New York
Queens Center shopping mall
It's finally arrived, our last full day in New York :( It was raining very hard this morning, but cleared up later. BTTF wasn't on today, nor were any other shows we would've been interested in seeing, so we decided to spend the day shopping instead. Mew was desperate to get to some shop called "Hot Topic" and had been talking about it the whole trip, so that was our main destination today!
The nearest one was at the Queens Center shopping mall in Elmhurst. We looked into the subway briefly before deciding to just eat the cost and get a "Lyft" (a kind of taxi) there and back, rather than risk getting lost (or mugged). It didn't turn out to be too expensive though. The mall was HUGE, so many floors!
We arrived at Hot Topic a bit after 4 pm. Mew calls this her "Holy Land". ^^;;;; She spent about an hour looking around there and buying stuff, then eventually left to explore the rest of the mall. We had wanted to look in JCPenney, but unfortunately they had closed by the time we left Hot Topic. Apparently they had closed early today due to it being the 4th of July... awww. After looking at some other shops, we got to Macy's around 6 pm and were thrilled to find THIS:
TOYS R US!!! About 5 minutes after we walked in, they announced they were closing in 40 minutes, so we rushed up to the third floor. Toys R Us shut down in 2018 in England, but has since reopened in the US as a section in Macy's department stores. It had been so long since we'd seen a TRU!!!
I got to take a photo with Geoffrey himself ^__^ He's my hero!
Walking on the Barbie red carpet... err, or would that be pink carpet?
They had these big statue things dotted around the TRU section. I'm not sure what the reindeer was meant to represent, but it was cute!
We rushed around TRU and didn't find anything we wanted to buy, but it was just nice to be in one again after all this time ^^ We briefly looked at some other parts of Macy's before leaving. There wasn't anything else at the mall we wanted to look at, and most places were either closed or closing soon, so we just left. Here's a pic of the mall from outside.
I thought this restaurant across the road looked very pretty. It looks like the buildings back in Sylvania ^_^ Apparently it's called "Olive Garden". We didn't go in though.
We got another Lyft taxi back to the hotel. This driver went a different way round to the one going, so we got to see even more of New York on the way back ^_^
Mew: Some parts of it looked familiar to us from the Steven Spielberg version of West Side Story.
The pretty sunset that greeted us when we got back to the hotel. We dumped our stuff (the results of Mew's shopping spree in Hot Topic ^^;) and left to get some food. We'd thought about trying to find a fireworks display to watch tonight, but by the time we got back, we were too tired and didn't feel like it, plus we didn't really know where to look for one anyway. Maybe Times Square, but none of us felt like walking down there by this point, especially since it was likely to be even MORE crowded than usual (if that's even possible!).
Here's a photo of our hotel as you walk up to it, and one from across the road.
In the distance, the Empire State Building was all lit up for the 4th of July. ^^
After taking some photos of the pretty lights and such, we got some snacks from the local 7-11 and then went back to the hotel, where I asked Mew to take my photo with these nice flowers that were in the lobby :3.
We spent the night taking photos of all the new stuff we'd bought (yay!), and packing (D:). Can't believe we're flying back to England tomorrow... it's gone by so quickly!
Day 7: 05 July 2023