Jealous Much?

In a week’s time hubby and I will be leaving on a jet plane bound for New York City *Jumping with joy*.  And this trip could not have come at a better time.  Of late, walking into my office feels like walking into an Alfred Hitchcock movie and I am not always quite sure what the plot is or if I will make it out alive.  I am tired, stressed the fuck out and I am in some serious need of a change of scenery and where better to go than the Big Apple.  Seeing as we will only be there for a week, we needed to do some serious planning about what we wanted to do and what we wanted to see within the confines of the limited time we have to do it in.  So after much deliberation this is what hubby and I have agreed on.

We have booked our flights on Etihad Airways and being the opportunistic little shit that I am, I took the liberty to write to them and politely asked if they would be so kind as to upgrade our economy class tickets to business class for free.  Needless to say I have not heard back from them.  So I will take that as them saying to me “ROFL! Nice try, but NO!”  The flights promise to be grueling.  We depart from Johannesburg to Abu Dhabi on an eight hour flight.  Then there is a three hour layover before we get onto a fourteen hour flight to New York.  The return flights are not much better.  It pretty much is the same thing but to make matters slightly more uncomfortable, we only land back in Johannesburg at the ungodly hour of 04:25am.  Flying business class would have made the flights a little more comfortable, but not being millionaires we are stuck in cattle class. Fuck!

As for NYC from all the hotels we could choose from we decided to stay at the Yotel (NO, this is not a typo, it really is the hotel name).  We choose this hotel for three reasons: 1) The hotel has the quirky meets modern combination that I like and has free WiFi (which is essential for me) 2) The hotel is centrally located (practically on Time Square) and walking distance away from some of the places we want to go to and 3) It has a fucking fabulous terrace and they serve cocktails with brunch!  Seeing as we will be on a tighter schedule than Lady Gaga while on tour, I do suspect that we will not spend a whole lot of time in the hotel apart from sleeping there and drinking all those fantastic cocktails at brunch or happy hour.  But at least we know what to expect from the hotel and they are somewhat affordable.  So what do we plan to do while in NYC?

Like I said before we plan our trips with military precision (we are synchronizing our watches to NYC time as I type this).  If anything, hubby and I are pedantic bitches when it comes to itineraries and we had a good few heated discussion when we were busy deciding which touristy things we were going to do (FYI: a democratic voting system does NOT work when there are only two people involved in the voting process).  So after a few books and maps got hurled across the room in a dramatic drama queen fashion, we eventually came to a mutually agreeable itinerary that’s broken down into days and hours.  Don’t worry, I will not bore you with the fine print, I will just give you a general idea as to what we got planned for our own general safety.  You never know who is going to read this and I don’t want to get kidnapped by a stalker in New York never to be seen or heard off ever again.

One of the places I absolutely have to visit is The World Trade Centre and the National September 11 Memorial Museum.  I am not quite sure if the museum is open for the public yet though.  I lost a friend in the South Tower on 9/11 and I do feel a strong urge to go and pay my respects to her.  We also decided to go to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty.  We will not actually go to her as that will waste too many hours.  Besides I have been inside a woman once and I didn’t like it, so I have no urge to go inside Miss Liberty even if people are now allowed to do so again.  Seeing as we will be close to the financial district we will also go to Wall Street, if only to stare at all those folks who are “Occupying Wall Street”.  That should make for an interesting photo opportunity and I really do hope they are still there protesting while we are there.

Another important item on our list of things to do is going and spending half the day at the Guggenheim Museum.  They will be exhibiting Rineke Dijkstra’s “A Retrospective”, Kandinsky 1911-1913 and the Thannhauser Collection.  Naturally there are also a number of other art pieces that I want to see and I am really looking forward to it.  You also cannot go to New York and not see a Broadway show.  After some deliberation we settled on watching Mamma Mia.  It was really hard to choose which show to watch but, in the end, we chose the gayest one!  Who wants to see “Spiderman the Musical” anyway?  It just sounds stupid and like some performer is bound to get hurt.  Oh wait, that actually really happened.  Off Broadway also seemed like a good option but we won’t have time.

Being married to a Fashion Designer (a creative god and bat shit crazy genius at times) he insisted that we also work Parson: The New School for Design and Mood Designer Fabrics into our itinerary.  We both love Project Runway and this is our equivalent of the Sex and the City tour.  Also on the list is the Empire State Building.  I am terrified of heights so it should be interesting being on the 86^th Floor’s Observation Deck – I might throw up, so be warned people!  At least I know we will find the building really easily – we just have to look up, apparently you can’t miss it.  We will also be spending some time in Central Park, it’s really big and we have to work in a romantic horse carriage ride.  I know Peta and some New Yorkers have an issue with how the horses are treated and that it’s not ethical.  But hey, I don’t know when we will be in New York again, and this is on our must do “to do list”, so sorry.

Buildings and attractions are not the only touristy things that we plan on doing, we also want to go to certain well know neighborhoods and different New York Boroughs.  These include the now trendy Hell’s Kitchen, the Meat Packing District, Soho, Little Italy and China Town.  There is also plenty to do and see in Queens, Brooklyn and Bronx but I fear that we may only get to see Manhattan due to our time constraints.  I guess this is a pretty good and convincing excuse as to why we will need to visit New York again.

Yep, in a week’s time we will be in New York City and as you can see we are going to be fucking busy.  My iPad is uploaded with everything we need to make every second of our trip count:  Subway guides, Foodspotting for when we get hungry, The Essential New York Tourist Guide and plenty more.  I can’t remember the last time I was this excited for a trip and when last I had so many people green with envy.  New York here we come.  Hope you are ready for us bitches!

Till next time.