vanillafrog's voice: new york, new york

day two was crazy! we got up early and went to top of the rock at rockefeller center. it's the only place in new york where you can actually see the empire state building. the views were absolutely amazing. you can see the brooklyn bridge, the east river, the hudson river, the statue of liberty and ellis island. i have already been to the empire state building, ellis island, and the statue of liberty...so we got to skip all of those places and it saved a lot of time! after we had seen everything from 70 stories up, we made our way to east village. we were signed up to meet a tour guide at the big black cube at astor place. it ended up being me, k-dogg, and a couple from london. the tour was awesome! not only did we eat a lot of great food, but our guide, susan, showed us a lot of important places and told us a lot of history about east village. i think my favorite things are the light posts covered in mosaics. they are by a homeless man named jim power. incredible artwork. we went to gem spa for an egg cream. a place i would never go on my own and a drink i would never have ordered...but i would now! we had fresh salami and spicy mustard at the east village meat market. wow! new york pizza, a cookie and ice cream from milk bar, a hot dog from papaya dog, treats from veniero's, an italian bakery that's been open since 1894. the weirdest thing we ate was borscht. beet soup at a 24 hour ukrainian coffee shop, veselka. it was so good, that as soon as we got home, i looked up their website to see if i could order their cookbook. it's on it's way from amazon right now! we saw a lot of cool things along the way. st. mark's on the bowery is the oldest continual church in new york city and the second oldest church in manhattan. webster hall , a farmers' market...in manhattan, cooper union, trash and vaudeville...i could probably go back to nyc and stay in east village the whole time! but then, k-dogg had done his research and found out that the harry potter exhibition was in town...oh. my. word. right down the street from our hotel...we saw tons of costumes and props from all of the movies...even the one that comes out this friday. if you are a fan of the movies or the books, or both, and you are going to be in nyc before september...you must go! it was awesome. but we still weren't done for the day. we went back to east village, to ippudo, for dinner. k-dogg loves ramen and had seen this place on food network's the best thing i ever ate. i had read that the wait to get seated was sometimes up to three hours...i was not excited. but we walked in and got seated immediately. k-dogg had ramen, i ordered a duck and eggplant appetizer. my food was good...but the ramen was crazy good! we went back uptown and ended up at central park. i could spend a whole day or two there, but we just walked around the south end for a little while since we were exhausted. we walked by the zoo...it was closed, found balto, the delacorte clock, and william shakespeare. for some reason, we decided to walk back to our hotel...all the way down 5th avenue. it was a lot of walking, but it was so fun! pictures to follow later today...scout is awake!

wow, about 2 hours and scout is asleep again! guess we wore him out this weekend...