My life in photos: April 2008

Well, I haven't travelled for a long time until the middle of March.
The good point is that I could notice almost everything which is different from the Russian reality because of my non-mobility.

So, New York. The city of skyscrapers, the capital of world business and the center of world democracy ;)

It moves every minute plus it starts shining in the night time. I mean movement never stop. Trafic, citizens, tourists, aircrafts, subway, elevators, lights always move to bring life to the NYC. Even Hudson, Harlem and East rivers always bring water to the Ocean.

Actually I lived on the other side of Hudson river, in New Jersey state, right in front of the George Washington Bridge. And it took an hour to get to the Port Bus Authority Terminal by bus.

I've been almost everywhere in the Southern Manhatten. Looked like the most interestng place to see. The end of March wasn't so warm, there were no flowering trees in the streets so I decided not to go to the Central Park.
I've bought city sightseing tour right in the Internet [Internet is the most popular place to buy everything as companies don't need to pay sales taxes while selling through the Internet.].
I've got to the tour start point and realized that they didn't have tours in Russian. They even didn't have any electronic audioguides in the bus. Actually they had but they were very low quality and they were in German, Spanish and Chinise. Neither of them worked for me ;)I said no electronic, but every bus contained real tour guide person. The thing is 60% of time I got a bus with tour guide in understandable English and 40% of time it was like pure quick American English :)

So, Time Square, Soho, China Town, Financial District in the very south of Downtown, WTC place and the Wall Street, Broadway and almost all the avenues on Manhatten were discovered by me.
Walking round the city by feet is the most important thing to understand it. City tour is good to discover the history and some interesting facts.
Here are a few of them:
- The Empire State Building was built for 13 months. It was build so quick because it was a depression time in the US economy and there were a lot of workers available 24/7.
- China Town is growing real fast. Most of modern China Town was populated with Eastern Europe immigrants late 80s-90s.

One of the parts of my tour was Ellis Island ferry. So, one frosty New York morning I took the bus to get to New York Port Bus Authority, then took the subway to get to the Southern ferry terminal and then realized that there was a long long line of people waiting for the same ferry. I don't know but I can assume that there were like 2 thousands of people and the line length was around 700 meters.

So, I decided not to go to the Ellis Island, the island where the Statue of Liberty is. And I wasn't mistaken as I took another Circle Line cruise round the Manhatten + Ellis Island. It starts right on the 42th street in the Hudson river pier. The most impressive pictures were made there. This is really worth visiting.

The other impressive place is the bank of the East river near Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn during the night time. I've taken some pics there as well.