New York, New York

For pictures, visit New York Vacation

A day after Christmas, we started driving to NY city. We left home around 7:15am and drove to Washington DC. The weather was not very friendly that day and it rained most of the way, which made our trip longer as we had to move slow, and were caught up in traffic, but we enjoyed the ride. We listened to an audio book "the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith, and it was a very good story. DC was interesting and we drove around before checking in at our hotel. Drove by the State capitol building and White House. We arrived at our hotel around 7pm very tired and hungry, checked in, ordered some Chinese food, ate and slept.

The next day, we left the hotel to visit the Zambian Embassy before we left for NY. We decided to walk to the embassy to have a good view of the city, and just fell in love with DC. It was cool visiting the embassy and talking to someone from Zambia. After the embassy we stopped for brunch and went back to the hotel to get our things ready and then started off for NY.

Driving to NY was cool, the weather was beautiful, and we continued listening to "the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" while enjoying some sunflower seeds (good companion)... We arrived in NY around 8pm, the buildings and the lights were amazing. We drove to the Bronx and stayed with our dear friends, Jim and Caro. We enjoyed spending time with them visiting different places and enjoying the NYC food. We visited some of the boroughs that make up the city - the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Unfortunately, we did not make it to Queens and Staten Island - I guess we would do that next time... NYC is big and there are too many things to see and places to visit. And yes, we walked around Central Park, Times Square, Harlem, Chinatown (the crowd in Chinatown was WOW!), Little Italy, Greenwich Village - 10th street where Abdu'l-Baha stayed at Juliet Thompson's house, Bowling Green, Battery Park, Bryant Park, SoHo, 5th street, saw the Statue of Liberty, went up to the 86th floor of the Empire State building to get a good view of the city, visited STRAND-the world's largest used bookstore (wow! there were books everywhere, I almost got dizzy looking at them), drove across the famous Brooklyn bridge, visited the Apple store - great place with advanced IT you could use without even paying a dime... it seemed like people just hang out at the Apple store to use laptops to browse the internet, iphones, ipods bla bla bla... We also attended a devotional gathering at the Baha'i Centre in Manhattan, and of course met friends we served with in Haifa - Martha Estafanos and Neda Neyastani, and met Greg Chingwe, a Baha'i from Zambia, actually from my hometown (his dad and my dad were buddies,and we grew up in the same neighborhood - how cool). We also had a privilege to attend the Nineteen Day Feast, at Jim and Caro's flat, had a wonderful time.

In NYC, it seemed like there was a shortage of decent restrooms, and our friends mentioned that the best places for a decent bathroom were McD and Starbucks (at least there was a Starbucks at every corner of the street). Once I had to go through security check at a museum just to use the bathroom. We also noticed that in NYC, you line up for almost everything; a cup of coffee, using the bathroom, the Statue of Liberty, Empire State and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) lines were way tooooooooooooooooooooo long, I could not believe, but it seemed normal everywhere we visited, and people just lined up. Actually NYC is a cool city to visit, and it was not as crazy as I thought.

Over the weekend, we drove to the Cloisters, and it was interesting.

On our last full day there, New Year's Day, we drove north away from the city, and visited other places in NY like Yonkers, Dobbs Ferry, and Ossining; stopped by Hudson river and drove by Sing Sing prison - well, we didn't mean to, but it was right there. We also met up with our dear friend Oak and his sister, Jasmine, in Manhattan and had dinner with them. Oak and his sister were visiting their grandmother in New Jersey and decided to come up to Manhattan.

As always, it is wonderful to leave home and visit other places, but it is so good to get back to a place you refer to as HOME.