12 posts tagged with "traveling"

Photo by Silviu Alexandru Avram

New York City. The big apple. Jay-Z's city that never sleeps. Batman's Gotham. Spiderman's home. Call it whatever you like, everyone knows what you are talking about. It's #1 most popular city for filming movies, topping the likes of Los Angeles, Paris and London.

Needless to say, I arrived in NYC with big expectations. And I was still blown away.

Jersey City​

My trip started in Jersey City, across the Hudson, where my friends are based. The trip from JFK took forever, but alas, I finally arrived at the World Trade Center, and then took the Path train to Jersey. After "checking in", we went for a walk to the Hudson River waterfront, overlooking Manhattan. Describing the skyline is just impossible, I just could not believe I was actually there, staring at it from across the river. It was late in the evening, or at least that's how I felt it was after the long flight. It was my opportunity to just pause and indulge the view. Right in front of my eyes, the World Trade Center. To the left, in the distance, the Empire State Building. The Hudson Yards, recently built, also to the left. Helicopters everywhere. Like in the movies, but better.

As for Jersey City, I found it to be quite a cosy place, especially the hip downtown, filled with coffee places, craft beer bars and restaurants. It featured many 19th century brownstone houses which suited the place very well, along with small shops and a few parks. The place was quite packed after working hours, and there was always a queue at the ice cream place (ugh...).

Manhattan Skyline	Jersey City Skyline

On the waterfront, however, there was a different architectural story, as the brownstones were replaced by the all-too-familiar tall apartment and huge office buildings, the Goldman Sachs being the most impressive. Right next to it, there was the Colgate Clock. Familiar words everywhere, really.

The best decision of my life was to pack my running equipment, as it helped me discover Jersey City even better, not only its downtown and waterfront. I ran all the way to the Liberty State Park, then along the boardwalk, then closer and closer to Ellis Island, where I took a break and admired the country's unmistakeable icon, the Statue of Libery.

On another occasion I also went north of Jersey City, towards Hoboken, and reached the Hoboken train station and the Hoboken waterfront. From there, the Hudson Yards and the Empire State Building were closer across the river, so I could take a better look. This Hoboken part of town seemed to me less impressive and more impersonal than Jersey City, but the train station's exterior was very pleasant to the eye. Unfortunately, I did not make it to Hoboken downtown, where I was told there are plenty of coffee shops as well.

One thing's for sure: when possible, I'll always pack the running shoes.

Lower Manhattan​

It seems pretty hard to divide the trip by time, so I'd rather split it by location, starting with Lower Manhattan. It's famous for taking a cruise to the Statue of Liberty and posing beneath the Wall Street Bull. There's also Wall Street itself, the stock exchange, and plenty of gigantic office buildings, hence it's name, the Financial District. At the intersection of Wall Street, Beaver Street and Pearl Street, I came across a building that looked stragely familiar and realised I was looking at the real life location of the Continental hotel from John Wick. On Broadway, betwen the buildings, the Trinity Church is making an impression. Squeezed between so many sky scrapers, it does stand out with its beautiful Gothic Revival style exterior, stained glass windows and peaceful cemetery with cherry trees and lots of flowers.

Equally impressive is the World Trace Center subway station, both from the inside and the outside. It was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and features white ribs that interlock high above the ground. Next to the station there's the 9/11 memorial, featuring a museum, a huge pool and a plaza. Next to them is One World Trade Center, the tallest building in New York. It's one of the buildings to visit for the panoramic view of the city, along with the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Center. Spoiler alert: I chose Blair Waldorf's favorite.

The 9/11 Memorial	Trinity Church

Of course, I should also mention the Brooklyn Bridge, probably the most crowded bridge to cross on foot. Even with the crowds, the bridge offers a delightful walking opportunity, with its neo-Gothic towers, steel cables and pleasant views over both Manhattan and Brooklyn. I turned around just before reaching Brooklyn, as I decided to continue my walk back to Manhattan towards Canal Street, and postpone Brooklyn for another trip. On top of the Dumbo view point, I also have the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in Prospect Park on my future visiting list. Anyway, back to Manhattan.

I got off the bridge and turned right towards Chinatown and Little Italy. I took Center Street and went towards Canal Street. On my right I came across an array of what it appear to be government buildings, with imposing entrances. Later, I discovered that the buildings were actually the Supreme Court and the Courthouse. I continued my walk north, reached Canal Street and wandered a bit through Chinatown and Little Italy, before deciding to change course and head towards Soho and, of course, Noho.

Brooklyn Bridge	World Trade Center

Both Soho and Noho offer a stark change of scenery from Canal Street, with a lovely combination of shops, designer boutiques, chic restaurants and the New York University buildings. Right next to the NYU buildings we passed through Washington Square Park, which was always packed, given its location. On the day I arrived there with my friends, we took some pictures by the Washington Square Arch and we continued to move northward, towards my friend's favorite building in New York, the Flatiron Building.

Middle Manhattan​

Probably the part of Manhattan I walked through the most, since my daily walks involved walking from the WTC to Central Park and then returning back either to the WTC or any other Path station. I mentioned the Flatiron Building, but unfortuantely I found it under construction, so there was not much to see. On the other hand, the Madison Square Park area offers a selection of equally magical places, and #1 is, of course, the Harry Potter store. I went to the shop at least 3 times and I was close to buying Severus' wand, but I did not like the wand stands and decided to postpone my purchase until I figure out where to place the wand in my home.

Equally magical is Shake Shack, and the Madison Square Park location has tables outside, right in the park. Double Smoke Shack, regular fries, 6 chicken bites and a laaaarge Fifty Fifty. 2000 calories and 0 regrets. And that's the magical part about New York which I liked: wherever I was, there was always something good to drink or to eat. Just out of any subway, there's a Starbucks. A Dunkin right next to it. A Chick-Fill-A on the corner. Or a Shake Shack. Popeyes? Yes. I cannot think of anything more magical than that, besides Disney. Two weeks getting high on Vanilla Sweet Cream Nitro Cold Brews, Boston Cream Doughnuts and Double Smoke Shacks. I hope, dear reader, that you're not hungry when reading these lines.

Empire State View	New York Public Library

A few streets to the north of Madison Square Park, there's the 34th street, with the Empire State Building, the Macy's store and The Morgan Library & Museum. I did mention that I climbed on top of Blair's favorite building, the Empire State, which is what I recommend going for first, given its position and history. It offers jaw-dropping Manhattan views both to the north and to the south, and every view is just breathtaking. I went to the Empire State Building alone, but at the Morgan Museum I went with my friends, since they booked a visiting slot during an evening. Morgan's collection is impressive, filled with pieces from all around the world, exquisite furniture, many many books, one of them being the Gutenberg Bible, one of the few available out there.

It's probably worth mentioning that most of the time I chose the 5th Avenue to go north, given its popularit and my hopes of seeing Taylor Swift. Other avenues are nice as well, such as the Madison Avenue, especially upwards from around 55th street. And the 9th Avenue. Other places that I really enjoyed in this part of Manhattan are the Grand Central Terminal, where John Wick was filmed (and others, of course), the New York Public Library where I took some pretty nice pictures, St. Patrick's Cathedral, MoMa, Whitney Museum, Chelsea Market, Hudson Yards. I think it's my favorite part of Manhattan, given the number of places I visited.

Manhattan West Office Buildings	Hudson Yards

Last, but not least, there are three more places worth mentioning in Central Manhattan. Firstly, there's The High Line, a former New York Central Railroad that got repurposed into a elevated linear park featuring a beautiful trail between the equally good looking buildings. It can be quite crowded sometimes, but it's still a great feeling to go for a stroll and enjoy the views, especially at sunset. Secondly, there's Times Square, and even though many considered to be an overrated spot with nothing particularly exciting about it, it's still a must go for the commercial light show, and for the John Wick filming location. And thirdly, the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, where my friend bought tickets for the Book of Mormon. It was the first musical experience for me, and I think it was the best experience I had in New York, to be honest. I did not know what to expect at all, and the show was incredible. If anyone has a todo list for New York, they should add a Broadway show right at the to. Period.

The High Line	Manhattan Street View

Upper Manhattan​

It's not geographically accurate, but I will call Upper Manhattan to be the part from Columbus Circle to the Columbia University Campus, since the latter is the most northern point that I explored in Manhattan.

My favorite place here is, undoubtedly, Central park. Even though it was the beginning of spring, the park still offered pretty landscapes, with enough greenery to almost forget that you are in the middle of the concrete jungle. Greenery aside, the magnolias and the cherry trees stole the show, as they were in full bloom and everyone was competing for the best photos. My Central Park objective was to reach the Bethesda Terrace, another John Wick film set. Luckily, I spent a lot of time in the park, from north to south, visiting places like Belvedere Castle and Cherry Hill.

Central Park	Columbus Circle

To the west of Central Park, my friend and I visited the Columbia University Campus, and just in time too, as the students there were taking graduation pictures. We blended in perfectly, given the fact that we look studenty ourselves and spent most of the time taking pictures as well. It was a refreshing experience to visit a US university campus and compare to what I've seen in movies. After the photo shoot was over, we descendend through Morningside Park, grabbed coffee from a nearby Starbucks on the road and went back to Central Park to continue taking photos, this time with squirrels.

To the east of Central Park is another area that was on top of my list, given its movies reference: the Upper East Side. The place seemed to me exactly as I'd expected: fancy. The shops are there. The hotels are there. The restaurants. The boutiques. Needless to say, I enjoyed the walks very much.

Lincoln Plaza	9th Avenue View

Also on the East Side, on the outskirts of Central Park, there's the Metropolitan Museum, where you probably need to spend a few days in order to fully experience it. I managed only 4 hours, I felt I was in a constant hurry, and missed many of its offerings. I went from Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, to Muslim Central and Far East Asia, early United States and everything in between. Some of my highlights include the Egyptian ruins (yes, actual ruins in the museum) and the American rooms arranged in the American History corner. But, to be honest, the whole collection is something to see. Being already familiar with art pieces from the ancient Mediterranean cultures, from many other European museums, the American and Asian parts from the MET impressed me the most.

Final Thoughts​

There are also other places that I have been and are not covered in the lines above, like the Rockefeller Center or Little Island. But if decide to write about every single place or experience that impressed me in New York, I would never finish this article, ever.

Without a shadow of a doubt, I can say that I love New York City, and that it was one of my best ideas to spend 10 days and enjoy it as much as possible. It's #1 on my favorite cities in the world, and I have a feeling that it will stay there.

It also helped that my hosts were absolutely amazing, I could not have hoped for better ones.

I was quite sad to leave, even though my holiday was far from ending. It was time to change the scenery a bit. Next stop: Seattle.

Photo by Silviu Alexandru Avram

It was a lovely day of spring, on the 19th of March to be exact. I am a very big fan of the lazy Sunday concept, but somehow I always manage to ruin it in a spectacular fashion. And this one was no exception. It was a great day for science and productivity in general, or at least that's how I felt. As I closed my laptop after finishing a PR for downshift, I took a last sip of my Starbucks matcha tea latte and decided to check the horoscope (skyscanner.net).

Fueled by the warm sensation of accomplishment, I submitted a search for all the flights in the remainder of March, without any specific destination. And just like that, the stars aligned, the planets made love, and the horoscope whispered that I should book a flight to Perugia, from the 26th to the 30th, for a total price of 40 bucks.

Intriguing, I know. The horoscope gave me the answer I was looking for, but I had to find my own answers to questions like ... what is Perugia anyway? So after a bit of google google guess what I found out. Perugia is a lovely city in the middle of Italy, the capital of the Umbria region, at equal distance between Florence and Rome, two beautiful cities that I enjoyed very much in the past.

And this wasn't the best part. Right next to Perugia there is this big lake called Trasimeno. And if you enjoyed history in school as much as I did, you may remember about a certain battle of Lake Trasimene, where the Romans got their butts kicked by Hannibal's Celtic mercenaries. A bit of history always works well with coffee and tiramisu, if you ask me.

Oh, and there's also this other town near Perugia called Assisi, full of big churches and with a castle, a bit of a mix of Sighisoara and Brasov.

It was looking good so far, as far as I saw it. Plenty of stuff to do for a 4 day trip. First 2 days aperol spritzing in Perugia, one day for a Lake Trasimeno bike ride, and one last lazy day for church visits and lazy walks. To be sure about everything, I checked the second horoscope (booking.com) and Mercury was generous there as well. Found a decent apartment close to the train station, booked everything and I was all set for one of my spontaneous Italian trip.

Perugia Day #1​

I passed trough a few small airports in my life, but San Francesco airport is on another level. It's like a small train station. The airplane pulls up right next to the airport. Because it's most likely to be the only plane in the airport at the time. You just hop off and walk inside, go through the immigration room, and directly outside. If it's your first time there and you're looking for an obvious way to get a bus into town, you're in the wrong place. It became immediately obvious that renting a car would have been a good idea.

That aside, we got to Perugia by bus eventually, and while the apartment was getting ready, we made for the city center. Not ideal when you have bags, but we were excited to walk the city for the first time and not take public transport just yet. And it's not a long walk, 25 minutes max. As we realised that the walk was more like a climb and we also had the bags with us, public transport suddenly sounded like the better alternative.

So there we were in the city center, which was the only place with people. We found nobody on our way there, and we started wondering if the town is dead or if there was a holiday. Once in the center, we went for Piazza IV Novembre and visited the National Gallery in Palazzo dei Priori. The place looked good on the outside, but the gallery itself was a bit disappointing. Do you know those weird medival religious paintings usesd to make memes out of? Yep, that was the place.

As the tour was over, we left our bags at the apartment and went back to the center to do some exploring and content creation for the gram. This time, we used a public transport called the Minimetro, which is an automatic train cabin that serves a few stops, including the city center and the train station. Never used anything like it before, it was actually very exciting!

Cloudy skies over Perugia	Church of Sant'Ercolano

We found Terrazza del Mercato with a gorgeous view of Umbria and the mountains to the East. Great place to sip your aperol and enjoy the graphics of life. We also found a few places to eat, obviously, and the most important were the O Sole Mio pizzeria and the Lick gelato place. Top tip: if you go to Italy, always, always, locate the take away pizza place conveniently situated, where you can enjoy a few slices of great pizza and a beer. Italian restaurands are very (VERY) picky about their time of serving lunch and dinner, so if you're caught off hours, the pizza place is your ultimate salvation. It saved us 4 times in total, with great pizza, arancini and Ichnusa. And I'm not even slighly mad about that.

Perugia Day #2​

Still hungry for instagram content, as the first day was not very productive, we went full on exploring the next day, even though the rainy weather was better fit for sensual bachata. We found some very good places such as the Garducci Gardens, the Acquedotto Medievale, the Chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo, and the Chiesa di Sant'Agostino.

In order to be able to walk, visit and take pictures, good coffee plays an important part, and the Pinturicchio Cafe did not disappoint. Caffee Arco was fine as well, but did not compare.

Overall, it was a good day for visiting and content creation. We felt that we saw enough of Perugia and we were satisfied about it. The next day was supposed to be sunny, which was necessary to achieve our next objective.

Lago Trasimeno​

After a short train ride we were in the town of Passignano sul Trasimeno, the starting point of what was supposed to be our Trasimeno lake bike ride. We rented the bikes and off we went, towards the almost middle point of the journey, Castiglione del Lago. According to Google Maps, we had enough time to perform a full circle around the lake in our time frame of 7 hours, lunch and cofee stops included. Consequently, we started our journey full of optimism and joy, like Gaius Flaminius and his friends.

As we got closer to a checkpoint, namely Campo del Sole, lunch hour was drawing to a close, so we decided to abandon the main road, and head over to the town of Tuoro sul Trasimeno and have something to eat. We were the only people in the town when we arrived, along with a couple of others, probably the mayor and some people at the local bar. Everything else looked deserted and closed. Eventually, we found one open restaurant, Osteria dell'Accademia, which had really good food and service, with the best bread I had for a while. Coperto well spent.

Silviu riding a bike near Lago Trasimeno	Sunset over Lago Trasimeno

Back on the road, we resumed the journey, with a few stops along the way, one of which was a field of daffodils. No, not your usual Instagram rapeseed photos, this was with actual daffodils. Glorious. Eventually, we arrived in Castiglione at about 16:30, 4 hours after leaving Passignano. Unfortunately, we did not visit the town, as it required us to leave the bikes and climb, because, obviously, the town was on a steep hill. Climbing would not have been a problem, but as we were doing the math, it would have been impossible to go round the lake and reach the end point by 19:30, the time we had to return the bikes.

Either Italian Google Maps tricked us, or we were just outrageously slow, because it turned out that the actual time it took us to reach a certain point by bike was two times the one estimated by Italian Google. And on that bombshell, we had to abandon the original plan of doing a full circle around the lake and go back the way we came. Italian Google clearly said it would take 1 hour to get back. It took us 2, like the priest.

With a bit of disappointment and much hunger, we dined in Passignano and got the (last) train back to Perugia. It was not all negative though. The weather was great, we took many pictures, and no army ambushed us along the way.

Assisi​

The third and final stop of the trip was the town of Assisi, a few kilometers from Perugia. There isn't much to tell about the town, to be honest. Just your usual medieval town full of churches and a castle on top of a hill. The weather, this time, sucked big time. There were gusts of wind that reminded me of the Grozavesti intersection.

Assisi Castle	View from Assisi

On the (brief) bright side, the churches were very beautiful, especially the main one, Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. Apart from them and the view point near the castle, the town was cute, but it did not blow our hats off. The wind did that.

Final Thoughts​

Overall, I enjoyed the trip, the towns of Assisi and Perugia are definitely worth visiting. Also, if you plan to go to Lago Trasimeno and intend to do a full circle, make sure you are really fast, or maybe stop for the night along the way. I'd go woth the second option, as a romantic stop at a hotel with a lake view is probably a good idea.

If I would do it all over again, I would also rent a car, and buy accomodation in multiple places: two nights in Perugia, one in Assisi, one or two at the lake, and so on. You would probably get more out of the Umbria trip like that, instead of having your accomodation in a single place and take trains and buses to the other points of interest. Just make sure to heed advice #1: pizza place that is conveniently situated.

Allora, that's all folks. Wrapping this one and will publish it. It has been a productive Sunday, on the 2nd of April, I am pretty happy about everything, to be honest. Hmm, I wonder what the horoscope has to say about it.