Travel Tips

New York City is most definitely a city that loves its sports and cheers for the home team. New York is probably the best represented city and state in this country when it comes to major league teams. I’ve never quite seen anything like it but I honestly can’t imagine a night when there isn’t some sort of major sporting event taking place somewhere in this great city.

The National Hockey League that almost wasn’t is back and going strong. New York is represented well by the Ranger’s who have made a wonderful deal this year to woo Shanahan away from the Red Wings. They play their home games at Madison Square Garden and have some of the most loyal fans. Even if you’re say from Detroit and visiting, and if the Rangers are playing at home then it’s the perfect opportunity (assuming you can get a ticket) to drop in and see how Shanahan is adjusting to life in the Big Apple and if he misses life back at the Joe.

Putting hockey aside for now, there are many other professional sports you can enjoy watching while you’re visiting New York City. I think there are a few baseball fans in this city somewhere. I say a few because it seems that they had to create two baseball teams in order to contain all the fans. I will say though that these fans are loyal to a fault to the teams they support. The New York Mets and the New York Yankees represent this great city in Major League Baseball and both teams draw loyal support from all their fans.

The amazing thing to me is that the double-teaming didn’t end with baseball. It seems that New York City also has two National Football League teams as well. The New York Giants and the New York Jets both represent this fair city to football fans across the country. While I have no favorite or even preference for all these teams and really have no idea how a city can survive with this sort of heated division. Obviously they aren’t as rabid as some hockey fans can tend to be or there would be civil war within the streets.

All joking aside, it seems that so far there is only one NBA team and they are the New York Knicks. I won’t go into how unfair it is to so improperly represent hockey and basketball because these guys might actually be getting the better end of the bargain-the entire city roots for them, not just half. With so many major sporting opportunities it’s amazing that men in this city get anything at all accomplished without carrying a portable pocket television with them at all times.

I don’t know about your house, but in my house it’s difficult enough to schedule important events in our family lives around one local team for each sport (and we don’t even have a baseball team). I can’t imagine how women in New York do it. But to all of you women and the men you love, I have to say kudos for supporting your great teams and giving your many visitors such wonderful opportunities to watch our sports when we’re away from home too. It’s hard to identify one thing about this city that is the greatest but that just may be it.

If you’ve never been to New York City, you may be surprised to know that there is so much more to this great city than skyscrapers, lots of people, and really fantastic parades. While it is in fact the wonderful people of this city that make it the exciting place to visit that it has become, there is so much more to this city than what you’ll see on the television shows and in the news.

New York City is a city full of exciting people from all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds of hopes and dreams of the future and experiences of the past. You will find artwork here like few other places in the world, you will see more nature here than in most big cities around the world, and you will enjoy seeing more cultures and nationalities represented in the space of an hour in this city than most people who live elsewhere experience in their entire lives. New York City is the true melting pot of the world and the rest of America is simply trying to catch up.

You will find music and art that is representative of the many cultures that call this grand city home. You will experience the sights, sounds, and scents of worlds that are exotic and foreign simply by walking down neighborhood streets where people are cooking dinner at night. You will hear more languages in one day than you probably ever dreamed imagine and while you may stand around with sensory overload thinking anyone would be crazy to live like this, most of them are looking at you thinking you’d be crazy to live anywhere else.

This is perhaps the greatest thing about visiting New York City. You get to experience for a moment the excitement that comes from living in this fascinating city. You get to understand what it is like for those living there. And you get to understand first hand what it is like to be alone in a city of millions and yet by being there, being one of them, belonging somehow to this giant community of strangers from different cultures, different pasts, and different futures.

Most people visit New York with certain preconceived ideas and certain goals for their visits. Hopefully the preconceived ideas will all be challenged and the plans that you have made are flexible. There is so much to do and see that you could go one block each way from your hotel and probably notice something new each and every single time you went by. My point in this is that you need to leave time to experience the wonderful things you won’t discover in the guidebooks. There is only so much of this city that any one person could possibly find to write about. I can imagine that there are New Yorkers that could eat in a different restaurant each and every day without eating in the same one twice in five or ten years. I find it hard to believe that a guide book is going to be able to hold everything you might find interesting in this city and if you spend your entire visit with your head in the book you might miss something truly worthwhile.

That being said, it is a good idea to make plans according to your budget and the things you wish to see, I’m just urging you to leave room in that schedule for change. The Statue of Liberty is great, but it takes a while to get there and back. Could it be that you take some photos, buy some post cards and do two or three other activities that you could have enjoyed in the space of time it takes to get there and back? Plans are made to change whenever possible-especially while on vacation. I seriously recommend that you reserve two hours minimum each day to do something that you discovered rather than something you planned.