New York: Day 1

Paul, Katie, and I got on a plane and headed north to NYC for the US Tennis Open. The plane was an extremely early flight. It took off at 7 an la manana and that was way too early for me.

The three of us went from the airport straight to the hotel where the trip started on a good note. When the bellhop showed us to our room, he said that we would not have a view of the city, but instead we only see the other half of the hotel. As, the bellhop started to leave, I looked out the window and saw something that you would only see in cinamax late at night.

I opened up the window and had a clear view of the room from across from ours and there was some lady in nothing but a bra and thong. From that point on, we knew it was going to be a great trip.

The three of us, while waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, decided to go and check out Ground Zero along with other landmarks in New York. But before we could do any landmark sighting, we had to hit up a bar first.

We went to some dive bar, i believe the more of a dive the bar the better it is, which seemed to be located in an old fire station because of the garage bay doors being used as an entrance. This particular bar also had a pretty damn good special going on for a Saturday afternoon. Starting at noon, all pitchers of beer started at 4 and went up 50 cents every hour and they also had tons of beer pong being played at the same time.

After that small excursion at random bar #1, we headed of to see Ground Zero. It was really strange and at the same time very moving to see this site. Everything was eerily quiet and somber.

Another weird thing about this site is that right across the street is a business building which consists of various private business and a mall and right behind the mall is a very lively river area.

I don't know what river it was but you could clearly see the Statue Of Liberty in the background and there were plenty of people learning how to sail boats and also the NYU Sail boating School as well. The view from this area was fantastic. It was weird that one building had two completely different views and feelings from one side to the other.

After Ground Zero, we visited Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. That was a really cool place to see and learn about because the only knowledge of this place is from whatever I learned while watching "Trading Places", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" or "Wall Street".

At this point, we have done alot of walking and subway riding, so we decided to something to eat. We traveled to Little Italy and picked the first restaurant we saw that had outdoor seating. What we didn't know is that almost every Italian restaurant had outdoor seating.

The Italian place seemed to be what a typical Italian restaurant in New York may be like. The "host" will do whatever they can to entice you to come to their business from you. It was actually kind of amusing to watch because they reminded me of a car salesman trying their best to sell you something.

After a quick little lunch, we saw Battery Park, Washington Park, and parts of Chinatown. After visiting this places, we had to go back to hotel to meet up with Cody. Cody was supposed to be their earlier but his plane from Austin, TX was delayed due to rain and he also got nailed in the crotch by a 4 year old with her yo-yo.

Around 9 P.M., Cody finally showed up and the 4 of us were ready to hit the town New York Style. The first place we went to was to Times Square. We all wanted to see what the place looked like at night with all of the lights on. And it looked awesome. We probably walked around for about 45 minutes just to check everything out and also to scout out places that we wanted to go to the next day.

Now, I don't remember where we ate dinner but I do know it was an Irish bar and grill. I just had a grill chicken sandwhich which was the bomb. We had a couple of drinks there after dinner and decided to hit up the night life as best as 3 guys and a girl from Texas could.

We went to different types of bars just to see what NYC had to offer, and NYC did not disappoint us at all. Since the group was from Texas and used to Texas laws, we could not believe that the NYC bars closed at 4 a.m. instead of 2 a.m. like in Texas. Which means were had to work a little harder in order to last 2 more hours.

We went to 5 different bars that night and each place seemed to be the complete opposite place to the previous one we just visited. That night we visited the following bars: O'Briens, Fat Black Pussy Cat, KGB Bar, McSorley’s, and Grassroots. You can check out the map here to see where we traveled to get to these places.

Day 2: Coming Soon