New York, New York!

New York City, yeah! As one of the highlights of our road trip, we decided to spend a whole week in the Big Apple.

So we listened to live piano music at Washington Square Park...

Saw Times Square by day and night...

... and relaxed at Central Park

By the way - we got pretty lucky and found a nice furnished apartment in Manhattan's East Village district for the week. The owner worked for the U.N. and was out of town.

Craigslist is awesome! 

The place even had a deck - real luxury for a place in NY. And we found some great restaurants in the immediate neighborhood. Such as Jebon Sushi and Noodle, which seemed to be open pretty much around the clock.

Or Veselka, a Ukranian place where they probably serve the second-best Pierogi in the world - the best ones of course are made by Sylvia's grandmother in Poland :-). 

Let's see, what else...

One World Trade Center is making progress and will be completed about a year from now. 

The recently opened 9/11 memorial. This is one of the two square pools placed where the twin towers stood.













Oh, and we made sure to spend some time on our new hobby: attending TV show tapings. Comedy Central have their headquarter in NYC and we were lucky to get tickets for The Colbert Report!


Lots of fun, despite the long wait! Warm-up comedian Pete Dominick actually was quick to identify us as the two Germans in the audience and made sure to make plenty of fun of us - "So you guys live on trees with elves in that Black Forest?"

If you wanna see the episode and try finding us in the audience: http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/tue-april-10-2012-richard-hersh

A few more pics:

<-- Sylvia at the New York Stock Exchange, thinking of the good old days...


Rockefeller Center -->

Also, a walk on Brooklyn Bridge...

Sweet wouldn't have been the first thing on my mind when thinking of Brooklyn ...

... and this wasn't the only new thing we learned about New York.

Mental note: start training for July 4th now!

Also, did you know that New York actually has some really nice beaches? Such as here, on Coney Island.

Speaking of beaches: after watching every single episode of ABC's Revenge over the last couple of months (rich unhappy people living in the Hamptons), we had to finish off our visit by looking at some of the expensive houses on Long Island.

Turns out it's not as expensive as you would think: places like this are available for as little as $200,000.

Oh wait - that's the rent. For one month. No kidding (we studied some of the real estate magazines out of curiosity).

Good news for us was that the "season" (i.e. all the rich people arriving) on Long Island is from Memorial Day until Labor day.

Off-season, the place is practically dead and hotel rooms are heavily discounted. Such as ours at the Montauk Yach Club and Resort, which we got for 88% off on Expedia... :) 

If it weren't for the millionaire crowds during summer, Long Island would actually be a wonderful place!











So much from New York. Next stops: Boston and Amherst.