Anna is sick with the stomach flu (no I didn’t poison her…well, hopefully not) so I am taking it upon myself to kick off a new year of fun-loving posts.

Why is Anna sick? I’m hoping it doesn’t have anything to do with the meal I made for her (one of our resolutions is to take turns cooking every other night). I seem to have survived (nice work small intestine).

A lot has happened in the last month and a half since our last entry.

We had Thanksgiving here in New York and were fortunate enough to have our good friends Bryan and Jenn come out and share the holiday with us. It went really well considering I bought two large chickens thinking they were turkeys. “Honey, why are there chicken recipes on these turkeys?”

Anna and I also went to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was a celebrecational experience. We saw the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana and Dora the Explorer (I later learned exactly who these fools were).

We went to Magic: The Gathering World Championships (Say What?).

We visited Rockefeller Center to see the tree and watched a few kids tempt fate on the ice rink (think Inspector Gadget on skates).

We made it back to Minnesota and South Dakota for Christmas and got to spend a lot of time with family and friends (I’ll never forget Champaign RPG and Bloody Slappers. It was good to see snow again and feel the burn of cold air in my lungs.

Anna and I arrived back in New York just in time for New Year’s Eve. We decided to make our way down to Times Square to watch the ball drop in person. I don’t want to say it was a mistake (part of me does), but it’s something I have no desire to do again (like watching the Star Wars prequels).

We arrived at 40th St. in Times Square at 4:15 p.m. and walked up to 49th St. (See our trek on Google Maps). Police had every other street blocked off to actually get where Broadway and 7th Ave. actually intersect.

At 49th St. we pushed ourselves (literally) into a crowd of about 200-300 people waiting to pass through security and into the Times Square area (you can’t bring bags past this checkpoint). It took about 30 minutes of really loving your neighbor before we got in around 5 p.m. We walked down to 48th St. where we ran into another barricade and another crowd. Eventually we got through and ended up between 47th and 48th St.

Each block is fenced in and police fill up Times Square like a funnel, closing each area when it gets to be about 75-80% full. The bad part is, once you’re in your permanent spot there’s really no way out (no access to food, drink, bathrooms or much else).

So, there we stood, for 8 hours straight in pretty mild weather (35 degrees). What did we do? We talked, listened to the entertainers rehearse (hey it’s Hannah Montana!) and watched a girl contemplate peeing into a Snapple bottle (made from the best stuff she’d drank all day on earth).

I talked to a few people who have lived in New York for years and never gone to Times Square for New Year’s Eve. If I had to guess, I would say about 90-95% of the people there were first-timers like us. I can’t imagine doing it again unless you were really hard-core about that ball.

But if you must go, and want to get a good view, you should consider showing up between 1-2 p.m. You know what? That’s crazy. Stay home (or go out), make some popcorn and crack open a bottle of Cristal (or your finest Welches sparkling cider).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Manhattan, NYC Places, Times Square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.