First up... The trip started out pretty interesting. Hahaha yeah I was homeless for a while. No pictures because I was too homeless to take any.
Let's start with some background knowledge about New York. In New York there are a few boroughs:
Manhattan is the New York City that everyone commonly talks about. It's your Sex and the City, Friends... Brooklyn is up and coming, some pretty cool indie areas there, but I still like Manhattan most. Unsurprisingly, Manhattan boasts really high accommodation prices and we were gonna be in New York for two weeks so we looked outside Manhattan for accommodation. We eventually picked a place in Queens through Airbnb because the subway seemed pretty near to mid Manhattan, where Times Square is around.
When we got there, we were told that someone had already checked in to our room. Whaaaat? Are you kidding me?
Javin was pretty stressed out over everything, but I found the entire situation pretty hilarious. Like what are the chances? Coming to New York and wanting to fall in love with the city like Carrie Bradshaw but ending up homeless instead hahaha
It turned out that Airbnb had allowed overbooking. We called Airbnb up and found out that it wasn't the first time they have gotten this problem, so I would suggest checking and confirming with your host through Airbnb chat about your reservation even after the reservation has been confirmed by the system. Airbnb put us up at a hotel nearby for the night while we looked for alternative accommodation on Airbnb. There weren't much choices left since people tend to reserve early and those left were pretty expensive, which restricted us a lot as Airbnb wanted us to choose a place with a price that matched our previous reservation. We were really tired from our 20+ hour flight so we just wanted to get it settled as soon as possible.
In the end, it was a blessing in disguise because we got a good location in Manhattan (yes!!!!!) and Airbnb topped up the difference for us. At least they had good service recovery.
At night, we took the subway to Manhattan to take a walk around Times Square and have our dinner around there. It was pretty quiet and I kinda fell into a tourist trap (I'll save it for a post on Times Square), but I was too happy to be in Manhattan to care.
I saw all the lights... Finally, the New York I came for.
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