New York City

June 7, 2006






If you ever need to travel from Boston to New York City on the cheap, we highly recommend taking the Fung Wah Chinese bus which runs on the hour to and from South Station in Boston and China Town in Manhattan. It costs a mere $15.00 each way and the trip takes about 4 ½ hours. We decided on the fly to go to the city, and finding an affordable place to stay in June in Manhattan proved impossible. We ended up staying in Flushing, which is about 20 minutes on the 7 train outside the city. It was much, much cheaper and fairly easy to get in and out of the city. Our first evening in the city we checked out Times Square then headed to Little Italy for a nice meal at a place called Da Nico at Mulberry & Broome. It was nice except for the Meadow Soprano wannabe who was on her cell phone at the next table through her entire meal, much to the chagrin of her date.


Today, we were up fairly early and headed to the South Street Seaport to the TKTS booth where ½ price tickets to the day’s Broadway shows were on sale. We got off the subway right next to Ground Zero and walked around the former site of the World Trade Center. It is a moving experience. Work is moving slowly on the site, but they have built a small memorial along the fence which commemorates those who perished. There is something more visceral and poignant viewing the site, much more so than say a Civil War Battlefield, my guess is because it was something that is so recent and that each of us experienced in our own way.

We explored the area around South Street, but none of the shows they had available jumped out for us at the TKTS booth, so we opted out of a Broadway show. Instead we headed to Penn Station where we met my friend Mandy Roerden & her friend Shana who had taken the train in from Copiague to hang out with us. Mandy is a fellow kookoohead or fan of the Counting Crows. We walked from Penn Station, through Times Square to the Moma (Museum of Modern Art), stopping for a quick lunch. Sadly the Museum was closed, it being Tuesday and all. So we continued our walk, through Central Park to the Guggenheim where we took in their current shows, architect Zaha Hadid and Jackson Pollock, “Paintings on Paper”. We then caught a train back to Times Square where we went to see the new Jennifer Aniston/ Vince Vaughn movie, “The Break Up”. After the girls headed home, Kathy & I stopped for dinner at the Stage Deli, before heading back to the hotel.
Mandy, Shana, Michael & Kathy