NYC V2

I'm going to be catching up on the last few months of travel of the next couple of days, where I have photos.  Kicking it off is the trip we took to New York City in September, with Stephen's Mum.  The photos are all taken with my camera phone, so please excuse the quality.

We stayed in a very expensive and very run-down hotel called the Paramount which was fairly close to Times Square.  What they don't tell you is that their standard room's bed is this size:

And Stephen is a skinny guy.  It's a single bed that they put 2 pillows on and sell as a room for 2 people.  Go somewhere better - the Paramount Hotel is really dodgy and not worth the money.

We spent some time walking on the High Line, which is an old aboveground railway line that has been converted into a walking path and garden.  You can see some pretty cool things from it, like the "High Line Zoo".

Street art from the High Line.

Patriotic cement mixer.

Lawn on the High Line.   It definitely stands out in the rest of NYC.

The Brooklyn Bridge.   Stephen was obsessed with walking over it.

 Walking along the Brooklyn Bridge.

Stephen's Mum had lost a lot of weight living in Vietnam, so we decided to take her to a Southern BBQ restaurant to help her regain her lost pounds.  The restaurant we chose was a BBQ market place and the portions were not small.  This was a small pack and included 100g of brisket, a pork rib, a beef rib and a quarter chicken, plus two sides of collard greens and bourbon sweet potato mash.  It was delicious (but there was no room for dessert).

We took the long subway trip out to Coney Island to check it out.  It was pretty run-down, but we had a nice walk around.

Apparently we had just missed the annual hot dog eating contest - apparently the male winner ate 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes and the female ate 45.  Ah, America.

We went for burgers at the famous Shake Shack, which were pretty tasty although quite small.  Not quite sure it was worth the 45 minute queue.  

NYC as seen from the Staten Island Ferry on the way back to Manhattan.  The tall building in the left third of the photo is the new One World Trade Center, built to replace the Twin Towers.  It's already the tallest building in NYC at the time of this photo, and it's probably got another 30-40% of its height left to be built after this photo was taken.