Hello Ladies and gentlemen,

here is day 3 of my new york adventure!

last i left you with an action packed day of shopping and eating. well, don’t despair, we have more of much the same! whoo hoo! so, the following morning we took my favourite ferry, and had some time for some pictures on the way to catch it.

here is the area we were staying in in new jersey

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and our friendly neighbourhood ferry terminal
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whilst there we had some time for some group pictures
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pictures with the family
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and these cute towels were in the store!
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and another hazy picture of NYC, except with 600% more ducks this time.
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and then, I’m looking up, and what do i spot. its a shadow of an airplane. but not any shadow. the shadow is in the the shape of none other than a B17-G, i do believe. ohh my ohh my. sadly, i can’t hear the rumble of the 4 Pratt and Whitney Radial engines. i pointed excitedly at noa, and cursed not having a second camera body with my telephoto lens that i also did not have on me.
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this is what a very poor zoomed in version looks like
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what an airplane. its not like i haven’t seen them before, you see them every once in a while in arizona, i just wasn’t expecting. it. that made my day. now back to the city.

so we disembark, and start walking. i see this really cool looking wall.

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and then we stumbled upon a flea market, which was really cool. look at all these old typography stamps. karen would of loved it!
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and this window was great
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and for some reason I’ve been into signs these days.
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the New Yorker building
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and the empire state building
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so then, noa’s dad and i lost a little over 2h in B&H photo. if you have never been, its a magical experience. imagine every gadget, camera, tripod and accessory, all in one store. now packed with a whole crap load of people, and overhead rail tracks with boxes zipping around. its fantastic. anyways, i was looking for a camera bag, and finally settled on one. eventually, we stumbled out of there, starving.

so we went to find the ladies, and we made our way to one of the places on our list. its called Eataly, and its owned by Mario Batali. what a place. after seeing b&h, this place wasn’t much better. imagine a high end grocery store, like whole foods. now add 5 restaurants inside, that cook with the ingredients sold there. wow, what an amazing place. we had a pizza there, that was pretty damn good. i also had one of my favourite beers, dogfish head 90 minute ipa. lets see some pictures from inside.
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i was mesmerized by watching them make fresh pasta
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and of course, we had some sweets. a cute little tiramisu, and some gelato.
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from there, we walked about some more, and i got a few more pictures
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and finally, we took the ferry back in the afternoon. we had dinner plans with some family that evening, so we had to head back somewhat early in order to make it.
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I had found a local liquor store the previous days, and this beer stood out. its NJ local, had an awesome name, and touted to be hoppy! well, it was hoppy, a little more bitter than i like, but super delicious either way. i brought some to dinner with me, as i did not have a lot of time to finish them on my trip. very creative bottles and names, i enjoyed it very much. hop-a-lot-amus. so fun to say.
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that evening we ate delicious steaks, and some fruit salad, which our host assured me tasted better with Kirch liquor. I’m not sure if it improved it, but it certainly made it interesting. overall, it was an excellent end to a night and another great day.

just one more day left for me, on the grand new york adventure.

Well,

Im home 3 days already, but noa and her mom just arrived today. i got in roughly midnight on tuesday, got into bed around 1am, and woke up at 6:30 to go to work, and i was teaching a photography class that day, which actually went over pretty well.

i was mostly recovering and cooking and playing with ginger these last few nights, but i managed to also upload my photos, pick them, and i got them edited and uploaded tonight. so I’m ready to blog about them now.

I think the best line of attack is probably to split the post into one for each day. in total there are something like 150 photos that i favorited. probably not all of them are blog worthy, but if i split that up into 4, its not too bad.

Alright, lets see, where to start. we got in early friday morning into JFK after a redeye. i think i already commented that we did not get much sleep. i certainly got more than noa did. we had booked a taxi service to take us to West New york, which is in new jersey, right across the hudson river from NYC. at 6:30 in the morning there was already a surprising amount of traffic, and we had to drive right thru town to get to new jersey, which took us about an hour. we arrived before noa’s parents, who had also landed at a similar time but at a different airport, and who were driving to meet us. so thats where the last blog post about us having tea outside of the starbucks left you.

So for this trip we were 5, noa, her parents, one of her sisters, and myself. noa’s mom found the place we were staying at on airbnb i believe, and it was an excellent choice. huge spacious apartment, 2 bedrooms and bathrooms, and lots of room. obviously we aren’t spending a lot of time in the apartment, but its nice to have a kitchen and such. incidentally, we also found out it was really nice to stay outside of the city in the evenings, where the pace is a little slower, and not so crowded. all in all it was an excellent choice.

here is a view of the apartment complex.
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once we got settled for a bit, off we went into the city. as it was friday, noa’s dad was still working that day, so it was just the 4 of us that ventured into the city. we were told we can either take a bus or a ferry into the city, so we decided to try the ferry, and off we went.

glimpse of the city
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we were down on the bank of the river, and there was this bluff behind this, densely treed, with this cool building in amongst it.
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i loved how this pathway ended
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so we got to the ferry, and here it is arriving.
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as it turns out, we loved taking the ferry. it ran every 20 min, it was fun, and you got to see the city from it. and it was fast! also, it was only a 5 min walk from the apartment, and dumped us right into NYC. overall i just loved taking it. if you couldn’t tell already.

noa and her sister
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this is us leaving the ferry dock, looking back at where we were staying
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and you turn around, and you get this!
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and much to my surprise, we passed this, which had just arrived in new york.
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The space shuttle!!! pretty cool. it wasn’t open yet, and over the course of a few days they put a giant tarp around it. but i was pretty lucky to get these few shots.

and a view with cruise ships and the city
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and then we were off the shuttle, and walking into town.

and you forget how crazy it can be. sign assault!
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and look whats nestled into a little corner here! a tim hortons. we didn’t go in, but kinda crazy to see one outside of canada.
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by this point we were starving, so we ducked into an old diner, and had some delicious food. i had a large pastrami sandwich. and this picture frame was in the restaurant.
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talking of food, there was a lot this trip. a lot. we came armed with a list, and we tried to hit as many places as we could. i asked noa to keep notes on where and what we ate, and we took mostly iPhone pictures of that. so i think ill save that for a totally separate blog post.

after lunch, we wandered out to times square
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as you have perhaps surmised by now, it was a really nice day. the weather while i was there was superb, hot enough to need to wear shorts, and cool in the evenings. they day i left apparently the weather hit mid 30’s, which is kinda warm. but i had great weather. i love wearing shorts.

i liked this picture
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So then one of noa’s birthday gifts was ti see the broadway play “the book of mormon”. we booked the tickets months and months beforehand, and only had 1 time when we could go see it. and that time happened to be at 2pm the day we arrived. so, after wandering around the city for a little while, we got to the theatre with plenty of time.

here is the theatre
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and the line to get in
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and here is inside the theatre, before the show started.
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Personally, i really loved the show. i grew up with south park, and their sense of humour, and this was right along that alley. it was a super fun, action packed show, with lots of great laughs. I’m not going to review a Broadway show, thats not really my schtick, but ill be happy to talk to anyone about it if they want. all ill say is i thoroughly enjoyed myself.

from there, we walked around to hit some bakery’s on noa’s list, see some more of the city, and head back. so lets see some of those pictures.

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one of the good looking bakeries.
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i thought this was quite striking of a shot.
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30 rock!
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even the trees around 30 rock are classy!
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lots of tall buildings around
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i think this is my favourite picture of the trip. the lighting was amazing.
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i loved this.
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and more of times square
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finally we met up with noa’s sister again (she didn’t watch the play) and got back onto the ferry home.
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the lovely ladies
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another shot of the shuttle
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and good night to the city for today, the view on our walk back to the apartment

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PHEW! day one was exhausting. I hope you were able to stick with all of day one, these posts have been long awaited for by people, so I’m glad to finally get started on them.
more soon.