NYC - Day 5

Today is the day E has been waiting for since we planned this trip, the Sex and the City tour!

But first things first, we had to get some breakfast. That tour is 3.5 hours, so we're gonna need our fuel.



Mmmmmm, that was below average, off to the tour!

Fellas, you may want to skip the pink zone coming up. It's all gonna be Sex and the City stuff.

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The meeting place was at the Pulitzer Fountain outside of the Plaza Hotel where Carrie saw Big and Natasha after their engagement party. We were the first ones there. Once I saw all the other women come out of the woodwork, I knew we were in the right place.



We boarded the bus, and then we were off! Our tour guide Lisa introduced herself. She immediately won me over with the first few F-bombs she dropped, letting us know this was a tour for the grown-ups. Fuck yeah, Lisa!




Up first the courthouse where Big and Carrie got married at the end of the movie. Something else climatic happened there I'm pretty sure, but E's out shopping right now and that's all I can remember. That's also a scene in the first Ghostbusters!:


This was the church where Samantha met the attractive priest she dubbed "Friar Fuck":


This is the dog-run where Charlotte's dog got gang-banged by the other dogs:


Next stop was The Pleasure Chest in the West Village where the SATC girls bought their sex toys and where Charlotte picked up The Rabbit:










This is the restaurant where Carrie and Miranda ran into Aidan and Steve after their respective break-ups. To add insult to injury they were both with better looking women (in my opinion, hehehe).


This is the park where Steve was shooting hoops and Miranda came down to support him after chewing his ass out a few moments before:


We passed the furniture store that Aidan owned. The real shop owner isn't affiliated with the tour in anyway, but he seems to be a good sport about it. As soon as he saw the bus he flashed a sign that said on one side "Aidan still loves Carrie" and on the other "Big is small". We all got a kick out of it.


The restaurant where Carrie met Aidan's parent for the first time:


Tortilla Flats is the place Carrie went back to grovel at Aidan's feet after cheating on him with Big:


Okay, the next stop was Carrie's brownstone that was used in the show. It's located at 73 Perry Street in Greenwich Village (which is an AMAZING place, by the way). According to Lisa, our tour guide, the woman that owns the brownstone has become so annoyed with tourist and the SATC tour that she is now in litigation with the tourism company. So there were some ground rules we had to follow. We parked around the corner, and we were to QUIETLY walk past the brownstone. No pictures were allowed to be taken because the women video tapes people as they come through. I know, what the hell? We walked past and there is a big chain across the stair that warns against loitering and sitting on the stairs. I could have taken a pic (like I saw one other girl do) but I didn't want to be a dickhead. And for some reason I felt like a douche bag trespassing on this quiet little village street while the locals carried on about their day. You know they have to hate it, so I tried my best not to rock the boat. Our tour guide told us that whatever we do on our own time is our business, but while we were with the group the rules were to be followed. Although she kept repeating the address to us as if encouraging us to come back on our own. Here is a picture of E leaving Perry Street:


We found out later that Sarah Jessica Parker lived around the corner from the where we were and she personally selected that brownstone to be on the show because she loved how the brownstones on Perry Street looked.

Greenwich Village seems to be a very controlled environment. They do a lot to set themselves apart from the rest of Manhattan. I guess that's why it's such an exclusive zip code. There are fines for horns being honked, and there are signs on all the trees saying not to let your dog piss on them. Whoa!




After the walk-by of Carrie's house we stopped at the Magnolia Bakery for cupcakes. A favorite of Carrie's on the show. E liked hers but they were to sweet and not very spongey in my opinion. So I ate half and tossed it. E looked at me like I was swearing in church or something. It was very sacrilege to her to do something like that. Whatever.





Some more pics from Greenwich Village:





The final stop on our tour was the bar that Steve and Aidan opened up. Lisa called ahead to the bar and the bartender had cosmos waiting for us, heeeeeeeeey!









The tour dropped us off nowhere near where it picked us up from. No worries, we were up to navigating the streets of NYC back to hour hotel.

And this concludes the Sex and the City portion of the blog.

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The tour conventiently let us off in front of the HBO store so we could fork over some more of our hard earned caysh for some more SATC wares. We passed.

I really wanted to see the top of the Empire State Building, so we started footing it downtown. Once we got there we waited in a line to get in. Then there was a security like like at the airport with metal detectors and whatnot. We go through there. Then there was a like to purchase tickets to the observation deck. When we finally get to the cashier I ask how long the wait is before we get to the top and she replied "45 minutes". No mf'in thank you. We do an about-face and head back out to 34th Street. I really want to see the top, but not that bad. So we headed back uptown.



Another funny factoid about NYC that I learned: You do so much walking that you pretty much always have an appetite. I love the fact that you can always eat on the go from the various street vendors. We hit about 3 or 4 hot dog stands during our trek back uptown. By the time you're ready to eat again, you've already burned off the previous snack.

After we left the Empire State Building we made our way to Time Square. This was tourist hell. It reminded me of Hollywood Blvd; dirty and packed with tourists. So we took the requisite tourist pics and looked to move the hell on.

My boy Curtis works for Conde Nast and told me if I was in the area of Time Square to call him up and he'd give us a tour. Conde Nast is a publishing company that produces magazines such as Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Allure, GQ, The New Yorker, and many many others. So I hit him up and he gave us a tour of their corporate offices.













Big ups to Curtis for that tour. Any time he wants a tour of my office overlooking, um, Oxnard Blvd. in Van Nuys, he's more than welcomed to it.

On our way out he recommended a pizza place right off of Times Square. We figured we'd stop in for a slice, but after all that damn walking we were a lot hungrier than we thought and we inhaled a entire pizza in seven minutes.


It was finally time to get a cab back to our hotel. We could go any further on foot. We needed to get back to recharge before dinner.

Three hours had elaped and hour batteries were recharged. We headed out on foot again to BLT Steakhouse on Park Ave. and 57th. It was a lovely walk in the Manhattan evening.






I didn't take any pictures inside of the restaurant because I didn't want to look like a tourist amongst the NYC locals. I just wanted to blend in and eat dinner. I had a Rib Eye steak the size of a small farm animal and E had a nice fat filet mignon. BLT Steakhouse immediately jumped into the top 3 steakhouses I've eaten at.

After dinner we could barely walk so we hailed a cab and called it a night.

Here are all the pics from day 6. Click on the pic to advance to the next.



Whew, what a day! I'm looking forward to tomorrow. No agenda, just a nice chill day and a stroll up Central Park West and through Central Park. On to Day 6!!!

Labels: nyc, travel

posted by Bdub at 12:34 PM