New York - Booking

by - 11:06

Budget: 1100€ (330€ Flights Norwegian; 300€ Air BnB; 140€ Broadway Musial; ca 300€ Activities, Food and Transport)
Duration: 5 Days (6Nights)
Travel Time: Middle of May (no risk for snow or bad weather, but not too hot yet, although we had 32°c already)

So i was going to NY! Hitting the big apple, and this time with a dear friend!
This journey was originally planned alone, so i booked a very long time ahead (6month), since Norwegian had very good offers, i could not resist. My friend booked 2 month later and got even a better price. Obviously both-way direct flights from Stockholm to JFK for 330€ is unbeatable. Also the flight times were pretty well, since we flew Sunday afternoon and arrived Sunday evening, so one can directly go to bed after a tough, 7h long flight and start fresh into the week on Monday. We left Friday evening, so in total we had 5 amazing days to spend in this Metropolitan City. Coming back on a Saturday also gives you time to recover from Jetlag before going back to work on mondays.
I have to admit i had really high expectations towards NYC, since it is shown in all movies and a lot of my favourite tv shows (including Gossip Girl) are filmed here. Honestly, TV is creating an image of this city, which is quite unreal. New York was not disappointing, but different.
One always thinks this city is incredibly huge and i was really scared not to find our way here, but due to numbered streets and a very good public transport network it is super easy to get around.
Our air bnb was located in East Harlem on Manhattan, so first challenge was to get there.
American people are in general really helpful and open, so if they see that you are lost, they will all directly offer help, which is almost never happening in Sweden.
If you want to go from JFK to the city, you will take the airport Air Train first to Jamaica station, which will cost you 6$ and from that station you are connected to the Metro Network.
I would definitly recommend you to buy a weekly pass for 33$. For us it was the best decision ever, since the days got warmer and warmer and we got more tired. In the end we used bus and metro all the time, even for one stop sometimes.
We were really lucky on Sunday evening to find boarder Control almost empty (remember to sign up for ESTA or apply for Visa in advance if you travel to the US). It took us only 30min from our Gate to airport shuttle, which is absolutely amazing. We arrived therefore much earlier at our air bnb place and could go to bed early, which we urgently needed. I will add some info about our Air BnB later, since it was a really, really great host and place to stay.
As mentioned above it was really hot during our stay in New York, almost unbearable during Thursday and Friday, since temperature rose to 32°c and the air is standing between the high rise blocks, but anyway that is far better than rain. I would definitely go around end of April/during May again, since one can mostly avoid snow in April and too hot summer days in June. Otherwise autumn and winter have to be amazing times as well to hit the streets of NY.
We had a rough plan about what we wanted to see and where to go to. My friend bought the lonely planet advisor, which helped us a lot to find different spots in the city. Since there is no free Wifi all around the city, as in many other places, it's best to have an oldschool map or download a Google offline map. Due to low phone battery i would recommend first one.
We both have never been to NY so we needed to see of course all the typical touristy stuff, which was at that point more important than shopping, although we shopped a lot more in the end, than we thought. Check out Citypass for good deals if you want to combine a lot of Tourist attractions.
Easiest to plan your trip is to divide the days in different districts, you would like to see. Although metro connection is quite good, it takes quite a while to go from one end of Manhattan to the other, or to Brooklyn for example.
So this is how we split our days in the end.
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Monday - Central Park/Central Manhattan
Tuesday - Financial District/Lower Manhattan
Wednesday - Metropolitan Museum/Top of the Rock/Broadway Musical
Thursday - Chinatown/Nolita/Little Italy/SOHO
Friday - Brooklyn/Central Park
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Originally it was planned a bit differently, but my poor friend suffered from a bad jetlag on Monday, so we decided to stay in town and not go to far away from our Air BnB, in case she needed to rest. Otherwise we would have gone to Brooklyn already on Monday. Anyway if you have planned the days you can easily also switch them, due to weather conditions. We did not visit a lot of museums, since that is not our thing. But in case of bad weather, there are uncountable possibilites for every interest.

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