Today was a wandering aimlessly, taking in the atmosphere, people watching and ambling kind of day! As we had nothing planned for the day we decided over breakfast (which consisted of coffee and huge sticky Danish buns courtesy of the hotel coffeeshop) to just walk and see where our feet would take us.

We first explored the upper west side between broadway and Central Park before heading back to the famous (for all the wrong reasons) Dakota Building. This was the Apartment block where John Lennon was shot by Mark Chapman in 1980 as he walked through the archway pictured below.

Across the road from the Dakota we headed back into Central Park to “Strawberry Fields” which is the Memorial to John Lennon. Lots of tourists taking photos and a bad busker butchering The Beatles (he wasn’t that bad to be fair) took away the peacefulness of what it should be like but it was nevertheless a nice place to sit and reflect on what happened across the road and what may have been had Lennon not been killed. After a stirring rendition of a day in the life by the aforementioned busker we headed off to explore the rest of Central Park.

After we had finished in Central Park we headed down 5th Avenue taking in some of the expensive designer shops and ended up at Grand Central Station followed by the New York Public Library (another Ghostbusters filming location) and finally at the Christmas market and Ice Skating rink at Bryant Park.
We ended up eating at Applebee’s on Times square which was extremely underwhelming so we walked back to the hotel via a bakers and got some very nice cake and doughnuts.