Hardly made a dent

I don't even know how to start this post. I was told when I got to New York, my head was going to explode. It didn't, thank god, but it came close. We drove to Mamaroneck at 7am and hopped on the 8:26am train, which dumped us at Grand Central around 9:15. After failing to get Saturday Night Live tickets (they're not filming right now) and abandoning the worst, rock-hard pretzel from a cart, we grabbed breakfast at a little cafe (egg and sausage on a roll for B, Challah french toast for me--$8) and started walking. I can't tell you every little thing we did because there is just TOO much! 

For the most part, we just walked and walked and walked for TWELVE hours (hence the excruciating blisters we both have on the tender bottoms of our feet), and along the way we saw:

- 5th Ave.

- Rockefeller Plaza (i.e., 30 Rock)

- Greenwich Village (thumbs up)

- Statue of Liberty (from Battery Park)

- Financial District (and Ground Zero)

- Tribeca ('Triangle Below Canal'--thanks, friendly lady)

- Lower East Side (thumbs way up)

- Empire State Building (obviously we didn't go in; we just gawked at it from outside):

- Magnolia Bakery froim Sex & The City

- Little Italy (awesome):

Beyond this:

I ate my VERY FIRST CANNOLI! I have been dying to eat one of these but I always had a feeling I'd end up in New York one day. I found out where to get 'em best (Ferrara, apparently, although they were $3 and there were equally large ones for 99 cents just a few steps away) and indulged, sharing half with B only because I was already full of sandwich. Otherwise, sucka woulda been on his own.

We also shopped (of note: Fishs Eddy for dishes, Brooklyn Industries for neat clothes/bags etc., Joseph Hanna for leather goods), but I didn't buy anything! What's wrong with me? We rode the subway once toward the end of the night, and had some excellent beer and wood fired meat for dinner, and we made friends with one nice lady in Greenwich (who tipped us off to a street market) and a chatty Syrian fellow in a leather shop, who decided he "really liked us", and encouraged us to watch Bill Maher and come back to get Brian's leather satchel polished in three months. 

But in a whole day of walking and gawking, we hardly made a tooth-mark in the Big Apple. We still have about 7/8ths of the city left to explore, and even that's only a cursory pass through the main thoroughfares. They say you can live in NYC your whole life and never see everything, and we believe it now. Neither of us wanted to leave, and we woke up this morning wishing we were still there... and, of course, that there was a miracle remedy for blisters.

I'll post all of our photos later, on Picasa.