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Sleep in, then the 400 metre walk into Times Square proper (The Area our apartment is in is in Times Square, but the small parcel we all know as Times Square is in the next block. We can see the the end of it from outside our front door.
A bit of scene setting here.... New York is expensive, and New Years eve is prime time. Although we think of it as an arm and a leg, they still had to evict the cockroaches to make space.... well, maybe not that bad, but the rooms are sized for large cockroaches, the floors would creak with just the weight of one of them and the overwarm rooms from the passing central heating pipes would be perfect breeding grounds. It's actually nice and clean, but just pokey and very, very tired. Two floors up some creaky stairs, but just 30 metres from 8th avenue, which has lots of restaurants and is quite busy.
Times Square is just the next block, and is everything we expected. Small, crowded, noisy. It was even worse then normal being the day before NY Eve as they were setting up staging and delivering barricades for the NYE concert. Quite abuzz with excitement - totally lost on the girls as we braved the crowds in....you guessed it..... the shops! Only briefly, and mostly chocolate shops - M&M's and Hersheys.
We split from our friends, the Doyles, as they had a show to go to, and we went down to the 9/11 memorial. After queing for an hour to get our (free) tickets, we killed time on the Subway in a desperate, but failed, dash to a dress shop in Brooklyn (We had to get back to 9/11 for a set time, and the trains were slower than expected. At least we got to go over the Brooklyn Bridge, but basically just had to turn around when we got there. It was warm and it wasn't actually shopping, so there were some good points! Oh, and queueing for 9/11 was good as we could absorb the buildings around us, and compare photos from a guidebook to where we were standing.
The memorial was quite stunning. The flowing water, the backlit names carved around the edge, and the serenity of it all was perfect. Moving, without being morbid. Naturally left us all speechless (Including Brooke) and very humbling. although the museum isn't finished yet, we were very lucky that the memorial was. The building site all around just added to theoverall experience, as did the documentary we saw not long before leaving home.
A quick (warm) subway ride back to base, the scurrying of little footsteps as we turned on the lights, and a pleasant dinner with the Doyles topped the night off.
Tomorrow - New Years Eve in New York!!!
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