Thanks to Gray Line New York (@GrayLineNewYork, Facebook), Madame Deals Media, and Mommy Needs Her Coffee, both Little Miss Kate and myself got a chance to take the NYC Night Bus Tour on the first night that we got into the big city! It was a fabulous way to get a “mental” map/perspective of the city layout; which was all kinds of perfect as I had never been to New York City before! I had no idea that we were literally just steps from Broadway and Times Square from our hotel until we passed by the glitz and drama during the trip, (and also where we began the walk back to home-base, since the bus stopped right at Times Square, how cool is that??)

My best advice is to sit back, relax on the second floor platform (rain or shine… it rained btw!), and just take in all the sites with your camera like a good tourist.

During the tour, I learned that NYC was very much like Toronto.  There were times where I felt like I was home… until I saw yet another yellow cab.  Not that Toronto doesn’t have its fair share of cabs, particularly in the downtown core, but the big TDot has nothing on the dominating regiment found in Manhattan.  And they’re really all a yellow-orange-y car, which is so weird to me when taxis come in all shapes, sizes and colour in Toronto.

Another comparison was the concentrated cultural neighbourhoods are similar in both New York in Toronto.  In fact, Little Italy and Chinatown are neighbours in both cities, which the human geography geek in me found completely interesting.

One area where New York City holds supreme is the architecture.  WOW, the architecture in this city is amazeballs.  (Yes I said amazeballs.)  I love the look of mish-mashing historical buildings with more modern looking monstrosities, and that type of deco was in an abundance there.  And it’s not just one era to be found, you can walk down a single street and work your way through the 18 and 1900s of architectural gold.

And then there is the advertising. I have to admit – I really enjoyed just watching the different sparkly, glitzy ads roll by while on the tour. It’s like Super Bowl ads on TV, a lot of these outdoor animated billboards where on a more entertaining level than the ones that tell you the time and temperature when you’re driving into downtown TO from Lakeshore.

Also? The conspiracy theory nut in me enjoyed finding hints of freemasonry (*cough*Illuminati*cough*) symbology architecture throughout the buildings and statues as well, heh. 😉

So here are some pictures taken on the Gray Line NYC Night Tour with both the HTC S One smartphone camera…

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