Zia Askari went to New York and came back totally bowled

If you are game for excitement, love food and enjoy shopping,
New York should definitely be on your list of destinations while visiting US. I
had the pleasure of visiting this true metropolitan place recently. Here are
some of the memories that I will always carry with me.

To the benefit of tourists, getting around the New York City is
easy: The city has a sophisticated transit system that includes buses and
subways, as well as thousands of taxis and limousines. There are also ferries,
bicycles, frequent Amtrak and commuter rail services. In addition, New York City
is a walking city, it's flat and much of it is on a grid, so moving around is
quite easy and comfortable.

With a lot of parks and natural vegetation, New York City is
perhaps one of the greenest cities in America. The Central Park in Manhattan's
famed green oasis is at five on the list of the city's ten largest parks.
Especially for those who love nature, the Central Park and the New York
Botanical Garden, located in the Bronx, offer guided bird walks. As a tourist
you are more than welcome to join New Yorkers who jog, walk, bike, in-line
skate, horseback ride, ice skate, rent row boats, play basketball, softball,
soccer, tennis and enjoy special events and festivals, in the city's parks and
playgrounds. New York City has five boroughs-Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan,
Queens and Staten Island — that are linked by a series of bridges, tunnels and
ferries. Midtown is Manhattan's main business district. Downtown (below 14th
Street) contains Greenwich Village, SoHo, TriBeCa and Wall Street-the
financial district. The phrase 'downtown' can also simply mean South of
wherever you happen to be at the moment, while 'uptown' refers to all points
North. As a general rule, traffic travels one-way going East on even-numbered
streets and one-way going West on odd-numbered streets. Main East-West streets
are two-way but smaller streets don't follow this rule. Interestingly for us,
the 'Print 2.0' event organized by HP happened at the World Trade Center of
today, which is just opposite to the erstwhile 'Twin Towers'. The overall
experience of seeing the ground zero of today, gave us a fair amount of idea
about things to come in the future and how fast is the development happening
around that square We stayed at the SoHo grand at Broadway. It is quite close to
the Canal Street. This is the place where you can find real good stuff when it
comes to shopping for watches, leather accessories and street fashion jewelry.

After walking through the Canal Street for a while, I went out
to see the famous 'Times Square'. It can be termed as the epitome of
modernity and the Internet age. It is the place where the famous Nasdaq is
based. Times Square is also unique because of the kind of metropolitan visitors
that it attracts on an hourly basis. On the second day of my stay in the city, I
ventured out to check out the local street food. To my surprise it was not only
the American or the Chinese but a host of other global delicacies from countries
like Lebanon, Bangladesh, Korea, Italy, France and of course India that were
available right on the street. I went for Lebanese lunch, which turned out to be
quite sumptuous for me. I also had the pleasure of visiting one of the biggest
retail stores in US-Macy's. I went to the Macy's, situated quite close to
the Times Square and someone told me that it is the oldest of the Macy's in
US. It was quite amazing to find almost everything under one roof. This apart,
it is needless to mention the kind of excitement and joy we had after taking
that 'open bus tour' of the New York City as well as the symbol of freedom
'Statue of Liberty'