You’ve seen blogs about how to spend a perfect day in (insert city name here), well we’re bringing you how NOT to spend a day in New York City.
6 am:
You wake up bright and early at your $450-a-night hotel in Times Square—it was tough to fall asleep with that Incredibles 2 marquee shining in your window, but you’re in The City That Never Sleeps, so maybe that’s appropriate?
7 am:
You’ve got a few hours to kill until the museums open, so you decide to have some fun in Times Square!!! A friendly-looking fellow in an Elmo suit pulls you in for a hug and a photo. Nice! Wait, he wants a tip? He won’t leave you alone until he gets one? You hand him a $20 bill and back away. Surely the same thing won’t happen with that guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty.
8 am:
Subway time! You stop in the middle of the street to consult Google Maps. Okay, so you take the S Train to Grand Central, and then the 5 Train…ouch. You just got knocked over. Okay, okay, you’re in the station. Where’s your Metrocard again? You stop in the turnstile to rifle through your wallet. You hear someone mutter an obscenity at you. These New Yorkers!
9 am:
You’re finally at the Met, and you’re going to see every darn inch of it. You haven’t eaten yet, but how long could one museum take?
3 pm:
Six hours later, you stumble out of the Met, dehydrated and delirious. But you finished the first floor! You buy a $4 popsicle from a street vendor and stumble into a dollar-pizza joint. It’s a great deal, so you buy eight slices!
4 pm:
Filled to your physical limit with pizza, you’ve got a real treat planned—a speedboard ride to the Statue of Liberty! The boat has a cartoonish shark face painted on the front and—oh man—the water sure is choppy. You see the Statue for about seven seconds as the boat lurches by. You really regret the pizza.
5 pm:
Heading back to Midtown, every subway car is packed—except for one, which is totally empty. Wow! Let’s get in that one!
5:05 pm:
Aaaaaaah!!! Let’s get out of this one.
6 pm:
Rest in peace, Flavortown: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar closed last year, so you’re headed to the Times Square Olive Garden for dinner instead. It’s like the one in your hometown, but inexplicably twice as expensive.
8 pm:
It’s almost dark outside, so it’s time to hit the clubs! You go to the one from the flyer that that nice man forced on you earlier, pay the $35 cover, and—where is everyone? There’s just one guy playing house music from his Macbook and a hostess carrying around a single bottle of Dom Perignon.
9 pm:
You return to your hotel room, dizzy and defeated, and try to fall asleep to the sweet cacophony of 1,000 taxis stuck in traffic.
Just a small town girl livin’ in a lonely world, Daphne took the mid-morning train goin’ to the East Coast of the United States and Canada (fine, plus Chicago). She graduated Harvard in 2018 with a degree in Government, a law school acceptance letter, and an overwhelming sense of dread re: her all-too-fleeting youth, so she took off to the party capital of the Western hemisphere: Quebec City. The race against the cold, unfeeling march of time continued in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and Miami, a wildly diverse array of cities united by not-boring weather and stupid-high rents. Along the way, Daphne sampled legit Canadian poutine (squeaky), smuggled her notebook into nightclubs (sneaky), and lived on cheap falafel pitas (tzatziki). The Oshkosh, Wisconsin native finished her spirit quest back in the Midwest, where the Windy City welcomed her nasally accent back with open arms. When she’s not writing aggressively alliterative articles for Let’s Go, Daphne probably can’t be found. Don’t even try it, Internet creeps!
