elis' travel journal: Bradley Beach / New York City

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Bradley Beach / New York City

Yesterday, on one of our last days off here, we decided to seize the 24 hours we had as good as possible ;-)

So we left the house shortly after 9 in the morning and went to Bradley Beach to enjoy the sun and the ocean until noon. And in fact it was really a great idea to go there earlier (usually we've always been there in the afternoon) cause it is just like a totally different "beach experience" at that time!!! Almost no people there - so that you can lie down wherever you want to, and you feel like you're in an oasis in the middle of all the sand next to the sea... besides, it's not so hot yet and there is a nice breeze in the air... So we just lay there for about three hours, listened to music and read a magazine while we got tanned... why can't every day be like that, huh?

At about 1.30 we ended the beach session and took a train right from Bradley Beach to NY Penn Station to have a nice afternoon and evening strolling through "the city", how we call it here ;-)
The time we had there was great, we strolled through Chinatown and Little Italy, which is in fact right next to each other, almost merging! It was such an interesting experience to see these districts, although, I've seen Chinatown in San Francisco before and it's of course almost the same. But it's still funny to see this little country in a city, you feel like you are in China indeed!
All the signs are in Chinese, you see mainly Chinese people running around and the markets and stores are all too Chinese - they've got all thei imported food and stuff from China and do everything in the original way, or at least it really seems like.
Little Italy wasn't that "authentic" as far as we could judge that, but it just doesn't feel like being in Italy when you're surrounded by all these typical American buildings...for Italy, you would just need a different aarchitecture. But still the atmosphere is uite exciting, so many little Italian-style restaurants and lots of tourists. In fact, we ate in one of these restaurants, called "La Mela" (the apple) and I can say it was really worth the money (wasn't even expensive!) - we had the best Pasta nd salad ever! YUMMY! I swear, it was heavenly.... If you ever wind up being hungry in little Italy, please go there and you'll never forget about it!

After this first-class culinary experience, we headed to the next subway station but got stuck in one of these cute little chinese shops, where we just found so many nice souvenirs and gifts that we had to stay for about one hour and shop shop shop. Hey, they close down in some days and everything was 50% off... We couldn't help! When we had spent everything we got (almost), we decided to also have a look at Greenwich Village (famous for nice cafes, bars, museums, etc) but when we arrived there we realized we would have had to walk for some blocks but didn't have enough time for that anymore. So we went back to Penn Station, where we had a short visit at our "Stamm-" Mc Donald's in the city (seriously! we went there every time we've been to the city!!) to get some ice cream and fruits and took the 9 o'clock train back to Bradley Beach where our Convertible was waiting for us.

Another very nice day came to an end! :-)

Here are the pics...

the sky was soooo beautiful that day! .....that's in Bradley Beach