The night we arrived in New York we were pretty jet lagged, which meant that we woke up ridiculously early the next morning. But with a view like this, it wasn’t so hard to get out of bed.
After about 5 years of planning to visit New York, my mum, brother and I finally made it over to the Big Apple for a week in July. This was the incredible view from our hotel room over the Hells Kitchen area of the city. We were staying in Times Square, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but the view definitely made up for it.
The day started off as all days should – with waffles. This was from Le Pain Quotidien which I got with a vanilla bean iced latte. New Yorkers love their iced drinks – literally everyone was walking around the city with the hugest cups of iced latte or iced tea. This was something I could get on board with.
Shout out to my brother for taking some good candid photos..
Saks on Fifth Avenue is just far too photogenic – look at all those flags! I also got the generic ‘crossing the street in NY’ picture that, lets admit, we secretly all want to take.
We decided to do the Empire State Building on our first day – after watching films like An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle, I was actually pretty excited about it. We bought VIP Express tickets – I cannot recommend these enough. We literally skipped the entire queue of people waiting. We were able to get to the top, look around, go up to the upper viewing deck and come back down again all in around 40 minutes. Everyone else was in there for about 3 hours..
I really didn’t get tired of looking at this skyline.
Feeling pretty exhausted, we retreated back to our hotel in Times Square. This area was crazy – you couldn’t move for other tourists, street sellers and traffic. It was actually a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but impressive none the less. My favourite part was probably the Sephora as that one was open until midnight and had ALL the good stuff. But more on that later…