Day 12 - Friday October 13th 2006

It was cold today. They had record snow falls for this time of year in New York state and in the city itself it only just managed to crawl to 10c in the afternoon. So whats the ideal thing to do when its freezing cold and blowing a gale..... ride an open top double decker bus around the city.

It was one of those hop-on, hop-off things and it was pretty good. The commentary was excellent and got to learn a lot about the city. We made our way on the bus from Mid-Town where we were staying down to Downtown which is where the major financial district is. We got off at Battery Park which is on the southern tip of Manhatten and pretty much faces the Statue of Liberty. It was going to be about a 3 hour wait to go to the actual island itself, so we will wait to later in the week to do a harbour cruise and get closer to it then. For now hows a picture take from Battery Park

We then walked up to the World Trade Center Site. Its hard to imagine just how high those buildings where, with them being about twice as high as everything around them and the buildings in that section of the city aren't exactly dwarfs. Not surprisingly there is a lot of construction going on there at the moment and a very heavy police presence.

The WTC site didn't have just the Twin Towers on it, but a series of compartively smaller office buildings as well, one of which has already been completly re-buily. They have also set up a small muesuem next to the WTC site. This made the whole experince much more personal as it delved into what happened to specific people on the day. It was very sad and emotional in there but very well done.
We then headed to a discount department store called Century 21, which is across the street from the WTC. Never have I seen so many people in one shop at one time. You could barley move. The prices where very good, I picked up a couple of Calvin Klien business shirts for about $20 ea and Toni got her first pair of shoes for the trip.
Another thing about New York is that they heat each and every building at about 30c inside. He come in from the street where your rugged up because it is freezing cold and then you are sweltering in the heat. Its even worse when you just duck into a store for 30 secs to see what sort of stuff they sell. With the heat and humanity in Century 21 we were glad to make our escape, even though there were plenty of other bargains to be had.
We walked up to Wall St and had a bit of a look through there and then back on the bus to complete the tour around back to Mid-Town. From there we hailed a taxi (which is incredibly easy to do and we did this a lot in our 4 days there) headed back to the apartment quickly to drop our crap off before heading back into Time Square to see the Lion King stage show.
I had been looking forward to this for a long time, having wanted to watch it when it came to Australia a few years ago, but must admit to being a little disapointed. The costuming and staging were fantastic but it really felt like they had enough material to do a really good 90 min show which they padded out to 2.5 hours with meaningless ballet and twaddle. A great example is the scence where Simba decides to become a man and go back and fight scar for the kingdom. The lead up and this scence was done magnificantly well and then how does he celebrate his manhood.... he dances around like a fairy for 5 mins. GRRRRR
Anyway the girls absoultly loved it (it was Toni's first theatre experience of any kind), the rest of the audience seemed very happy and it has been running now for years, so I guess its just me.
We caught a taxi back to the apartment and then walked up to the Manhatten Diner again for some of their world famous cheesecake which didn't disapoint.
Another big day and only 2 more to go, we are barely even going to scratch the surface of New York