If there is one thing you have to do once in your lifetime, this is waiting for New Year’s Eve in Times Square, NY.
I said once, just because after that you certainly will never spend new year’s eves in NY again.
Hell seems to be a nicer place, I swear.
This year (I mean 2012) I had the fantastic idea to celebrate New Year’s Eve in New York.
Just one comment: Never Again!
9 hours spent standing in the crowd, too far from Times Square (I was standing between 7th and 49th, and I arrived there at 3pm), freezing and with no possibility to buy food or go to a restroom.
Every hour a new 10 seconds countdown celebrating the new year in different timezones and after 8pm music performances begin: this year the guest stars were Carly Rae Jepsen (Call Me Maybe), Psy (Gangam Style) and Taylor Swift (We are never getting back together), but from where I was standing it was not possible to hear anything, you can just look at the big LCD screen and try to understand the lip-syncing.
But if you still want to spend New Year’s Eve 2013 in Times Square (are you really sure???), I want to provide some helpful advices:
– If you wanna see the “ball drop”, you need to be in Times Square before 3pm.
– After 3pm you can enter the blocks just from 49th or 52th.
– Wear everything you have (2/3 pair of socks, 2 pair of jeans, all the t-shirts and sweaters you want and don’t forget hat, gloves and scarf. I’m not kidding, you seriously gonna need all this stuff).
– Bring your own food and water.
– Don’t stand in the front of the crowd, find your own place at the end of the block and sit there, because 9 hours go by very slowly.
– Curse is useless, once you are inside the block, there’s nothing you can do.
– If you need to go to the restroom, find a policeman and try to convince him to let you go out the block and be sure that you can re-enter it (going out of the block is easy, re-entering it is not if you don’t find a policeman who let you do that, and they don’t seem very cooperative).
And then at 23.59 start counting back the last year’s minute and don’t forget to watch the ball dropping!
After that, escape from Times Squares before it’s too late. It’s like a nightmare, you can start breathe again once you’re out.
But then, after all this suffering, you can say: “I was there” and surely you will be ready to deal with any queue in your life.
