NEW YORK - Dreams come true

So this post is a bit delayed as I was in New York over christmas and new years eve, but I wanted to share this experience with the Internet anyway! 

My parents and I always spent christmas with our family, almost every year at our house. For this years christmas (2015) we wanted to do something completely different! Don't take me wrong I LOVE spending time with my family at home!! But for the last christmas we decided to spend only the three of us somewhere else. Whilst discussing where to go we all secretly in the back of our had were thinking of NYC, but nobody actually said it because it seemed so unrealistic - Christmas in New York?! Sounds like a movie with a lot of famous actors showing you this perfect life, nobody actually has! Especially not us! - It wasn't until my mum finally said it and we started looking up apartments and flights and all that kind of stuff when we realized that this dream could actually become reality!

In July 2015 we had everything planned and we were so ready! Since then I was counting the days on several countdown apps! 

Then finally the day of the flight came! I was very excited but also pretty tired and exhausted as I had just finished a pretty tough and packed term in school! Luckily we were upgraded to business class, which has never happened to us before! So after this pretty relaxed flight we arrived at JFK-Airport in New York.
Sadly as soon as we arrived at our apartment in the heart of Soho I started to feel a little bit ill. Two hours later I was laying in bed with pretty high fever and all the other things you have when you have the flu... so that was cool... NOT!! I really hoped that it would go away over night, sadly it didn't. I spent christmas eve, christmas day and two more days in bed feeling awful! I was trapped in this small (but beautiful) apartment in one of the coolest cities ever. All I wanted to do was to go outside and explore the city! We had to cancel dinners and plans we had, but hey: I had a really good excuse to binge watch one series after the other on Netflix!! No but seriously, although we were stopped from exploring it was very cosy in our flat and these days were a real recovery from all the stress not only for me but also for my parents!
Finally the day came!! I felt (kind of) well enough to go out and actually enjoy the city!
I looked pretty shitty but here's the thing I love so much about New York: Nobody knows you and nobody cares how you look! That's good for days like this one where I wore an oversized sweater, leggings and no make-up, but it's also really cool if you want to try a new maybe a bit more adventurous style. 

As we lost 4 full days of exploring the city we had to pack a lot of plans we had in the remaining five days! These five days turned out amazing!! We did so many things and I was so happy to be able to do them, as I thought that I'll be staying in the apartment for the whole nine days. Everything we did felt even more special and I was a lot more grateful than I already was to be able to be part of this amazing city!

Here are some things we did:

1. We stayed in Nolita which is located pretty centrally! We could literally walk almost everywhere and believe me or not: we did not once take the subway!!
On our first exploring day we walked through beautiful Tribeca and Greenwich Village to get to the High Line. It was really cold and rainy but it was beautiful anyway to see this park growing over the city!

2. On our second day we decided to get up pretty early (which we did anyway thanks to jetlag!) to have the city a bit more for ourselves and not having to share it with thousands of other people! This is a really good advice I can give you in general about New York: the early morning hours are the most peaceful time of the day in this never sleeping city! 
So what we did was to walk all the way from Soho to Midtown most of the time along Park Avenue, having the Grand Central Station as our destination. As it was the day before New Years eve Midtown was absolute CRAZINESS! Walking was very hard, it was more "pushing" through a menacing amount of tourists, policemen and some locals.
We decided to go to the Top of the Rock to escape the mayhem on the streets beneath us! Although it was very cold and foggy it was absolutely magical!

3. On the day of new years eve we decided to cross the river and walk through Brooklyn. We took a cab to Brooklyn Bridge Park where we went for a beautiful walk along the riverside and took a lot of pictures of the city! It was such a good end to this amazing year 2015!!
On the way back we didn't take a cab, we walked back crossing the river on the Brooklyn Bridge! An unforgettable experience!

These were obviously only some of the things we did! We also went to the 9/11 Memorial which was breathtaking and did a lot more amazing, beautiful, impressive, stunning ... things!

Our trip was unforgettable and wonderful although I was ill half of the time, although there were way too many people and although the weather wasn't what we hoped for! Still this trip was perfect just like that! I don't often use the word PERFECT but these ten days were truly perfect! 

I can't wait until I can come back to this crazy city and dive into its adventures!

UNTIL NEXT TIME NEW YORK. SEE YOU SOON!! 

I hope I inspired you with this post to visit New York or any other place you want to visit! And I hope that I showed you that things don't always have to workout as you hoped they would, to be THE BEST they could have been! 

Thanks for reading,
Claire