NBC and Radio City Music Hall tours

After 3 days with sunny and warm weather, the next couple of days weren’t that awesome. On Thursday it rained for the most part and although according to the forecast it should have been quite warm, it wasn’t. The weather was chilly and rainy the whole day so we looked for inside destinations to visit. First we decided to take part in NBC Studio Tour to see how the legendary TV broadcast station has been founded and developed in the past century and to see a bit how the shows are filmed and made today. After that we continued to the famous Radio City Music Hall. The tour took us across the theater to see various interesting places and we also met one of the Rockettes :)

Since it’s election time in Finland at the moment and we didn’t wanna miss our chance to have an effect on the coming president, we headed to United Nation into the Finnish embassy to vote. Olli’s cousin Johanna is working there at the moment and she gave us some hints where to go here in NYC. She proposed us a nice pub in the neighborhood so we went there to hang around and watch the Knicks’s game.

Thursday’s weather wasn’t much better, it was very windy and cold but luckily it didn’t rain. We started our morning with a long subway ride from Queens to Bronx to see something else than than just Manhattan. At some point during the ride we noticed that among the ca. 50 people in the subway car we were the only white people there. We arrived in Bronx at the Yankee Stadium and went for a walk around the stadium and the neighborhood. But we shortly noticed that it was too windy to really enjoy walking around there so we aimed back to the subway. The weather felt so cold that we didn’t wanna spend much time outdoors hence we visited some locations included in the NY Pass. We visited the Guggenheim museum and I’ve to say that I don’t understand modern art.

The target after lunchtime was the Madison Square Garden which unfortunately is not open for the guided tours around the arena due to some massive renovations at the moment. Before MSG we also visited Bloomingdale’s shopping center which is covered with all the luxury brands existing and we almost felt like being not brave enough to touch anything there. :) In the early evening we walked to Empire State Building for the New York Skyride which is a helicopter ride through the skyline in a motion simulated movie theater. The concept is really cool but it was a bit disappointing since the film was quite bad and not that sharp. After 5 pretty exhausting days, we were feeling tired so we decided to head back to the hotel pretty early to rest for the two last days here in New York before West Coast road trip. 

Top of the Rock

After some small departure delays at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport (our first flight to Berlin took off almost an hour after planned) we reached JFK on time on Monday at 1pm and headed to the security check. We certainly weren’t the only people there and had to stand in the queue for an hour before we got out to breathe the American air and catch a cab to drive us to our hotel in Queens.. We did only let our luggage in our room and headed to the closest subway station and drove to Times Square to find Olli and Maiju who had come to NYC already on Friday. First mission for us was to find a decent place to eat since we were starving although the airplane meals were surprisingly good. TGI Fridays’ burgers tasted good but the bill was pretty high which we weren’t aware of before eating J 

After lunch it was time to walk up the 5^th Ave for a while and have a first look at the New York skyline. The only place we visited on the first eve was the new Apple Store. We all were amazed by the size of store and the fanatic iPeople in the States! I think there were at least 50 salesmen and it looked like that many customers were spending the evening playing games on the iPads.. Because we woke up already before 4am in Finland that morning, we were pretty tired and exhausted after the long journey so we decided to head back to our hotel to get a decent amount of sleep to get rid of jet lag.

On the second day we stood up quite early after a cold but well-slept night. We wanted to experience the skyline from the skies so we went to the Rockefeller Center observation deck. Below you can find a few pictures from the deck and gotta say that the view was breathtaking!

With the New York tourist passes we got also a free, guided tour around the Rockefeller Center and Plaza. It was cool to hear some interesting details about several things around the buildings and their details. After the tour we went to visit the American Museum of Natural History. It was way too big and versatile for a 2-3 hour tour and we didn’t spend much time in wondering details J

Being a tourist is a tough job and we wanted to relax for a while and thanks to the museums wi-fi we found easily a pub located in the neighborhood which had a happy hour during the whole day-time so we went to grab a couple beers and relax for a while before continuing. After Top of the Rock we wanted to visit the Empire State Building during the evening so we headed there. Though the view was amazing in the sunny morning, it was even better in the dark as you can see in the pictures below!