We took the PATH down to 33rd St and walked over towards Macys in Herald Square. Check it out, I'm standing in the middle of the road that would normally be filled with traffic! They have closed down 33rd to 35th St and laid out chairs and tables for the public to just chill. In a way it's a good idea, but I don't know. It looked kinda silly too. Traffic was being diverted to the other streets while people just sat around, doing nothing. Isn't that what Central Park and all the other parks around the city are for?
We walked down Broadway to towards Times Square and they started to block off traffic starting from 42nd St. That's where the famous Times Square ball would drop every New Years Eve. People were just hanging out and relaxing on the green lawn chairs! It's quite funny to see Times Square without traffic (well, not counting the time when I went for the New Years Eve countdown).
We walked further down Broadway and now there were blue lawn chairs! It looks like a huge beach party, minus the sea and sand :P
Every time we go to Times Square, I would take a picture in front of that...haha! Don't ask me why. The difference today is....I get to take the picture from the middle of the street! I cannot believe I am standing in the middle of Broadway, minus all the yellow taxi cabs and traffic.
We decided to take a break and look for somewhere to go to for dinner. I wanted to check out Bubba Gump, so we went in. It was sooooooooo crowded and the hostess said that we had to wait for about 45 minutes to get a table. Forget that! So we continued walking in search of another place to eat(we ended up in Charley O's at the theater district, will blog about that later). Oh and if you are wondering why it's only me appearing in all the photos today, it's because Kevin says that he has been appearing in the blog too many times and there is not enough photos of me in here. Soooo, its all me today :P
As we continued walking up Broadway, the chairs got even more comfortable. Now there are deck chairs all over the place near the TKTS booths. For those of you who don't know, you can get last minute Broadway show tickets here for 50%! You should definitely check them out whenever you are in NYC.
After walking a little bit further up, this is what we see. Now the chairs are just plain absurd! Look at all various designs and shapes that they are in! I think it looks weird, but weird in a good way. Pretty cool actually.
This was towards the end of Times Square. I have never seen so many people (excluding the NYE countdown of course) in Times Square before. No traffic, just a sea of people.
There were all kinds of people from all walks of life down at times Square today. Also, all the Times Square 'celebrities' were out in full force. We saw the Birdman, Superman, the Naked Cowboy, some cartoon characters and even four Statues of Liberty! We also noticed that there were a lot of police standing around at every corner. At the time, I thought that the NYPD was stationed there for crowd control. They must have a lot of manpower to station so many officers just for this pedestrian mall. Little did I know at that time that there were two (well, three) very important people visiting the area around the same time as us.
Nahhhh, not those two! :P Yeah, they were in Times Square too but they were not the important people I was talking about. President Barack Obama and his wife were actually just a few blocks away from us. Not on official business but it was 'date night' for them. They flew in to have dinner at the West Village and then headed to Broadway for a show at the theater district. No wonder there were so many cops! Guess who was the other? Prince Harry! Yup, Prince Harry was in town for a polo match earlier in the day and he was going about visiting tourist attractions like 30 Rock and other places in the city around that time too. No wonder security was super tight that afternoon/evening! No, we didn't get to see the Obamas or Prince Harry. We didn't even know that they were somewhere near us until we got home and watched the 11 o clock news!
We had a great time in the city today though we didn't get to see the President or Prince. We had loads of fun shopping, people watching and also had a super yummy dinner. Sooo, what do I think of the new pedestrian malls? Keep the one in Times Square and scrape the one in Herald Square! The Herald Square pedestrian mall is just plain silly. There were not as many people hanging out at the one in Herald Square anyways. I think that they are both too close to each other. One is enough. :D
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