We stepped off the subway at Canal Street at 07:12 on a Wednesday in October, and the air smelled like hot pretzels and something fermented we couldn’t identify. A coffee at a Polish diner two blocks north cost $2.50, refills free, and the waitress called everyone “sweetheart” without irony.
Chapter 01: Arrival
JFK to Manhattan takes 58 minutes on the A train for $8.25, or 41 minutes in a yellow cab for $52 plus tip, plus the anxiety of watching the meter tick while you sit in traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway. We’ve done both. The train wins every time, and you get to watch actual New Yorkers fall asleep standing up, which is a skill we still haven’t mastered after three visits.
LaGuardia is closer but more chaotic. Newark is cheaper if you’re staying in Lower Manhattan. The AirTrain from JFK connects to the subway at Howard Beach or Jamaica Station, both work fine, both dump you into the genuine New York experience immediately, which means someone will be playing saxophone badly in your subway car and you’ll love it anyway.
Our team stayed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn last time, $89/night for a railroad apartment above a Polish bakery. The L train to Union Square took 23 minutes. Manhattan hotels start at $180/night for something the size of a shipping container, $320/night for a room where you can open your suitcase on the floor. We’ve sent readers to both, and the Brooklyn option wins unless you absolutely need to stumble back to your room at 02:00 from a Midtown bar, which, honestly, why would you.
The city runs on a grid above 14th Street. Avenues go north-south, numbered streets go east-west. Below 14th Street, the grid dissolves into a medieval tangle that makes perfect sense to locals and no sense to anyone else. We got lost in the West Village four times in one afternoon. Bring a charged phone and accept that walking 20 blocks in the wrong direction is part of the education.
Chapter 02: Why now, and why New York
The Norwegian krone is suffering, which makes New York expensive, but it was always expensive, so the psychology barely changes. What changes is that the city spent three years being weird and depressed, and now it’s remembered how to be loud again. Restaurants are packed at 20:30 on Tuesday. The sidewalks have that aggressive pedestrian energy where everyone walks like they’re late for something important, even when they’re just going to buy yogurt.
We visited in May 2019, then again in October 2023, and the difference was palpable. The 2023 version had more bike lanes, more outdoor dining sheds that looked semi-permanent, and more people willing to make eye contact on the subway. The 2019 version had cheaper beer. A pint in a Williamsburg bar cost $7 in 2019, $9.50 in 2023, $11 if you want something that isn’t a lager. We drank the lager.
The Nordic perspective helps here. New York feels like what Copenhagen would be if someone fed it growth hormones and removed all the bicycles and functional urban planning. It’s chaotic, it’s overstimulating, it’s got 47 different cuisines within a 10-minute walk of any given subway stop. You can get Senegalese food at 23:00 on a Sunday in Crown Heights. You can buy a bagel with lox at 06:00 on Christmas morning on the Lower East Side. The city doesn’t sleep, which is a cliché, but it’s also literally true in a way that makes Stavanger look like a monastery.
Our team goes to New York when we need to remember that cities can be dense and functional and deeply strange all at once. The subway runs 24 hours. The bodegas never close. You can hear six languages in one block and nobody thinks it’s unusual. For Nordic travelers used to orderly, spacious, quiet urban environments, New York is a reminder that other ways of living exist, and some of them involve eating soup dumplings at a plastic table at midnight in Flushing, Queens.
The city doesn’t sleep, which is a cliché, but also literally true in a way that makes Stavanger look like a monastery.
Chapter 03: What to skip, honestly
Times Square after your first 10 minutes. We get it, the lights are bright, the screens are big, the Elmo costumes are unsettling. Take your photo, feel the tourist energy, then leave. There’s nothing to do there except stand in crowds and pay $18 for a cocktail in a theme restaurant. We’ve never met a New Yorker who goes to Times Square on purpose.
The Statue of Liberty ferry is $24 round trip plus the cost of getting to Battery Park, and the statue looks better from the free Staten Island Ferry anyway, which runs every 30 minutes and gives you the same view without the ticket line. We did the paid version once. We felt ripped off. The Staten Island Ferry also has beer on board for $5, which the tourist ferry does not, and which makes the 25-minute crossing significantly more pleasant.
Skip the brunch lines in Williamsburg. Any restaurant with a 90-minute wait for eggs is not worth it, no matter what Instagram says. We’ve sent readers to diners in Astoria and Bay Ridge where you can get the same quality food, better coffee, and a table immediately. The Instagram-famous spots are fine, but they’re not 90-minutes-of-your-Sunday fine, and the staff are exhausted and resentful, which you can feel in the service.
Don’t book the comedy club packages in Midtown. They’re $40 minimum plus a two-drink requirement, and the comedians are working through material that didn’t quite make it onto their Netflix specials. We saw better comedy at a free show in a Brooklyn bar where the performer was eight feet away and we could see him sweating. The intimacy matters. The Midtown clubs feel like comedy factories, which is what they are.
The High Line is beautiful but mobbed between 11:00 and 17:00 from April to October. Walk it before 09:00 or after 19:00, or skip it entirely and walk the Brooklyn Heights Promenade instead, which has better views and fewer people taking photos of architectural plants. We’ve done both. The Promenade wins.
Dr. Mondo’s prescription
- Get a 7-day unlimited MetroCard ($34) if you’re staying more than three days, it pays for itself after 12 rides and removes the mental calculation from every subway trip
- Eat at least one meal at a halal cart, the chicken and rice platters are $8 and better than most sit-down restaurants, especially after midnight
- Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge before 07:30 to avoid the tourist hordes and the cyclists who will ring their bells at you with deep hostility
- Carry cash, many bodegas and small restaurants are cash-only or have mysteriously broken card readers during busy times
- Download the Citymapper app, it’s better than Google Maps for subway directions and tells you which subway car to board for easiest transfers
- Don’t eat in Little Italy, it’s a tourist trap, eat in Flushing or Sunset Park or Jackson Heights instead for actual ethnic food
- Museum day passes exist, MOMA is $25 and worth every dollar if you go on Friday after 16:00 when it’s free but crowded, or full price on Tuesday morning when it’s empty
- The New York Public Library main branch has free bathrooms, free WiFi, and a reading room that looks like a cathedral, use it
Chapter 04: One perfect day
Start at 06:30 at a bagel shop on the Lower East Side. Russ and Daughters is the famous one, but any proper bagel place works. Get a bagel with schmear and lox, $9.50, eat it while walking south toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The morning light on the bridge at 07:15 is gold and slanted, and you’ll have the pedestrian path almost to yourself except for joggers who are much faster than you and have better discipline.
Cross into Brooklyn. Stop at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade at 08:00 and look back at Manhattan, which from this angle looks like a stack of Tetris blocks that somehow hasn’t fallen over. Walk north through DUMBO, which used to be warehouses and is now coffee shops and tech offices, but still has cobblestone streets and good light. Get a second coffee at a place with outdoor seating where you can watch the East River traffic.
Subway to Union Square by 10:00. Walk through the farmers market if it’s a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday. Buy an apple that costs $2 and tastes like an actual apple, not like the waxy things they sell at supermarkets. Walk west on 14th Street, cut south through Greenwich Village, get lost on purpose in the diagonal streets that refuse to follow the grid.
Lunch at 12:30 at a Thai restaurant in the East Village or a taco place in Alphabet City. We’ve sent readers to both. The Thai places have lunch specials for $11 that include soup and spring rolls. The taco places have $3 tacos that are better than anything you’ll find in a sit-down restaurant charging $18 for the same thing on a nicer plate.
Afternoon at a museum. The Met is overwhelming, pick one wing and ignore the rest. Egyptian collection if you like old things, European paintings if you like staring at brushwork, American wing if you want to understand what Americans think about themselves. Three hours maximum. Museum fatigue is real and ruins the last hour of every visit if you’re not careful.
Exit the museum at 16:00, walk through Central Park toward the west side, watch the light change on the paths and the runners doing their loops. The park is designed with sight lines and vistas that reveal themselves slowly, which is impressive for something built in the 1850s. Exit at Columbus Circle, subway to Lower Manhattan, walk through the Financial District at 17:30 when the office workers are flooding the streets and the energy is frantic.
Dinner at 19:00 somewhere in Chinatown or the Lower East Side. Soup dumplings at a cramped restaurant where you share a table with strangers and the menu is laminated and has pictures. $24 for two people, including beer, including tip. The dumplings arrive steaming and dangerous, bite carefully or spray yourself with hot broth, which we’ve done multiple times and which never stops being embarrassing.
Evening walk through SoHo and the West Village. The streets are full by 21:00, the restaurants have their windows open, you can see into living rooms and wonder what it costs to live in a ground-floor apartment where strangers watch you eat dinner every night. End at a bar in the West Village with a back garden, order something with whiskey, sit outside if the weather allows, watch the New Yorkers be effortlessly cool in a way that takes tremendous effort but looks spontaneous.
Subway home by 23:30, or stay out until 02:00 if you’ve got the stamina. We usually don’t. The city will still be running at full speed when you leave, which is either inspiring or exhausting depending on your tolerance for stimulation. We find it both. The subway ride back to Brooklyn is quiet and strange, everyone on the train looking tired but not defeated, which is maybe the whole mood of the city compressed into 25 minutes underground.