NYC, Day 2.

Friday morning we were up sorta early because we had tickets to see the 9/11 Memorial Site. I'm SO glad I talked to my aunt a couple days before we left, because I didn't know you had to get tickets to see it. I thought it was more of a park and you could just come and go as you please. Not so! She said the tickets book up fast but when I went online Wednesday morning, I was able to get tickets for Friday at 10am. The tickets are free {although they suggest a $10 donation} but you can't get them at the site. I would have been so bummed if I wouldn't have known about it ahead of time! We took the subway to downtown and it took about an hour. When I went 9 years ago {14 months after 9/11} Ground Zero was just a big hole. Now there are 2 pools that are about an acre in size and pretty much exactly where the towers were. The South Pool:

The North Pool:

It's actually a lot bigger than the pictures look and it was very quiet and somber. Across the street {outside of the 'park'} there was a visitor center. That was more emotional for me than the site itself. There's a museum that should be opening in early 2012 and I'm sure that will be even better than the visitor center.

From the 9/11 Memorial Site we headed over to Wall Street and walked around the Financial District. That is one thing I hadn't done before.

New York Stock Exchange:

From Wall Street, we headed to the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. The ferry is totally free! :)

From there we did Battery Park. This was recovered from the site after the 2 towers at the World Trade Center fell.

From Battery Park we headed to Little Italy and China Town. On our way, we randomly found this place {that's me on the left} :)

We didn't eat there because we were headed to Lombardi's, a famous pizza place. This pizza was SO good!

It's called the white pizza. It has 4 or 5 different cheeses and no sauce. Mmmmmmm :) From Little Italy, we were off to Washington Square Park.

Jen's friend told her about a place called Chocolate By the Bald Man, and we were pretty close so we headed over there. We didn't really know what it was before hand and it turned out to be a sit down dessert place. It sorta had a Willy Wonka type chocolate piping system that was cool.

We had white hot chocolate which I'd never had before. It wasn't as rich as you'd think and it was super yummy! For our dessert we got chocolate cake, with a tiny scoop of ice cream and a chocolate milk shot {no alcohol}. Oh my yummy. So rich and delicious!!

We then walked to Union Square and saw good shot of the Empire State Building.

We were beat by that time and decided to head back to the apartment. Our uncle had been out of town on business and came back that night so we visited with him for a little bit before bed.