8:00am Rent a bike to explore Central Park (over the internet you can save a lot of money – go to Google and search for “bike central park”).
10:00am Visit Rockefeller Center and Times Square
11:30am Take the subway to Little Italy; from there you can go to Chinatown and then to Wall Street. During this walk, look for something to eat. Everywhere you can find some nice parks. After lunch and Wall Street, go down to the sea and look at the skyline with the Statue of Liberty. (If you are just there for a few days, it isn’t worth going to the Statue of Liberty because it takes too much time.)
2:00pm Go to Washington Square where you can enjoy music and watch people playing chess. If you like shopping, walk through Soho or 7th Avenue where the biggest shopping store of the world (Macy’s) is. You can also go to a museum – for example, the Police Academy Museum, which is free.
6:30pm Be sure to have enough time to now go to the top of the Empire State Building (86th floor for $20). If you are lucky, you’ll be able to see the sunset and then New York by night (sunset is around 8pm). If you’re now hungry, go to Wendy’s next to the Empire State Building, where you can eat cheap American food, or go to a deli for a real New York experience, or (if you have enough money) go to a steakhouse.
Final piece of advice: The best thing is to get a map and mark the route you want to take – but remember that things are much closer on the map than they are in real life!
Contribution by Aline (Switzerland) from Aayesha’s Advanced Reading & Writing class
