New York City at Christmastime

Mike and I traveled to NY City this weekend. We both have other things to do in nearby areas early in the week so we came in on Saturday to see the city and go to a Jets game on Sunday. This blog will just be about the city and I'll do an update on the football game tomorrow.

We took the bus into the city and then walked to Rockefeller center to see "the tree." I don't think I have seen it in real life before but it is on the morning TV talk shows, like the Today Show, a lot, so it looked familiar. I am used to going to see the "other tree" - the National Christmas Tree in Washington DC. It is magificent, but in a different way. They added blue lights to the NY tree last year and they were beautiful. It made me re-think the lights on my miniscule 9 ft tree at home.

Last night was about 31 degrees, but dry so it was chilly but not unbearable. We walked all around Rockefeller Center with about 50,000 other people. Maybe a million people, I am not good at estimating crowds. Let's just say everywhere in that area and Times Square was packed. There is a snowflake light show set to Christmas music on the Saks building. I caught a shot when they were all lit. You can imagine how they come on individually and in bunches when set to music. Very pretty.

I haven't seen these other things before, the snowflakes, the red balls (at the beginning of the blog) and the angels below. The department store windows are all decorated individually but the crowd was just too thick to make our way across and down 5th Avenue. Apparently Dec 13th was THE NIGHT to go see these sights in the city, so we'll have to come back another year to see other things.

Everyone has seen this (below) on TV. The line to get on to the ice was about 3 hours long. The rink stays open all night long. Mike told me that they pay really good skaters to spin around and look good while normal people struggle to stay upright and go around in circles. I was game, but couldn't talk Mike into waiting in line that long! lol

After we had seen enough we found a subway and headed to the Village. We had planned to go see Kevin who works in our local regional office play in his bands. On the way, we kept running into Santas. Everywhere! Here is a gaggle of them outside a bar we passed. The inside was full of Santas too! We learned today that it was one of those things organized through the internet with meet up places spread through text messages. In the cab back we saw that the Santas made the news, there were so many.

Kenny's Castaway was where Kevin was playing in two bands. He's the drummer.An excellent drummer it turns out! We really enjoyed the second band, Friday's Child. I thought the lead singer had a Barenaked Ladies kind of voice. I would definitely pay to see them again, they were that good.