New York City.

Over the weekend, Sean and I stayed in New York City at the Millennium Broadway hotel in Times Square. I got a great deal on the hotel from Groupon and it was by far the best hotel we’ve stayed at in NYC. The room was nice and had a view of Times Square and the Empire State Building and a whole bunch of other really tall buildings… plus, everything was so clean! Cleanliness is up on my list of musts. 

We left Saturday afternoon and arrived around 4PM. After checking out the room we ate at Heartland Brewery and then walked through a street festival near the hotel. We walked through Central Park and Times Square and decided to venture to the Empire State Building. Because we’re so cheap, we didn’t actually go up the Empire State Building (it’s like $30 a person!) so we thought we’d just walk up to it and take pictures. Obviously once we got to the building we realized how dumb that idea was because at that point we were too close, the building was too high and no pictures could be taken! We ended our night with drinks on the rooftop bar of the Hyatt which was on the 54th floor above Times Square. We had multiple conversations about how amazing (but cold) it would be to stay there on New Years Eve.

On Sunday we planned to wake up early and take the subway down to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. But then we woke up late and we modified the plans. We still took the subway, which is the most confusing thing by the way and New York City should update some signage, but we decided to just take the free ferry to Staten Island and take pictures of the Statue of Liberty rather than pay $18 a person to step on the island where Lady Liberty stands. After the ferry ride, we walked up Broadway and crossed over to see the 9/11 Memorial. 

After we had lunch at Atomic Wings and did some window shopping in SoHo. I was pretty impressed when Sean said to me “hey, don’t the Kardashian’s have a store here?”. It took us seconds to look up where it was and pay them a visit. Unfortunately, the least expensive things in the store were Rob Kardashian’s socks from his sock line… and they were still $18 a pair. We continued walking back to the hotel and rested up for an hour.

At 6:00 we left the hotel to go to the Eminem and Rihanna concert at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The concert was the main reason for the trip to NYC. It took some trial and error to figure out where to go in Penn Station since we needed to find the New Jersey transit line and there were probably a thousand different ways to walk inside Penn Station. After walking in circles, we decided to ask for help. I walked up to the information desk, and without looking up or at me, the man behind the glass said “down the hall, take a right” and then looked up at me. Confused, I said “wait, what? really?” to which he said “are you going to the Eminem concert?”. I said “yes!” and he said “well you’re the 10,000th person to ask where to go… down the hall, take a right”.    After traveling down the hall and taking a right we bought tickets for $10.50 to get into Jersey and ended up following people wearing Eminem shirts hoping they knew what they were doing. After a few good luck choices and “wow, how did we figure that out?” we were on our way in the right direction.

By 7:30 we were in the stadium and they were about to go on stage. I paid the least amount of money for these tickets as I could. We were high up in the sky, not quite as high as we were for T. Swift last summer, by high enough that you get a little dizzy when you stand up and there for sure wasn’t any chance the iPhone was about to miraculously take awesome pictures from that distance, in the dark. There wasn’t an opening act, it was the two of them and they shared the stage the entire time for three and a half hours. It was neat because they co-head lined and you never knew who would come out next or if you were about to hear a Rihanna song or an Eminem song.   Sean, not being a fan of New York City, public transportation, or rap/pop music was a trooper during the entire weekend. His smiled faded slightly when they stopped serving beer at the concession stand at the concert at 10PM but it was back in no time. He’s the best.