No place in the world that can compare | Final Thoughts

• If you're not up on the hip hop/rap scene, my blog titles are lines from Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' song "Empire State of Mind," which is all about New York City. It's a really good song, but if you're not all about rap, go download just Alicia Keys' R&B version. It's absolutely beautiful and a lot of the lyrics are the same. Her voice is incredible and the piano part is unreal.
• I love my husband. Brian has probably had NYC roads memorized since he was 3 months in utero and, with the help of his Blackberry, he knew all the pertinent subway trains that we needed. We never got lost and the dude is a freaking genius. He knows which routes in and fro the city require tolls, he knows which subway stairwell to take to come up on the right side of the street, and he knows exactly how to tell the cabbie to get to our hotel so that he doesn't drive all over the place and charge us a fortune. It was fantastic for me. I just followed along and went where Brian told me to go with no stress.
• My first actual experience with Manhattan was incredible. We came up from the subway at night right in Times Square. It was complete sensory overload: everything right and wrong with America simultaneously. My head was probably spinning 360°! I haven't been to a lot of places, but I have been to some big cities (namely, London, Paris, and Sydney) and I haven't ever seen anything like New York. The sheer number of skyscrapers is incredible. The only places I can even imagine having a similar phenomenon would be Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. Whether they do compare, I have no idea.
• The city didn't feel nearly as dangerous as I would have thought. We never felt weird, not even on the subway at night. I would have been 100% comfortable going around the subway and the city (at least to the places we went) by myself during the day.
• I still don't want to live there. It would be a major pain to have to deal with public transportation every day. I like my car, thankyouverymuch.
• It snowed A LOT in D.C. and Baltimore.
• Smart phones can be very helpful.
• Every Top 40 station in America is playing Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" and Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" four times an hour. Fortunately, we liked both songs.
• I do regret not getting to run while I was up there, but it was absolutely freezing and we did so much walking that I was completely exhausted each morning.
• I do wish we had seen the NYC Public Library building and visited the Natural History Museum. We'll definitely be doing both on our next trip.
• We are incredibly lucky. It snowed 2 feet in Washington 2 hours after we left the area, never snowed a flake in NYC while we were there, and tomorrow they're calling for 18 inches in NYC. Go us!