Bahar and I went to New York for Memorial Day weekend in May. We were invited to my cousin Bryhiem’s wedding and decided to make a vacation out of it. We drove to my sisters place in Kingston Wednesday evening and stayed there for the night, then in the morning the four of us packed up the little Saturn and drove to New York! My mom and Ken flew down and we met them at the hotel.

The drive down was about 6 hours, uneventful but fun. We found out just what a Saturn loaded with 4 people and luggage will do when going up a hill — lose speed! We stopped in a small fishing/hunting town called Roscoe for lunch. It was just what you’d expect from a little town, a cute little diner with old school cash registers and hand written receipts. After a good greasy meal, we stopped again in Livingston where we parked our car and took a 40 minute train into NY, then a 20 minute subway ride to our hotel just off the island in Queens. It’s MUCH cheaper and less stressful to take the train in. Some places in Manhattan were charging $500 a month just for parking!

After arriving at our hotel, we quickly freshened up and went into Manhattan for Cindy and Bryhiem’s rehearsal dinner. Unfortunately I have forgotten the names of the places we saw and ate at, but the food was terrific. We caught up with some family we hadn’t seen in quite some time, and many of them hadn’t met Bahar yet. It was our first time meeting Cindy also. Wedding related pictures are here, including the rehearsal dinner.

We spent Friday morning at Central park. It’s really amazing you can have such a massive park in the core of one of the largest cities in the world. Being Memorial weekend, it was fairly busy, lots of people around, kids running around and bands playing. Non-wedding New York pictures are all here. The afternoon was spent getting ready for the wedding, which was located on the 20th -ish floor of a building.

The wedding was awesome. The location was beautiful, with an excellent view of the city 20 floors up. The food was tops, and included a sushi table, something I’ve never seen at a wedding before (but thoroughly enjoyed!). The ceremony was short and sweet, and the party was fun. Everyone had a great time. After the wedding, we took a cab back to the hotel, Tim and Elaine took the subway. We arrived there at around the same time, to give you an idea of traffic congestion and subway efficiency.

We spent Saturday morning in Chinatown and Little Italy. Shouts of “rolex rolex rolex prada gucci” could be heard everywhere, girls were trying to sell bootleg dvds, fruitstands were in abundance. There was some sort of festival in Little Italy, the road was closed down and the restaurants were packed. We went into Manhattan in the afternoon and saw Wall Street and Ground Zero. This is also the first place I actually saw people selling watches out of a briefcase (I thought you only saw those things on tv!). After a rest back at the hotel, we made a brief appearance at Times Square and had some terrific stone fired pizza. After a visit with some family at another hotel, we rode the Subway back to our hotel.

Sunday morning we were on our way back home. It was a short but fun trip, we saw a famous city that neither Bahar or I have been to, and saw lots of family. While NY was huge, busy and very crowded, it felt very safe and seemed just like a bigger Toronto but certainly had it’s uniqueness, no doubt about it.

Check out pictures from the wedding and our other New York pictures. Some of the pictures are dark and noisy, but, I did the best I could … Oh, I actually had the pictures ready and done the week after the trip, but a hard drive crash (yes, another …) destroyed all my hard work. :p