When I Did Like a Tourist in New York City
Published:
Nita, my friend from Case Western Reserve University, is an NYC lover. During spring break in my first year at Bowdoin, she invited two Mainers, Um-im and me, to spend our vacation in Manhattan, NYC. By that time, we all had been in the US for almost two full years, yet we were pretty much tourists who know some English. Yes, we were acting just like tourists, and that was a fun part of this trip!
“One benefit of being a tourist is that you don’t have to know everything. If you make a mistake, just laugh it off!”
As you know, I’m not a big fan of staying in a hotel in the middle of a big city. Rather than spending 200 dollars a night, we decided to stay in a hostel which cost us $50 a night. It was quite comfortable if you don’t mind sharing your room with a stranger.
Apart from staying in a hostel, we bought the New York sightseeing pass. We chose the flex pass, which allowed us to visit any six tourist attractions on the list. The cost was $159, so it was about 27 dollars a place which helped us save quite a lot of money!
Since we only traveled in NYC, the order of places we’ve been to doesn’t really matter. When you are in NYC, everywhere is, most of the time, within 30 minutes from one another. Thus, let me just show you where I’ve been to and what this Asian tourist likes the most about NYC!
9/11 Memorial
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum was built to commemorate the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
Another family-friendly chain museum that I have been visiting a couple of times in Thailand. This chain is pretty much the same as the one I have seen in Pattaya, but it is somewhat smaller. However, it was still fun to see weird and unbelievable stories of people worldwide, such as the tallest man, the man who had lived with cockroaches, and so much more! It could be boring for science people, but we, STEM majors, really enjoyed it!
Gulliver’s Gate
This is the best one of all the museums I’ve been to in NYC. It’s quite new by the time I visited, but it was not crowded. Everything is scaled down as if they have traveled through the Gulliver’s gate! There are lots of models of interesting places around the world. Walking around this place made me feel like a giant!
National Geographic Encounter: Ocean Odyssey
This is not an ordinary aquarium because everything in this place is projected! This is one of the most innovative exhibitions I have ever seen in my life. The first couple of rooms were projected with the scenery under the sea. It truly made us feel like we were underwater! Every room told us different stories about the ocean, such as sharks, kelps, and whales. The room that I was the most impressed by was where we had to sit in the complete darkness and listen to the whale’s noises. The tour was not long, but it was worth it, in my opinion.
Riddle Me Out
I’ve never thought that I’d do something like this in NYC. It’s, of course, cheaper to do it in Bangkok or somewhere else in Thailand. However, it turned out to be one of the most stressful yet enjoyable time events on the trip. We only had one out of 6 missions to be done, and I was so close to solving it!
Empire State Building
That was my third time going up to the 86th floor of the Empire State. It was still really cold during the spring break, but we ran around enough to warm our bodies. The view was gorgeous since it wasn’t too cloudy that day, but I suggest that you visit it in a warmer time.
China Town!
No need for flex passes: It’s a must for Asian students like us! I don’t actually know where we had been to in Chinatown, but all the food is terrific. There was even Asian porridge sold in the town. I bet you cannot find it anywhere else in NYC!
This article is kind of short and not so detailed, but I hope you get some idea about where to go and where to eat! Enjoy :)
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.
Although Poy graduated from the Scripps-Oxford joint Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for half a year and already started working at UIUC as a post-doctoral researcher, his graduation ceremony was held way later in May 2024. His family also came from Thailand to attend his graduation ceremony in San Diego. We then spent over a week afterward traveling around the west coast, including California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was my first time (and his family’s first time) doing a road trip in the west coast. We enjoyed a huge variety of natural wonders that the west coast has to offer.