One of my favourite movie scenes in my early adult years stemmed from Al Pacino in Devil’s Advocate: him standing at the entrance of this huge chapel with a wide smirk on his face.
He plays the part of a dark angel (let’s be honest, they could not have picked a better Godfather to play that role), and in the scene he quietly dips a finger in the sacred holy water font, looking very satisfied with himself as the liquid starts to bubble.
York Stock Exchange – which for the 9/11 commemoration activities later that week was emblazoned in the red, white, and blue – brought this memory back, and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
I guess New York was that place for me, it has that kind of energy, that sizzle, that smirk that takes everything you think you knew about foreign cities and travel and turns it on its head.
And it’s for this reason that my first piece of advice to any budding Big Apple traveller, is to decide before your wheels touch down what it is about this city that floats your boat.
Do some research and decide beforehand what are the must sees for you. I say this because you realise after your first visit that this city is like an onion, it has many layers to it, with many visits needed to peel through it.
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Minesh from South Africa was peeling the top layer, the tourist layer, but visiting again means tackling the arts and culture layer, then the foodie layer, then the surrounding areas layer, it’s all quite a tasty conundrum. A first visit to NY is an assault on your physical and mental senses.
Over five days I averaged 15 kilometres of walking per day, excluding time spent on busses and evening subways, and to be honest I would have walked more if there were more hours in the day.
There is just so much to see, so many bucket list things to tick, you become this hamster on this exciting Hollywood wheel, trying to tick everything you’ve seen so many times on the silver screen.
So where to begin? On all my foreign-city escapades I’ve become a firm believer in open-top tour busses, with NY being no exception, and for a few reasons, I may add.
The most obvious is that they easily tick your sightseeing to-do list, generally adding a few spots you didn’t know existed, with the headphones merrily telling you about each part of the city as you meander through the traffic. But the hidden truth is that it’s a cool alternative to public transport.
Buy the weekly pass, valid along all available routes, and you just need to find a relevant bus stop to get going. Sure, you start memorising the guide’s soundtrack, but versus the subways where you see nothing, the bus is more entertaining, time-permitting, to make this your chilled mode of cabriolet cruising.
Choosing a hotel and more-importantly its location is your next big decision.
I initially looked at a place near Times Square, but luckily before booking, saw TripAdvisor was a little grumpy with it, so ended up downtown in the financial district at the Holiday Inn.
And for the record, not just any Holiday Inn, but at over 50 stories high, the tallest on the planet. At almost R25 000 for six nights, it was no bargain, with the room itself working off the Hotel Formula One philosophy of less is more.
But it did what it promised, with the only strange thing being curtains that didn’t close, meaning you can’t get the room completely dark at night.
But, in terms of location, being in the financial district meant I was nowhere near the craziness that is Times Square, where every night is New Years’ eve. The financial district also meant I was two blocks away from the Stock Exchange, the big banks, and more importantly the 9/11 memorial site, in the week leading up to 9/11 memorial activity.
This naturally became the first easy stop, and it’s spellbinding to see the energy.
Like I’ve discovered with many trips, it’s sometimes not the obvious that makes the biggest impressions, with the Fire Station across the street from the towers shining its own light of authenticity through this tragic tale.
This was a first respondent station – and standing outside its walls with its own memorial and shrine to those firefighters who died trying to save others, you realise the magnitude of what actually happened.
The site of the twin towers, with deep foundation-holes in the ground and the water pouring into what seems like dark nothingness is both moving and poignant.
It leaves you cold, with the sound the water makes across the vastness of the design bringing home that emptiness that so many thousands of families must have felt.
It costs nothing to visit but is so worth doing.
The Stock Exchange was another important stop on my list, and while not a massive building, it has this immense sense of heritage and presence.
You feel like this is where money was invented; you picture John D Rockefeller and Franklin D Roosevelt walking through the doors, and you can imagine director Martin Scorsese getting his inspiration for the Wolf of Wall Street from these very pavements.
And every few times you pull a dollar bill out of your wallet you think about this place.
A stop here would also not be complete without finding that famous raging bull statue a block away, along with a scratch of his nether regions for good luck, as is the tradition.
The next thing you quickly realise is that around every corner is some form of great architecture.
The skyscrapers, if you enjoy concrete and metal, are magnificent in a Transformers movie kind of way. It’s like nobody was allowed to build anything less than 50-storeys high, and it has to take up a full city block for it to count.
I’ve been to cities like London and Tokyo and Shanghai, all of which have skyscrapers and, but I reckon it’s the age of NY that makes these buildings, with their varied architecture and space between most of them, so majestic.
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