festival still going strong.
Times Square at its crazy best
Another very full day - so much more we could do if we had time, but we're certainly making the most of the time we have!
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