A break from work and travel was not so much fun!

There is so much to write that I don't know where to begin from. I would have blogged more frequently if I weren't on my feet all the time for the past few days.

There has been a lot of travel. Went to NYC and DC this weekend.

NYC :
New York City was good. The layout of the streets is logical - the vertical ones are called Avenues and the horizontal ones are called "Streets". Once I had that figured out and the layout in general of where Bronx (North), Brooklyn (South), Queens (East), Manhattan (West), East river and Hudson River was, it was much easier. The transit system in every city is different that it takes time to figure it out. After seeing the Metro system at NYC, I'm all for CTA. CTA is amazing. Ofcourse the magnitude in terms of size and the numbers that travel by NY metro and CTA cannot be compared. We stayed at Jersey City which is much less crazier than NYC. After lunch at Jersey City we took off to Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel which took a whooping 2 hours to cross. The cousins who drove us said it was exceptionally high traffic that afternoon. Our first stop was at the World Trade Center. I have only seen pictures of the World Trade Center. It really must have been shocking to see those giant buildings that occupied so much space sometime to have fallen the way they did. The names of the thousands that disappeared in the attack are inscribed there. Standing there, nothing seems to justify that act of terrorism.

Out next stop was at Wall Street which is not so far from Ground zero. Being a Saturday afternoon, Wall street was really quiet. after taking a couple of pictures there, we headed to the Empire state Building. The Emipre state building built during the Great Depression took just a lil over 13 months to build. The observatory is situated on the 86th floor. Unlike Sears Tower at Chicago, the observatory is not in a enclosed area atop the Empire State building. One can step outside and feel the air and look at the mazing view down..it really feels like you are at the top of the world. However that evening it was very cold. It was 8:00 p.m. by the time we came down from the ESB. Our next adventure was to find a Indian Place to eat. This was exciting. Considering the fact that good eating places were probably just 4 blocks away (which we didn't know at the time) from where we were (5th avenue and 33rd Street), we kept going down on Park Avenue until we hit 1st Street. It was then that I told Lex is parallel to Park avenue and we traced all the way back. We went round and round for 4 times until we got 30th street and Lex. The only good part was that the place we chose to eat at was really nice. The cousin who drove us was very patient despite driving in the crazy NYC traffic for 6 hours at a stretch.

After a good dinner, we stopped at Times Square and then headed back to the hotel. The next morning, we took the ferry to see the legendary Statue of Liberty. It is nothing like seeing in the pictures. For some strange reason, I had always pictured it in grey color. Seeing it in green and standing tall was a breathtaking view.

Sunday evening we drove to D.C. D.C is so much in contrast to NYC. NYC stands tall with all the high rises. Whereas D.C reminds one of Roman architecture with those huge, not more than 10 storey tall federal buildings.

..to be continued...