In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do." - Gianni Versace

Another Monday another start of the week. This Monday... marks exactly 18 days left of working at the UN. I cannot even believe how fast the time has gone by and I'm so glad that I have written so much of this down so that I can reflect on it.

I cannot believe how much I have already done. I am completely blown away. I feel like I've really worked hard on my projects here and I've also experienced almost all of New York city. It's been seriously amazing.

At work, I pondered a bit about the end of my internship and how I would feel (immense sadness, in case you were wondering) and worked a lot on more formatting (I am the word queen).

The queen looks beautiful. Trust.

At lunch, the Canadians and I went out to lunch again, this time joined by the French, American and Iraqi forces. It was quite fun, we sat, talked and laughed as we made new friends. My lunch was pretty boring - a wrap. I usually bring lunch almost every single day of the week since it is not only cheaper - but it is significantly healthier than the food I would be eating (coughdollarpizzacough) if I went out to buy stuff.

Though sometimes I'll grab soup, which is fairly healthy and not too expensive. I just try not to eat at the cafeterias here since they're all weigh by pound, which makes lunch pretty much cost $10 a day. That's about $50 a week simply for lunch. Could buy groceries instead (or 50 slices of pizza).

Afterwork, I headed down the stairs to the ECOSOC room where there was a meeting that was hosted by the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG as we call it in 'UN lingo') of Children and Armed Conflict as well as the Kingdom of Belgium (I didn't know they were a Kingdom either!).

I sat there and listened to the panelists speak as well as a child soldier who gave us first-hand experience about his life as a child soldier. It was heartbreaking to hear.

Child soldiers are one of worst things out there - to completely strip a child of their innocence, their childhood and their education- that's just disgusting and horrendous. No one should ever be stripped of their own childhood. And no child should ever have to learn how to operate a gun or kill another person.

No child. Ever.

Of course, another person who felt very strongly about this was the Queen of Belgium herself, who was at the meeting!

I had the chance to shake her hand and take a very sneaky photo with her.

After work, I headed over to a co-worker's house for an Ifar dinner (for the end of Ramadan) to see everyone, drop by and say hi!

I had to leave as I had made prior plans before. I was cutting it really close, since I was by Upper Manhattan and had to run down to Chelsea so I JUST barely made the train after running and speed walking and headed down to Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre which is "An underground organization that tries to undermine society by spreading Chaos."

It was a pretty promising title. Since they did improv comedy and I do improv comedy... It was a perfect place for me to be!

The whole bar!

It was actually interesting because the whole improv troupe was actually girls! In fact, the whole night was female comedians. The whole place was so packed and I just BARELY made it to slip into line with some friends who were picking up tickets and I was lucky enough to get a seat.

The improv segment was okay - I wasn't super impressed but I enjoyed it. However, the act afterwards, which was when they were all doing a planned skit called "Balls deep," which was a series of sketch comedy acts with girls pretending to be guys was excellent. I don't think I've laughed harder in a really long time. I enjoyed it so much.

Afterwards, my friend and I headed out and grabbed some groceries from Trader Joe's, which, on a Monday night, was the MOST packed I had ever seen it. It was ridiculously insane. I could not believe how many people there were! But the line moved fast so it was all good.

Afterwards, I walked home, put my groceries away and put myself away into bed.

"Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy. To do nothing and have it count for something. To lie in the grass and count the stars. To sit on a branch and study the clouds." – Regina Brett

That's all us.

HAPPY EID TO ANYONE WHO IS READING MY BLOG AND CELEBRATES IT!

Today I tried to wake up late, but it didn't work. Instead my body decided it was a good time to wake up and go to work - even though there was no work to go to.

So I got up, made myself some food to eat, got dressed and headed out to meet my friends.

We met up on the corner by Grand Central and took the MTA train and then bus.. It took us a bit over an hour to get there but it was all good. We had some great company on the train and we all sat around and talk and I think we scared some of the other people who were sitting there. It got emptier as we exited out of Manhattan and at one point it was just us chilling on the train.

We headed out and onto the bus and it was waiting right there... a bunch of our friends had ran off to buy a soccer ball. So the bus just left without some of them and as our bus turned we waved good-bye to them (We weren't being cruel, we just didn't want to wait 30 minutes for the next bus).

At the beach, the weather was B-E-A-UTIFUL! It was sunny, hot and even though it was kind of crowded (weird but I guess people are off on summer) we still got a pretty good spot for all almost 20-30 of us.

So fun!

Rockaway is where it is at. We had some food, some pop, some friends, played some football, soccer and volleyball, ran into the ice cold salt water and had some just all around good company.

Afterwards, we all headed back to Manhattan to grab some food and we all ended up going to different places and then brought our food back to Finterty's bar (where they were doing Wednesday night Trivia and it's bring your own food) where we all sat around, talked and then headed seperate ways.

I headed over to the famous Halal Guys (which is opening in Toronto soon) and as I talked to the guy, right before I left, he slipped me a bag of HALAL GUY'S SAUCE (It was just spiced mayo).

It was a pretty good day off!

All relaxing, no thinking and a perfectly calm atmosphere.

"Brooklyn, it's a great town, a great city. It's New York." - Patrick Ewing

The Cathedral of
Commerce

Today started off pretty damn early (well for a weekend). I had to wake up so that I could get up and leave for about 9am to get to my walking tour at 10am. Now some people may ask why I don't take the subway (As I found out later on Sunday a bunch of lines don't actually run on the weekends so that's one reason) but my main reason is that I want to know this city. I want to walk around, I want to see the building, I want to get to know the area and explore.

The NY skyline, will change in the next
15 years. 

Not bragging - stating a fact, I have quite a good internal compass and sense of direction. I almost always know where I am and where North faces (to those youngin's with them Zphones and samdsungs and whatever, that's more important and reliable than your google maps). I find that going around, seeing things and looking at the city will help me know it and understand it better than if I was under it. Plus it was a beautiful day (so beautiful that I would later get a sunburn).

They called it Pearl
Street because it is
where Oysters came up

I met up my tour group today at 10am to do the tour of Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO. I actually had the same tour guide as I did last week so I was quite happy and excited - I knew that he knew his stuff and was well trained.

City hall! It has an orange flag outside
because of the Dutch! Also the back
was quite ugly because they assumed that
people would never move behind the building

We started off with a bit of the history of the city (which I get a brief of every single time I go on a tour) which I drowned out a
bit but snapped back into attention when our tour guide started talking to us again! We started off by learning a bit about the Woolworth Building, which for a very long time was the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere until the Chrysler building was built! It was also known as the Cathedral of Commerce because of it's neo-Gothic style. 

Beautiful wavy building.
First few floors are actually
public school!

It was pretty cool because it was also one of the first times that people could actually walk around and pick and chose clothing to buy. Before, they would ask the reception desk for a specific article of clothing and size from them and
that was when they'd buy it. Now, people could see these clothing articles and walk around the store with it. It made them more likely to buy it as they would walk around the store with the clothing, almost as though they owned it. Those clever tricksters. 

They had love locks..
but some people
put in love headphones.

As we were going over the bridge, we stopped (which was brutal because it was SO SUNNY out) and talked about the people who had built the Brooklyn bridge. Initially, the bridge was to be engineered by Chief of Engineering, John A. Roebling. However, just a few weeks in, he passed away from what was originally an amputation that would later turn into tetanus and death.

Beautiful plaque for the Roeblings

When he passed away, his son, Washington Roebling took over the bridge. Unfortunately, this Roebling developed caisson disease, which affected him so badly that he became bed-ridden. He had to give his wife, Emily Roebling the plans for the bridge. Emily Roebling ended up going above and beyond. She went took over all the duties and become the first ever woman field engineer. She took over duties like day-to-day supervision and project management. She dealt with politicians, engineers and all the work that was associated with the bridge - all to the point where people actually thought she was behind the bridge's design. When the bridge opened up, she was the first person to cross it by carriage. She ended up studying and excelling in engineering and math. 

Halfway across the bridge

The memorial building in Brooklyn
with people hanging outside. 

We looked at some other buildings that were on the horizon and spotted the beautiful One World Trade Center (some people call it the Freedom Tower but it is not officially called that for fear of retaliation and fear that it may become a target) and I found out that it is exactly 1776 feet tall. Important because that was the year of independence for the United States.

This is the corner where Clinton has
the headquarters for her elections

It's interesting because before, the Chrysler building and 40 Wall Street used to battle to see who was tallest (So I told you about how the Chrysler building, after 40 Wall Street was built, had secretly built a needle in their basement and 3 days after 40 Wall Street was declared the tallest building, Chrysler put up the needle). Both sides argued about the issue of structural integrity and whether or not it counted as the tallest building if the tallest point did not count towards anything.

In Brooklyn Heights! :) 

After the Empire state Building was put up, the argument was over. Unfortunately, the Empire State building has had several suicide attempts. One in particular, was interesting. Because the building is so far up and kind of isolated with very few tall buildings around it, it creates a massive wind tunnel. One such woman tried to attempt suicide and as she jumped off, she was pushed back into the building by the wind. New York wasn't done with her yet.

This was owned by the
Roeblings. but it was
torn down by the
Jehovah's Witness...
which is where they
started wanting to save
historical monuments

It's interesting because the classic New York skyline will change soon. In the next 14 years, New York is expected to gain 30 new skyscrapers. On top of that, they're planning on building one in Brooklyn as well.

As we walked over the bridge, the tour guide mentioned Governor's Island which was originally called "nut island" because of all of the nuts there. Apparently it is also a very swampy and gross area to be around.

This was originally named after army
men, however, the Queen was mad and
renamed all the streets. No one knows
what they were originally named before.

While walking across the bridge, we were told that some IDIOT decided to run across the bridge and scream that the bridge was falling because it was shaking a bit (it's a suspension bridge what do you expect?). People stampeded, some were seriously injured and at least 12 died in this stampede and for a while, people refused to get back on the bridge. It wasn't until P. T. Barnum decided to lead a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn bridge to prove the stability of it. Man, how cool must that have been? 

Beecher

We talk a bit more about the area around us and learned the name "Robert Moses" who was a very integral part of New York city (As I found out, Brooklyn merged with NYC in 1899). He designed many buildings, planned 150 parks, many bridges as well as the roads and highways. He really wanted New York to become a car city but, as we all found out... He couldn't actually drive himself. He was very against subways and public transit, which is ironic, because with the way New York is built, there is just simply too much gridlock! New York's grid system may seem smart to many as it is very easy to
know exactly where you are and how to get back home, but with the grid system, even though only 18% of New Yorkers own a vehicle, the traffic is HORRIBLE. There are simply not enough alleyways to actually have cars go out and so when a street is closed down, it is terrible congestion. Not to mention the roads are simply not big enough. 

Plaque for Jackie
Robinson

As we walked around the Brooklyn heights side, I found out that every Little bit suspicious here... presidential candidate has some sort of tie with New York. Clinton lived in NYC for 90 days, making her eligible to run for governor, Trump was born in Queens and Sanders was born in Brooklyn! Clinton's electoral headquarters is actually in Brooklyn, on the corner of Clinton and Tillery street.

We walked by this huge statue and here we saw this amazing man named Beecher. Beecher was an abolitionist and his church was almost like the Grand Central of the Underground railway. He helped hundreds of slaves escape and for that he is someone to be proud of. He was also extremely progressive, stating that said evolution and Bible could Co-exist. Back in the 19th century. 

One of the first fire
departments to respond to
9/11. The 8 stars are for the
8 firefighters they lost.

We walked back down and found a plaque where the old Brooklyn dodgers used to play - more specifically, the team that Jackie Robinson used to play with. They were called the dodgers because they dodged trolleys back in the day. Some may argue that this is where the Civil rights movement started, when they realized that blacks could play baseball. 

These railways were active
only just a few years ago!

We then found out about the battle of Long Island between the British and George Washington (Who only had one natural tooth by the time he was president). On one foggy night, on Brooklyn, while the Americans were pushed all the way to the edge of the island, the British were camping out, waiting for the fog to lift. Washington, knowing that if they lost that night they may lose the war, lit fires and covers everything in cloth (books, horse hooves) and sneaks
across to Manhattan. Had they been captured, the war would have been over. 

In Trader Joe's

On our way down, we saw a difference in the housing, there were many houses without stoops, which seemed so odd to me because everyone had stoops. The reason for this was because if there was a stoop, then garbage would not fly into
your door. 

As we were walking, the tour guide explained why it was called "DUMBO" - Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. They're starting to call the area under Harlem "SoHa" for South Harlem.

This city man.

All in all, it was a pretty great walking tour. Seriously recommend Free Tours by Foot if you are ever visiting New York.

Up on the rooftop <3

I headed over to Trader Joe's afterwards to buy some groceries (honestly just chips and dip don't judge me) and then walked back to the subway to head back home. It was honestly so hot and sweltering outside I almost felt like I was going to pass out. Protip: always wear sunscreen. I failed to do that and got mighty sunburnt. It was horrible.I went home and rested for a little bit before I headed out again later that night. It was my french friend's birthday that night and she wanted to have a nice party on her rooftop. 

And so we did. 

The Empire state under
the Brooklyn Bridge!

She brought us food (she made salads, hummus, guacamole, etc), drinks and a bunch of french people - it was pretty cool. I had a great time just sitting on her roof top and I had a deal with all my french friends, they would speak to me in English and I would speak to them in French. That way everyone remembered and everyone benefitted by being able to understand each other. 

Taxi'd back home after a safe and fun night!

"Brooklyn's good. Brooklyn's funky. Brooklyn's happening." - Waris Dirie

Really boring mall. But nice architecture

Today I slept in a little bit today, woke up at 8:30am. So I had some time to actually catch up with some blogging and posting. I was so many days behind! To actually put it into perspective, I'm writing up this blog post... on Wednesday night. This is meant to be a post from Sunday. "Today." I spent most of the morning writing up blog posts and then watching my go to Netflix series, Malcolm in the Middle. Afterwards, I decided to head out, but I was a bit early since the tour started at 2 but I was pretty much done all the posts I wanted to and decided to head out at around 12. 

The metro to get into Williamsburg

I headed out and walked over to the "Mall of America" on Broadway because I always wanted to see
what a mall in America is like.

Honestly, it was amazingly underwhelming. It was like every other mall I've ever been to so I hopped on a train over to Brooklyn! 

Beautiful graffiti on the streets

The train ride was kind of horrendous and to all the parents and other people who care about me reading this right now - I am okay. Nothing is wrong with me and I did the right thing by getting away.

So on the train, Some creepy guy followed me off the train. I was a bit suspicious so I stopped to look at my phone. So he stopped and sat down. So then I started to walk towards the exit...he got up and he followed me but I stopped and looked at my phone again right before the stairs. He kept going I left and took a different exit. Later on, another guy tried to grab my arm while I was walking and when I looked back with disgust he just looked at me and winked. It was a bad first impression of Brooklyn, I'm not going to lie.. but like I said, I came out okay. And it was an "Experience" right?

Found this on my
walk and made me
think of my mom

Well, when I left the subway it got significantly better. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon andever). I walked around for a bit since it was so beautiful out and checked out the area. I wanted to see if Smorgasburg was up but it wasn't. Turns out it's actually put into a different place.
people were out - there were SO MANY people!! And even better, there was a company giving out yogurt so I had a nice light snack to go with my day (don't knock free stuff -

So as I was walking back down, I ran into my friend who I was supposed to go on the tour with and we walked around for a bit, grabbed a coffee and waited for our tour guide...who showed up with a Kylo Ren light saber. Classic. 

We started off with a bit of the history of the area, which included learning about where the name Brooklyn came from - It was actually named after Ben

Imagine how big a house is. That is
how big this graffiti was.

Franklin's grandson! I finally figured out the names of most of the Boroughs in New York. How awesome is that? I also learned a lot about the history of Brooklyn as well and how Williamsburg really started to expand and grow out into what we all know and love to be Brooklyn now. 

The bakery

We started the walking tour by talking about how the area used to be predominately very Polish. So we stopped at a Polish bakery and outside there were a bunch of little old Polish ladies sitting around and talking to each other. The tour guide waved quite a few times, talked to the ladies and really talked up the bakery. 

Fresh and DELICIOUS

While he was explaining the history of the neighbourhood (which I can't really recall right now), one of the little old ladies came up to us and actually opened up her bag of freshly bought bread and offered it to everyone of us. 

Yes. She walked around and she offered every one of us a freshly baked slice of bread. It was delicious and amazing. And then she went back to sit with her ladies. What. A. Sweetheart. 

But that was the sense of community they had. Much like Chinatown, Little Italy, Little India, there was a huge sense of community and family there. It was awesome to experience first hand.

Cool graffiti

As we walked down, the tour guide pointed out various pieces of graffiti and artwork that was spray painted everywhere. In particular, he showed us some artwork that was done on walls by famous artists! Beautiful. He told us that around the area, there are a lot of advertisements around and many times, those advertisements aren't done through posters or pre made, they're actually spray painted on - it's the Brooklyn way. 

With the apartments, many of them are actually done up with graffiti on the side because it gives it a bit of a really "cool" twist on it, makes it edgy and cool to live in. So landlords will let graffiti artists spray paint whatever on the side and graffiti artists will have an opportunity to expand their portfolio! Win-win. 

This was built in the last two decades.
Also the same street with the
Italian festival.

As we were walking through the city, he stopped to talk to a lot of locals on the way. One person in particular struck a chord with me. He was born and raised in Brooklyn but the only one of his friends who could stay there because it had simply gotten too expensive to live there. Once it got trendy to live there, rents skyrocketted and people were forced out. He said that the Brooklyn that exists today was not the Brooklyn from 15 years ago and not the Brooklyn he knew. The Brooklyn he knew was gone.

Russian Orthodox church

It was a bit sad to hear how much the neighbourhood had changed and gentrified but in a way it's also interesting because it is the way that life is meant to go - change is a constant force that no one can go up against. Sometimes change is for the better and sometimes it's for the worst. I would, personally, find it sorrowful if neighbourhoods never changed and things were never different. Not because having no change is boring - but because it would mean that there is no progression. One motto that I have always gone by and always go by is "Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation." I love that line and live by it.

In the back they have an olympic sized
pool. 

We walked by this big main street where the tour guide started talking more to us about areas and how when ethnic areas come in, much like the Polish, they still worship the same gods as before, eat the same foods, do the same things... it's not like when they came to America, they would drop everything and become Americans - no, many were still set in on their old ways and many miss home. Doesn't matter how much you want to go somewhere to live a good life - you will always miss specific things from your old life. So they brought this festival called "The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola" in Williamsburg. It is a huge festival where they bring up a tower that is taller than 20 stories high (Dont quote me on this) and they celebrate with music, performers and most

Playing baseball. Used to be beautiful
park view but now all these buildings
are coming up... 

importantly - food. It's in the summer time so I'll keep in mind that I should check it out!

As we kept walking, we found this beautiful Russian Orthodox church. One way to know that it was an orthodox church was because of the way the cross was. As I found out, the top "bar" was there to represent Jesus. The second is normal, in the shape of the cross and the third, which runs diagonally is there because when Jesus was crucified, to his left, there was the person (do I call them the person?) who believed and accepted Jesus into his heart, and so lead his way to heaven, hence why this side of the diagnal points up. To his right, there was the person (???) who rejected jesus and hence the other side points down to the ground (to hell). It was also apparently the church from Seinfield.

The building that used
to make ink for the US
dollar bills

We headed next to the park where we heard a bit more about the history of New York and learned about how New York really was a gang city with the Serpico family and others. It was a bit scary to hear about. We had two New Yorkers on the tour who said that New York, back in the 70's was a dump. It was horrible - there was corruption and at one point, during one Commission, about 75% of the cops were actually found to be dirty and corrupt. How terrible is that?

We also learned about the pool that was build - Olympic size - back during the Depression. During the summer, people were poor, angry and jobless. To keep them from striking, the city build a pool! How smart is that? Instead of going out and picketing, they could go to the public pool, hang out with their families and enjoy. However, the poool turned out to be too much of an upkeep and ended up going down the drain. People demanded the city do something about it but they city refused. It ended up just being this gigantic waste of space until the 2000s when

The coolest bar ever, where they film
Daredevil and have the sketchiest of
people. 

people would actually, to protest the waste of public space, hold pool parties IN the pool. I wish I could get an invite.

We found out more about the different buildings in the area, such as one specific one that was recently rebuilt, it used to produce all the ink for the US bills! It's now more residential, however, I would never live in there because as I found out, there's actually a lot of uranium (or something to that affect) in the basement. Scary. They went bankrupt and were sued when the people found out that the waste from the factory was leaking into the river... the building had a "mysterious fire" and built something new. 

Heh. 

Wen found this out because there was a bar owner on the other side who found this stuff out from his customers. 

And this is one of the coolest bars ever - it's actually where they film some scenes from Daredevil (Never seen it, heard it's pretty okay). It's probably one of the best dive bars I've ever been in. There were quite a few "characters" inside the bar. I heard a lot about the area and what it was like before, how cheap the rent was and how NOBODY wanted to live there. It was called "Turkey's Nest Tavern." They actually give you alcohol... in a to-go cup with a lid and straw so that you can just take it and go.

How.

Awesome.

The Brooklyn Bowl. At one point they rented it out to the
SwedishRoyal family to hang out while they were in town. 

The place itself had a lot of character within it and I really really loved being in there. I will go back sometime I'm sure. They gave us some tasting of Brooklyn Brewery beer (Since the actual brewery would be so busy with so many people). 

We headed up the streets later, walked by the busy Brooklyn brewery and found out a lot of stuff with the beer scene. Actually, during the digging up of the aftermath of 9/11, the found crushed beer cans of beer that had not been produced for years. They realized that it was because the workers who were building the buildings originally... were drinking on the job and just throwing the crushed beer cans down into the pit to hide the evidence. Interesting.

Also found out that Brooklyn beer is the #2 selling beer in Sweden. People just absolutely love it there. Really they love anything that is "Brooklyn." 

Life quote right here

Actually the tour guide told me about his niece and how when she wants to say something's cool, she'll say, "that's Brooklyn." I want to bring this over to Canada.

We kept walking and ran into a place called "Brooklyn Bowl" Which is this REALLY awesome super
duper cool, gotta go back again bowling alley/concern hall/bar/cooler than wendy place. We were lucky enough to be able to go in as a group and on that day, there was actually a motorcycle show so we got to see a lot of motorcycles! And a live band play. It was pretty sweet. Going to bring all the cool kids there. 

Tru

We kept walking around and saw some really cool places - such as where original signs come from and graffiti advertisements!

We then headed over to the coolest, COOLEST, bookstore/CD/casette/Vinyl place ever. It was called "Rough Trade" and everything was kind of like the inside of a factory with factory carts. In the back, there was a small intimate place where bands could play and at the same place, there were ping pong tables where you could play ping pong. Yup. I meant cool. And the books were pretty unique and hipster too.

Afterwards, as the tour was coming down to a slow down, we headed over by the river and took some very nice photos. It was very casual so the tour guide was just telling us about stuff and having conversations. He actually said I was a pretty funny person and complimented my hair (I made a braid)! :) 

After the tour, my friend and I went off to find RAINBOW bagels and boy did we find them (Holy

Concert venue was small, they had everything, ping pong, music
books, good vibes, great building

crap thuogh $4 a bagel WITHOUT the cream cheese). So we waited in line for a bit and then had to wait about 30 minutes. So we decided to go for a walk.

As we were walking down, we saw the neighbourhood, which is by Williamsburg bridge really change. I mean yeah, there was one beautiful restaurant, Peter Luger (Holy crap there was a guy working for the restaurant holding the door for guests, and when we asked for the menu, the 'steak for two' was about $110, heart attack pls stop. He also told us that if we ever came back we would ahve to have a reservation). But we got into a much poorer area where you could tell that some people had just not grown up with the same opportunities or possibilities as though who are more well off. 

People called this an "abomination"

Even as we went into the McDonalds to use the washroom, the washrooms auto-locked and there were no mirrors or tissues in there.. It was not the most pleasant place. 

My thoughts exactly

However, we walked back to get our bagels and our moods definitely changed. We grabbed them and went on our way. They were beautiful and actually not too bad - very salty and sweet and spongey. As we were walking out, I heard some guy say "only tourists would get something like that." 

But it's an experience.

Right?

yum

After that little snack, we headed over to find some Mexican food and found this really sweet Taco place, Dos Toros which was amazing. For about $4 I got this taco that was just slathered with good delicious food. Meat was moist, veggies were fresh and the shell was the bomb. 

We sat for a bit, talked and people watched before we headed home. Unfortunately, the train was stopped for quite a bit. When I finally did get home, it was quite late in the evening and my roommate came back with KEY LIME PIE, FRESH KEY LIME PIE and it was the most delicious concoction I had ever had my whole life. God it was so good and fresh and just done right. I ended up working a bit on the blog and just pittering around. I watched the newest episode of Game of Thrones and then cried. 

That was my day. Long but good! 

Friends by the New York highline :)

"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!