I set my alarm and woke up at 8AM the next day. Somehow, even though I started the process an hour earlier, I didn’t manage to get everyone up until the same time as Saturday. We went back to the PATH station and took the other line to the World Trade Center site. The ride was much shorter than the one to 33rd St, and I was surprised that it actually went through Ground Zero. We took some pictures around the site, but I was annoyed by the fact that they had a thin mesh which prevented any clear pictures.
Since we were right there, we went to Century 21 next. I thought this was a bad thing to do because if we bought anything, we would have to carry it around the entire day. We scheduled to meet up an hour later, at 12:30 which left an hour of shopping. After taking a quick look, Richard and I decided to walk around outside. We visited St Paul’s Chapel which had tombstones from the early 19th century, then went across the street to the NYC side of the Hudson river. There was the Irish Hunger Memorial there which was a interestingly built lookout. We continued into the World Financial Center and took some pictures at the Winter Garden. Then we hurried back because we were already 15 minutes late, but of course no one was there. After randomly running into Nelson on the escalators, we found the girls and Ben in the shoe section. Eventually, after another hour, we assembled everyone and 5-6 big bags of shopping, and left Century 21.
We walked towards City Hall, but by that time, everyone was hungry and so we stopped at Oliva Gourmet for some food. This was a pseudo fast food place, where you would buy your food and then there was a seating area at the back. I had a portabello panini ($6 wtf? there’s no meat) or something like that, and Pauline had Ravioli. It was here that I had my first crappy NYC washroom experience. It seems that NYC doesn’t have the concept of multiple washrooms so I had to 5 minutes just to wash my hands. Afterwards, we took some pictures in City Hall Park and planned to walk through Chinatown and Little Italy. At this point though, Ben suggested the he would go back to the hotel and drop off the bags from Century 21. We made plans to meet up again later in the day at Katz’s Deli. The rest of us continued up through Chinatown.
Chinatown in New York seems much like Chinatown of Toronto. There sidewalks were crowded with Chinese people, the shops overflowed onto the sidewalk, and there were random people selling cheap groceries on the sidewalk. There seemed to be a lot of people around, particularly in one stretch where they sold on the sidewalk, but I don’t know if that was because it was a Sunday afternoon. After a few wrong turns, we made it to Bowery and headed north through Little Italy. There were an awful lot of lighting and restaurant equipment stores there, and not a lot of people. We made it up to E Houston St and at the point were pretty tired, so we walked over to the Adidas store on Broadway to have a rest and play some Snake.
It was still too early to meet Ben, but we decided to start making our way towards Katz’s. Along the way, we passed some sort of block party that was happening so we took a look. I’m still not sure what was happening there, because there were a lot of people gathered around and someone was pumping beats out of speakers on their fire escape. Katz’s Delicatessen was the deli featured in When Harry Met Sally, although I never watched it; Nelson and Edmond talk about going here all the time, so we had to go! It was setup in a Richtree-style, you were given a ticket on the way in and your purchases are recorded on that ticket. Apparently it gets pretty busy during prime hours, but since we got there at 4:30 there were still seats available. Pauline and I split a Pastrami on Rye which was surprisingly tasty; we also sampled Ben’s corned beef, which while good, wasn’t as great as the Pastrami.
Once we finished our early dinner, we got on the subway and headed up to the Theatre district to catch a show.
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