We arrived safely in NYC from Toronto and were immediately overwhelmed! The airport shuttle to the place we were staying was…nuts. I would never, ever drive in this city. I thought Brisbane drivers were bad, but really NY roads are a lot like Bali. There are rules but no one really follows them.

So we eventually made it to our Airbnb room which was exactly what we needed. A home base with a comfy bed right in the middle of Chinatown and super close to Little Italy, because food reasons 🙂

Our first adventure was to go out and buy an American sim card so we could have Google maps readily available (essentially). This was easy to find. Seriously Australian mobile providers, why you no have unlimited plans? We picked up an unlimited data, sms and phone plan for $80 for the month. $80. That is it. And really we will only be using data, but eh.

Google maps in hand, we set off on our first adventure around NY. We started feeling peckish as we were walking and as luck would have it we stumbled upon a pizza slice place. So we bought 2 giant slices and a bottle of water for $2.50. It was just a plain pizza but damn it was good!

Feeling better, we kept on exploring and found ourselves in East Village and Soho. Such pretty areas with a lot of parks and green areas. Like this little community garden we found.

We sat in here for half an hour just watching the birds fly around the bird feeders. It was so surreal of a space surrounded by huge apartment buildings.

So we kept on exploring and eventually went back to our room to find an awesome place for dinner. Without even realising it, I managed to find one of the places we wanted to eat at (from a list of NY cheap eats I found months ago). My god. For $16 we both had duck noodle soup and dumplings. They were amazing. Apparently we were meant to have the beef, but I really don’t care. Just look at it

Seriously. This was so good and so damn cheap! It was at this point we realised we stayed in the right area.

We have been here half a day and we love this city!