For Saturday the weather was brilliant and in the afternoon me and my host were to go to watch a soccer match (about which I will write in a separate posting). But before that we set off to the south of Brooklyn to go to Coney Island.
Coney Island is quite a drive from where I’m staying, but it was interesting to see the many different neighbourhoods this bourough has to offer. It really is a city of its own. We arrived at Coney Island just in front of the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium and walked from there. To be honest, I thought what is Coney Island was a lot bigger, but even the smaller size is very nice. So there are piers and beaches and on a small portion of the beach there is something like an amusement park. There’s food vendours, souvenir stands and there’s something that’s called „Shoot the freak“. Some guy (the freak) goes down into some area (looks like there used to be a building there), but’s on some gear and then people shoot at him with paintball guns. Kind of crazy and exotic, but I guess it’s kind of american as well.
Before going back to the car I had my first hot dog at what i the site of the world famous hot dog eating contest. I only tried one though. Well, my host then drove me around through Brooklyn poiting out all the different neighbourhoods to me. One was very high class with lots of victorian styled houses which look like they have been imported from the south. Another one was the jewish neighbourhood and because it was a Saturday a lot of people were out on the streets enjoying the sunshine. We ended up at Sunset Park where I enjoyed the great view of the skyline. Our last stop for the morning was Red Hook Park, where the hispanic community seems to meet for soccer matches, but the main attraction are the food vendours all around the park. You can find any south american food there, there’s music, a lot of people walking around and the whole atmosphere is just very ince and peaceful.
So we went back home for a few minutes and then headed out to the soccer stadium. When the match was over we went back to Manhattan and had a few drinks there. Our first stop was a bar near the WTC station called „The Patriot“ which was introduced to me as one of the worst bars in NYC. It wasn’t actually a great place but good enough to drink a beer and then change locations. Which is what we did, so we called a cab and the five of us squeezed ourselves inside, having to tip the driver before we were actually going. We went to Chinatown to another bar and hung out there for another hour.
We then decided we should go back to Brooklyn to finally get some rest, but not until one friend of my host who was riding the cab with us, insisted that we should try the best slice of pizza in Brooklyn which was only a few blocks away from home. That place was awesome. One guy sitting in a small shop with slices of pizza in front of him. So you basically just told him what to put on it (like e.g. mushrooms, peperoni, salami, etc), and he would warm up the slices in an oven. All for around two or three dollars. And pizza was delicious! Great way to end a great day.
Leave a Reply