The Un-Planner’s Guide To: New York City (Day 2)

Hello, wonderful person! If you’ve made it here, that means you’ve made it to the second and final part of  Un-Planner’s Guide to New York City.

I hope my itinerary, and I use that term VERY loosely, for Day 1 serves you well. Now, let’s get the show on the road for Day 2, we don’t have much time to waste.

Day 2:

Herald Square

• Plan to meet up with family for breakfast, but start your day off a little bit earlier so you have time to wander.
• Realize that you’re a block from Herald Square and its Macy’s of Miracle on 34th Street fame. Use store as a landmark to return to because it’s impossible to miss, considering it takes up an ENTIRE city block.
• Pick a completely random direction to go in and enjoy strolling at your own leisure while watching sleepy businesses open and traffic buzz by.

Koreatown

• Be lucky that Koreatown is close enough to Herald Square that you can stumble upon it by accident.
• See a street sign for Korea Way. Follow the sign.
• Decide that Korean food would be an AMAZING breakfast. Meet up with your people and tell them so.
• Find that there’s an abundance of Korean (surprise, surprise) places to eat that you know nothing about.
  • We interrupt this guide for the Un-Planner’s Mini-Guide to: Selecting a Restaurant (A guide within a guide. Guide-ception.)
    1. Yelp it.
    2. Be indecisive.
    3. Walk up and down the street looking at menus.
    4. Wonder how you ever make any decisions in your life.
    5. Say “to heck with it” and just walk into a random place.
• Fortune smiles upon you and the restaurant you’ve chosen is New Wonjo, a popular Korean BBQ eatery that also happens to serve a really dope breakfast.

This beef and kimchi soup was as delicious as it was enormous. Pictured in the background are all our side dishes or banchan, plus some excellent fried veggie dumplings.

• Be thoroughly stuffed, but it’s fine, because you’ll need all those calories for all the walking you’re about to do.

American Museum of Natural History

• Take your first subway trip of the day.

For this iconic blurry subway train picture, I stood just a little too close to the platform edge and got the breath sucked out of me as it went by extremely quickly.  100% DO NOT RECOMMEND. Seriously, take your blurry photo from a distance.

• Arrive at the American Museum of Natural History and marvel at its museum…ness.

KNOWLEDGE.

• Buy the Super Saver pass because you want to do all the things and then realize you may have made a mistake because you have roughly three hours and 5 floors of museum. TRY TO DO IT ALL ANYWAY.
• Run around from floor to floor ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ at things, but mostly getting lost because seriously, how is this place so large.
• Pause to watch a planetarium show about the universe. Or more accurately, watch two minutes of the show and fall asleep because the chairs are comfy, the planetarium is just the right amount of dark and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s voice is really soothing.
• Spend the rest of your time enjoying the dinosaur exhibit the most because they are GREAT.

SO MAJESTIC.

Central Park

• Morning has somehow quickly bled into afternoon. Head over to Central Park, which happens to be just across the street.
• Walk through Central Park while thinking, “I think I’ve seen that in a movie.”

I can’t tell you what part of Central Park this is, but you’ve probably seen it in a movie.

• Keep walking a find yourself amidst a lot of hubbub you don’t understand. Tourists are standing in a circle and taking photos of the ground (and of themselves and the ground).
• Make it to a break in the circle and it suddenly all makes sense. You wandered into Strawberry Fields, an area paying tribute to late Beatles member, John Lennon.

Imagine all the people… trying to take a photo with this mosaic. It was a lot.

Chelsea Market

• It’s time to regroup with the rest of the family, so back to the subway you go.
• Really experience the ride. People watch. Read the poetry that the MTA has put up in the cars, or the other fascinating literature other passengers have left behind.

Uh, where exactly is this train going, again?

• Decide on Chelsea Market because your group cannot agree on dinner. Thankfully, the market is a block long and chock full of a variety of restaurants and shops.
• Let the smell of french fries take you to the Creamline for a burger and fries that you practically inhale. Then for dessert, the mini-donuts that your brilliant father has gotten from the Doughnuttery.
• Roll out of Chelsea Market.
• Struggle to find the right train station with machines to refill your metro card.
• Arrive at correct station.
• Zombie walk to hotel because you’re full of a combination of sun, food and exhaustion.
• And finally, sleep.

That’s all she wrote, folks. Thanks for joining me for this brief and devil-may-care tour of NYC!

Happy Un-Planning,

Katie