"I love exploring New York and I think that's what is so exciting about it. You find places that you've never heard of or seen before all the time." - Tory Burch

We woke up nice and early (I usually do because of my stupid internal clock, and he usually wakes up at 6 for work) and headed on our way out. We walked downtown so that we could see the Empire

Starting the day off
right with a street festival!

State building and some of the parks. It was quite a nice walk since it was so warm out and headed all the way down 6th avenue to Union Square Park. There we ran into a street food festival (we were starving, had barely anything for breakfast to prepare us for a nice meal in the park) and gosh was the food ... delicious smelling. There was grilled sausage, pork, chicken leg, pretty much everything there that could torture a person did torture a person (me). We kept walking around, ended up grabbing some free sunglasses and then headed over to Union Square Park.

Street festival on Bedford! 

At Union Square Park, there were a bunch of tents with fresh foods, baked goods, veggies, pretty much everything you can think of! We walked by and to try to sedate our hunger, we got to try some samples, like lamb sausage, duck confit, beer, juice and more! It was nice trying a little bit of everything.

So many people... 

Afterwards, we got into the subway and hopped on a train over to Brooklyn to try Smorgasbord! Chris had never been so I had to bring him. We started off by walking around a bit and ran into this really cool festival that they were hosting on Bedford Avenue. There was real grass that was rolled out on the streets so that people could hang out there as well as sit down and enjoy the weather. I found out that it was a part of some music festival where bands would be playing on the street all weekend! Pretty cool.

SO MUCH FOOD

But first, I was meeting up with some friends to walk over to Smorgasbord. We first headed over to the Artists and Fleas market where there were many handmade goods and other things for us to see! Unfortunately, for a "flea" market the prices were very steep. It was all hand made jewellery and artisianal stuff so it was quite cool to look around and check it out. When we headed out there was a musician playing a very interesting instrument with over 20 strings outside. It was interesting to see.

Swag of the day

We headed over to Smorgasbord where we were, of course, surrounded by an insane and immense amount of hipsters, people and overpriced food. It was pretty overwhelming - especially because there were so many people everywhere and the line ups were long. I decided to settle down with some fish and chips (they actually gave me a very generous amount for what I paid in comparison to the other places) while Chris grabbed some duck confit.

We sat by the beach for a little while at a picnic table before we got up and left to check out the street festival at Bedford Avenue.

At the street festival, there were many bands performing free concerts outside and as we were walking down, we ended up grabbing a bunch of free samples (yeah I know this keeps happening please don't hate me) of this new drink by Pepsi, somelemonade and a bunch of jerky. It was a pretty cool experience.

Giving out samples the classy way

Afterwards, Chris and I jumped on the metro to head down to SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown. We grabbed some gelato (after walking around to find the perfect gelato place) from Ferraras and then headed over to the park to grab a seat to eat. 

People, people, people. 

We sat down in the middle of Columbus Park (also known as five point park) and enjoyed the view of people gambling, singing Chinese opera and playing musical instruments. It was quite enjoyable. I called my mom to talk to her a little bit and then just sat around for a bit with Chris.

Gelato! 

Afterwards, Chris and I walked towards city hall and I tried to give him a quick history lesson and some fun facts about the building but turns out my memory melts a bit in the sun. we walked around for a little while longer and headed down past the church (which was left completely unscathed during the 9/11 attack) with the beautiful old cemetery.

We were walking down so that we could see the memorial of One Trade Center (didn't go into the museum, but for anyone interested, they are free on Tuesdays).

Imposing.

It is truly a heartbreaking memorial when you go and see how gigantic the holes in the ground are and how deep both the holes and the scars in peoples' lives run. 

After the memorial, Chris and I rode the metro back home so that we could change and head over to the (Free!) Off-Broadway show, Trip of Love. We tried to head over to a rooftop bar beforehand (I wanted him to see the Empire State in all it's glory), unfortunately, when we went there, we were told it was closed for a "private event." Very sad that we couldn't get in so we went to the nearby Bryant park and sat down for a bit and relaxed... relaxed that is until I looked at my phone and realized I completely screwed up and instead of picking up tickets half an hour at 8, it was pick up tickets half an hour before 8.

The memorial, there are two gigantic
holes where the twin towers used to be...
but now instead have memorial fountains

Whoops.

We ran over to the theatre as fast as we could on 42nd (and you know how bad 42nd is for walking right?! Right by Times Square?!) and went through what I would call the quicksand of people. It was the worst thing I had ever gone through when I was in a rush. And even though we were already past 5th and needed to get down to 9th... It was not something easy to do. You'd think just a few blocks would be easy - it's not. By the time we got into the theatre we were sweating quite a lot.

The venue itself was quite nice, with escalators and high ceilings to enjoy the view of the entire theatre and a window to look out onto 

42nd. I was very impressed with how nice the seats were and how well done the decor was. With the

Free tickets :3

high ceilings, it made the place feel very large and very fancy. I really enjoyed the venue. And it helped that our seats were just two rows from the stage!

They had decorated the sides of the walls to reflect the Broadway play that was playing. 

The ushers there were quite nice and very polite, willing to answer any and all questions we had and at the end, when the Broadway show was finishing up, I looked back and all I could see was the ushers dancing and just jamming to the show. What a cool group of people working there.

In the theatre! 

Unfortunately, the play was not as great as I'd hoped it would be...in fact I didn't even like it until about 3 songs in because I had no idea what was happening. It seemed like they were just singing songs... but once I accepted that they were just singing songs, I started to enjoy it a lot more as just entertainment rather than a play with any plot whatsoever.

After the play, I was particularity hungry so I demanded that Chris walk with me for about 20 minutes and grab some Shake Shack with me. I had never been before so I just wanted and had to try it out!

We both grabbed burgers, fries and he grabbed a milk shake. We took it to go, walked home and sat there, watching Bo Burnham (who is extremely offensive, don't google him if you don't want to be offended or anything) and enjoying our fries.

Crispy fries and yummy burgers

Oh my god. Those were the BEST burgers I have ever had from a fast food establishment, I am honestly still so blown away by how amazing and delicious they were. I enjoyed them so so so much. The fries were particularity good and the bacon cheese burger I had was just bursting with flavour. I can still remember how delicious it was and it's making my stomach rumble a bit.

After the much-needed food and humorous entertainment, we headed to sleep.

"He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles..." - Woody Allen

The first stop was at this old school
bakery!

Today was a pretty great day. However, it started pretty early. My body isn't used to not waking up at 7:30 to get to work, so even though I set my alarm for 8:15... I still woke up around 7:30. And lied there. Doing nothing. Actually, that's not true, I did think about how this is what my life has come to. Waking up at 7:30 am every day.

I got up, had some breakfast and then headed down to where I needed to meet everyone for the tours. As I was walking, it was a beautiful day out and I was excited go on and about my down. I needed to be a bit down on 6th street so I stayed on 6th and kept walking. After a little while, about 20 minutes of walking, I looked up.

These are vault lights that used to light
up the basements before there was
electricity

I was on 5th. Apparently I had been walking down 5th for a while and had no idea how I even got there. HOW DOES THIS EVEN 

HAPPEN. I was walking down 6th! And I didn't even take any turns!

How cool is the graffiti here? Some
businesses actually love having this
graffiti on their wall because it amps
up their business and gives them street cred

Well I finally got to where I needed to meet in the park, Spring St. and 6th Ave and there was already a crowd there. Fortunately, the tour guide wasn't there. Unfortunately, neither were my friends. But when they did get there, I ended up accidentally turning just me into 5 extra people. Whoops. But I mean, better publicity right? 

Our tour guide, Jon, started off by giving us a bit of the history of New York, including the dutch originally owning it, the British taking it, etc. It was all interesting history. One of the newer things that I learned was that SoHo actually means south of Houston, NoHo is North of Houston! They do this to a lot of things! Like

It's actually a diagram
of the MTA done well
only problem is that it's
facing the wrong way

Tribeca is actually triangle below Canal street. How cool is that (I am kind of sad that these small things are mostly what I remember haha)?

As we walked through the neighbourhoods, I realized that this was the first time I had actually had friends on the tour with me. It was quite nice actually having someone to go up to and make little comments or gush or enjoy, or just in general whatever with. And when I had more or extra information, I could still talk to others and tell them all about it. It was actually quite nice to have the company. 

As we walked through, some of our first stops included the apartments and art galleries of the area. SoHo was originally a very industrial part of town, which is why so many places have such high ceilings - they were all factories. Quite

a few of the factories actually are now art galleries or apartments (Insanely expensive apartments, you do not want one here). 

Made of solid iron. And they have to
have railings that are updated cosntantly

We dropped by a bakery, called Vesuvio Bakery. It was a very old-school bakery with a very vintage exterior. There were lots of people inside and the cookies that were freshly baked outside looked delicious as well. This is one of the oldest bakeries in New York with old rare coal ovens. They began producing Italian bread and biscuits in 1920. Unfortunately, it is now a law that people are not allowed to bake using coal ovens anymore. There is now a new owner of the store, and it was agreed that they would only allow the new owners have the store if they kept the window front.

We also saw that they had a "green B" sign. So I found out that the New York city health board gives out letters to restaurants. As I was told, green B's are "okay" but not somewhere where you should eat. "Blue As" are where you really want to eat. And you'll always know when and what the status of the restaurants are because everyone must legally put the signs out on their windows or at least

This picture does no justice to how
beautiful the stone carvings are.

somewhere that is visible. And it MUST be visible. 

We kept walking down the street and actually found some really cool street artwork, and it was real legit artwork. It was a kind of map of the New York MTA map on the floor. It was pretty cool. There were also a bunch of glass almost "bulbs" on the floor, called vault lights so that people who lived in the basement would have natural light. Pretty cool eh? I found out that they are also in parts of Europe as well.

The original police headquarters but it
is now apartments (expensive ones)

Many of the sidewalks in New York are hollow. Scathing past flung open hatch doors on a crowded sidewalk, to avoid falling down into kitchen areas and storage basements, is a common obstacle for New Yorkers. In many of the older buildings the basements extend beyond the building’s footprint- opening up to a “vault” space under the sidewalk. As urban industry grew, the sidewalk shape morphed to adapt to the needs of the urban streetscape. In 1845, Thaddeus Hyatt patented “vault lights”, fitted clear glass lenses set within cast-iron panels embedded into the sidewalk surface in front of building storefronts (source).

While walking through, we stopped to look at the streets in front of us. They were made of pure cast iron. So a lot of them, if you bring a magnet, will stick right to the building! They stopped making the

Apparently an AMAZING dessert place
with some really awesome quotes outside

buildings out of wood because they were on fire and brick was just too expensive. On top of that, I also found out that every residential building actually needs to have a fire escape (you know, because of the fires and stuff). It is actually illegal not to have a fire escape in front of a residential building unless the building is commercial or it has been grandfathered in. Cool facts.

Afterwards, we kept walking down the street and found this building with this beautiful hand carved stone roofs. It was gorgeous. The only problem was that people had graffitied the sides of the building and actually made it look kind of ugly. It was horrendous just because it was just such a nice building that people worked for years on. It was interesting hearing about the reason why there are so many high rises. People would buy their land

Difference between
park and playgrounds

and build right to the edge of the lot (which I explained before happens because they wanted as much plot land as possible. That's why they have the grates outside and in front of the stores, so that they could get shipping and other stuff into the building [they had no alleyways and very little backyard]). 

Cute pixel art everywhere

The reason why was that "people don't get charged for building up." So people would buy the land, build a commercial store and then build apartments up so that they could rent it out and make more money. There is, however, one building on Wall Street that is very low, owned by a very rich man, JP Morgan. Now people asked him why he didn't build up and have apartments and in his humble way, he said that "he didn't need the money." #LifeGoals. 

We ended up walking into Little Italy afterwards and checked out all the graffiti in the area. We first passed by a nice playground with only kids. I found out that

Forgot to take a picture
of the sign but the fire
hydrant was pretty baller

in New York, it is actually illegal to be in a public playground without any kids. So if I wanted to buy some food and go to the playground, I wouldn't be allowed to sit because I wouldn't have any kids with me. Interesting.

We walked by the original police station which was in SoHo and we were told about how there used to be a hardcore rivalry between the Irish Catholics who were chosen to be police officers and the Protestant English... So they made their own police office. It was cool.  

Around that area, we also found the apartment that Heath Ledger passed away...It was interesting because I looked up at the building and saw a bunch of acorns and oak leaves (Throwback to another blog post where I talked to you about Vanderbilt and his rowboat turning into his big huge corporation).

Lombardi's original pizza. It was
packed when we went at 3pm.

We headed over to Little Italy, which I found out was actually devastated by the 9/11 plane crashed.

Because the area depended so much on tourism, it greatly diminished and is now only a few roads. Chinatown has really encroached on it now because it isn't dependent on tourists, rather it is dependent on mostly on other Chinese and Asian populations. So Chinatown did really well.

We started out with looking at Lombardi's Pizza, which is the BEST pizza place in all of New York. It was actually the original pizza place in all of the USA. It was originally comfort food and in Italy, they only really ate it as peasant food. They also don't make any pizza slices, they will sell only as a pie, so go hungry or go with friends. Joe's pizza, the other popular

Ferrara's dessert

place, was trained by Lombardi's. After a meal at Lombardi's, you can head over to Ferrara's bakery where they have the BEST (as I was told) Italian baked goods. 

Around the city, there's some really cool pixel art all around. Afterwards, we

kept walking down the street, found the Mulberry street bar and found out that THAT was where Frank Sinatra used to play! It's still very old school with the original interiors. It was beautiful. 

Where Sinatra used to
play, also legit angry
Italian ladies will yell 

I found out that Chinatown and Little Italy were actually originally a German area. Very German. The tour guide explained that immigrants would come to America, try to make their lives better and then move on. So the area changed hands. To show us a bit of what was leftover, we were shown this Catholic church

(from the German era) that was now Chinese and had sermons in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. How cool is that?

Got these bad boys
for $2. 

Afterwards, he suggested two of the best restaurants to eat Chinese food. The first was Hop Kee and Wo Hop which are both on Mott street. For one of them, you should go downstairs instead of upstairs because it's cheaper downstairs and it's mainly for the locals. On top of that, we went down another street that lead to the main park where I found a store that sold 5 dumplings for 1.25. How well priced is that?! 

The German chuch in Chinatown

We walked through the park, where people were playing majong, chess and gambling. Police don't care about it because it's petty crime but it was pretty cool to see. We ended off the tour and our group of people split off, since some

of us wanted to go to the market and others wanted to go back to Lombardi's pizza. The girls and I headed over back to the dumpling place where I asked for 5 dumplings, gave them $2, got 8 dumplings, no change and yelled at frantically in mandarin. Protip. Always have exact change.

We headed over to the Essex street market afterwards where they were having a big block party with food outside in the front of the market. It was actually quite nice

Inside the market! And there was a
block party outside

and reminded me of St. lawrence market in Toronto. It was quite nice and big. We ended up getting some food there, I grabbed some arancini balls, one with pesto, pizza and nutella, found a place by the Williamsburg bridge to sit down and enjoyed our meal. 

Gotta say - it was pretty delicious. They were freshly fried and still

hot. We sat down there for a whileand just people watched. 

Arancini balls in a cool egg carton

Afterwards, we headed back to SoHo and we went window shopping. It was interesting seeing so many things that I could not afford. Like damn. We went into a few stores called "Second Time Again" where I got to find out how poorly educated I am on the ways of fashion and brand names. I found out I am indeed very bad at it. There were clothes there which were literally thousands of dollars. Like more than my rent for a month. I didn't cry but I hurt just looked at them. AND THEY WERE USED TOO. Apparently some of those clothes were also clothes that models and movie stars had worn before. 

When we were finished window shopping, we left the area and two of us ended up going to the BEST grocery store ever. We discovered TRADER JOE'S.

Now. Imagine the best ever grocery stores, reasonable prices (not so low that you question the quality) with delicious hipster whole food quality produce and goods. And free samples.

The block party

This is Trader Joe's. I love it. Oh my god, I grabbed so many delicious things, such as a spinach and kale (I hate kale but I loved this) greek yogurt dip, some corn chips, dark chocolate and peanut butter cups, frozen orange chicken, GERMAN WURST (produced in Germany), pork dumplings, gah, JUST SO MANY THINGS, I BOUGHT SO MANY THINGS, ONLY FOOD. AND MY BILL CAME OUT TO LESS THAN $40. IN NEW YORK. LIKE HOW DOES THIS EVEN HAPPEN ANYWHERE?! 

My dinner, appies and dessert

Yes I am freaking out but i don't feel too giulty about it because it's totally worth it. Guys, Trade Joe's did not pay me to say all this. I just feel this way. I just know that it is amazing. Even though it's kind

of far from my place, I will go and do my groceries there EVERY WEEK so that I can buy as many fresh and delicious groceries as possible. Seriously. It was amazing.

Afterwards, I headed back home and just relaxed, watched some Malcolm in the Middle and vegeated. Had some leftover chicken for dinner, some chips n' dip and some peanut butter cups for dessert.

Worth it. Good day. 

Group photos!