Still cold (Or: More photos from the States)

Here are some more photos from the trip Marco, Roger and I took last month! Two last photos from Philadelphia and the rest from New York City (I’ll skip the overly touristy photo of the Liberty Bell in Philly although that was also fun and suprisingly free).

Bronze sculpture of Washington crossing the Delaware

The above sculpture can be found at the intersection of Chestnut and 3rd in Philadelphia.

Artwork in the Lucha Cartel restaurant in Philadelphia

The above might take a bit of explaining! There’s a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia by the name of Lucha Cartel. It’s actually in Old City on the east side of Philly. It is a reference to luchadors, who are masked Mexican wrestlers. It was very close to our hotel. And you guessed it – the artwork is actually many skate boards placed next to each other. It was a great restaurant (both food and theming) and I highly recommend it.

And now on to New York City…

New York Transit museum at Grand Central Station. A temporary model railroad exhibition. Free – just a few rooms to explore plus the store.

New York Transit museum in Brooklyn (this museum was much larger)

We also visited the Brooklyn New Transit Museum. One of the sections in the transit museum was the effects of disasters on New York transit; the higher photo above was flooding during an intense rainstorm in August 2007. The subway vents have since been modified to try and prevent this.

Frozen fountain at Bryant Park. And if you go to Google Images, you’ll find photos with a fountain that is completely frozen over.

A foosball-esque table featuring the New York Rangers at the NHL store in NYC. Free to play.

Brooklyn bridge with the NYC skyline behind it.

Did you know we walked across the Brooklyn bridge from Brooklyn to NYC? It was collllddddddd. It was interesting because the pedestrian/bike path is in the middle, raised above the cars. Did I mention it was cold? (But worth it!)

For the first time ever we stayed in Brooklyn, in an Airbnb. This time we had an apartment on the 2nd floor, with a separate entrance. The owner lived on the ground floor. Just like in Philly’s Airbnb, we never actually saw the owner (although she was around if you had questions).

Newspaper headline the day after the Super Bowl

The three of us planned the trip a bit around the Super Bowl – normally we’d leave on Sunday and arrive back on Monday, but I definitely wanted to see the big game. (We also choose our Airbnb based on which one had a TV!). And it was a lot of fun to watch it, especially for the commercials. And not have to stay up until 1 am in the morning waiting for the game to start like Marco and I have done in the Netherlands (with a planned day off the next day).

The next day, we saw the newspaper headline above – which references the fact that the Giants had a NFL-sponsored commercial spoofing a scene from the movie Dirty Dancing. It was a pretty funny commercial. So yeah, they didn’t win the Super Bowl (nor were they in it!) but they did have the best commercial of the Super Bowl. That’s something right?

(Although personally I loved the string of Tide commercials.)