Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island

Today we visited the Statue of Liberty :-) ^_^

We had to start early for this one, so we made our way to the Battery Park in the Financial District of Manhattan where the Ferry leaves for Liberty Island... yes, it is really called Liberty Island. The trip also included a visit to Ellis Island, which was the place were in the late 19th century and early 20th century all the immigrants had to pass through, before they could enter the USA.

To give you an idea of the area, I embedded the google map below.


It was a super sunny day, the first one of its kind since we arrived on the shores of this new land. Let's be clear right from the start about this. This is a tourist trap... maybe even the mother of all tourist traps. We knew this when we went in, but we wanted to see Lady Liberty up close.

Knowing all this, we expected the completely overfilled boats bringing you from A to B and we were nicely surprised by the reasonable $18.50 per person for a ticket for the Statue and its Pedestal and also access to the Immigration museum on Ellis Island. The $5 per ice cone were already a given.

An overfilled boat if I ever saw one

Having said all that, visiting the Statue was very cool. When seeing it from afar it admittedly looks tiny, because of all the sky scrapers on the neighbouring islands, but back when it was built in 1884, it actually was the tallest building around.

As usual, with buildings like these, there was some kind of political undercurrent. In this case, the French gave it to the Americans as a sign of their friendship, but also to critisise their own government to go back to more freedom and liberal views.

The image that is instilled on every viewer is the one that millions of immigrants from the old world went onto a steamboat for roughly two weeks in cramped quarters and the first that they would see from the new world was in fact Lady Liberty. Powerful imagery indeed, and that is how the Statue became the symbol that it is now.

The view of the Statue from the Boat

View on Manhattan from the Statue's Pedestal

Proof! Isi was on Liberty Island

The second stop was Ellis Island, where the old Immigrations Office was converted to a museum and you could walk the way of all new arrivals from Europe. In addition, they talked about the immigration process and becoming a US citizen.

Funny quote from an Italian immigrant

It was rather weird, because they talked about the process of become a US citizen (they called it "Naturalization") as something that is very simple and easy to achieve. There is one test that you have to do about history of the US etc. We did the multiple choice test of 10 questions and scored 6/10, therefore we passed and could become US citizen :-P.

After we went back, we came across one more wonder of the US, differently flavoured Fanta. In one of our less lucid moments, we decided to buy one of each and rank them according to taste. We found orange (we took it as the standard), the in the order below, pineapple, mango, strawberry and berry.

Below you can see in pictures what our verdict was...

Judge Isi

Traditionalist Isi prefers orange above all

Berry and strawberry was best for Judge Johannes