New York, New York (Part I)

We had a great time on our trip. Here's a recap and a few of the many, many pictures we took. Unfortunately our camera doesn't take the best pictures. It looks like that's what we will be getting ourselves with our next tax refund.

We got there Thursday about 4, but it then took 2 hours to get to our hotel via shuttle because the driver couldn't find all the people he was supposed to pick up and he was probably off on multiple smoke brakes or something. We did have a lot fun chatting with the other people in the shuttle though, and joking around with them about the crazy driver, but we made it alive. We checked in and headed off down to Greenwich Village for some live jazz. We happened to end up sitting next to a jazz musician from Belgium who comes to NY for several weeks once a year to hear some jazz, as New York is the place to be for jazz. We then walked around Times Square for a little bit, but it started to rain so we headed back to the hotel.


Friday we headed out to Flushing for the U.S. Open. It was raining and cold. It rained all day long and they played absolutely no tennis. It's a whole big complex and it was fun to walk around for a little bit and see all there was to see. But that was only fun for the first couple of hours, we were there for 5 1/2 hours waiting for them to do something and it was a challenge to find a place to stay dry and warm. We finally left at 3:30. We went out to dinner that night at a place called Ellen's Stardust Diner. The waitstaff is want-to-be Broadway stars so they take turns singing while you eat, it was a pretty fun place with a lot of character. Then we went to Wicked. This was our favorite part of the trip!! It was incredibly amazing, and easily lived up to all the hype about it. The girl who played the wicked witch was the best thing I have ever seen, absolutely unbelievable!!


Because of no tennis on Friday they backed the whole thing up a day and people with Friday tickets were allowed to come on Satruday. We didn't want to spend all day there though, especially since it was still cloudy/rainy. We were supposed to go on a bus tour and see another play that night, but we had to switch things around because of the rain and fitting in some more tennis. We went to the top of the Rockefeller building (Top of the Rock) for some amazing views of the city, despite the cloudy day. We went into a cathedral and heard an amazing choir rehearsing that was an all men's choir, complete with young boy sopranos. It was fabulous. Then we went to the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art.) It was a very nice building and had some nice art. We then went out to the U.S. Open to catch the end of a men's quarterfinals that had been postponed for two days. However, it actually wasn't raining, they actually started on time, it took longer to get there than planned and the match was over very quick. We got there just in time to see Nadal's final serve to win the match. We figured since we were there we'd watch the next game, Men's Double's Finals, but it immediately started to rain. We went back into the city and checked out the Guggenheim, however 3 of the 5 floors were closed. Then we hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That thing is insanely huge and never ending. You would need weeks to see everything in there. They have everything from mummies, Egyptian temples, armor, Rembrandt, and modern art. We saw very little of it because of time constraints and being dead tired from already doing lots of walking.


That night we went to a great french restaurant for dinner, the food was wonderful. We then headed back to Flushing to watch the infamous Williams vs. Clijsters match. Because of all the rain that prevented any other play that day the place was pretty empty so they let the people that were up in the nose bleed seats sit down court side, so we had awesome seats. I learned tennis players are completely wimpy and won't play in a drip of rain. It was fun to watch though and we were glad that in 2 days of tennis we were able to see 1 match.