Lonely Planet - New York City

13. Enjoy the benefits of conspicuous consumption

All the glories of NYC shopping are paraded along Fifth Avenue, where strings of tempting, tantalizing stores will turn your head left and right. Once the home of prominent families living in gracious, stately mansions, it was taken over by the retail industry in the early 1900s. It's now forever associated with fine shopping.

Luxury stores abound, but a few discount chains have moved in and sit cheek by jowl with classics like Brooks Brothers, Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier. Nowadays the most over-the-top fixture on Fifth Ave is Trump Tower, a gleaming complex of exclusive condominiums and a lobby replete with cascading waterfalls and ritzy boutiques. Just up the street is Grand Army Plaza, presided over by the famed Plaza Hotel, now filled with private condos. This romantic square abuts Central Park, and there are plenty of hansom cabs waiting to whisk you away. If you get tired of trawling through stores like Burberry, Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves St Laurent, St Patrick's Cathedral is around the corner and the New York Public Library just down the street.

14. find your inner punk rocker

At once glittery and grungy, the ersatz earthiness of the East Village spawned a revolution in eating, drinking and socializing that's made it one of New York's most exciting neighborhoods. This former rocker-filled enclave housed a young Madonna, jazz great Charlie Parker, guitarist extraordinaire Jimi Hendrix and social raconteur Margaret Sanger, arrested for distributing pamphlets about birth control.

Remnants of those wild times still infuse the neighborhood with a singular, electric energy, even as waves of gentrifi cation knock down squatter tenements and turn community-run cooperatives into luxury condos. It's safer and cleaner than it once was, but it's still the East Village: the best place for a poetry slam (Nuyorican Cafe), cutting-edge performance art or avant-garde gallery showing (La MaMa), or an all-night pub crawl along Second Ave (and increasingly Avenues A and B).

Across Houston St, just one block to the south, the long-forgotten Lower East Side has been rediscovered. Fueled by a daring group of restaurateurs, the Lower East Side is experiencing a culinary renaissance setting off a chain reaction all the way down to Chinatown.

These neighborhoods are an exciting blend of old and new that manage to coalesce into an entrancing now.

15. Show your taste buds a really good time

Dining in New York City is more than a pleasurable pastime, bigger than a ritual celebration, and rarely just about slaking bodily hunger.

For foodies, eating is an art, a philosophy, a transformation of yet another mundane act into a larger-than-life event, all the better to fit into the supercharged and turbo-energized pace of the city.

New and innovative cuisines are part of what makes NYC such a gustatory delight. Ingredients from the furthest corners of the globe show up in the tamales on street corners and the homemade chilis and pasties at local markets.

Fads and flavors come and go in the time it takes you to cab in from the airport, but one trend that's sticking around is an obsession for appetizers. Time-crunched Manhattanites order a bunch of these small plates and nosh like crazy. They've also discovered 'lounge food,' a replacement for hard-to-get reservations at in-demand restaurants. If Del Posto is booked when you're in town, eat at the 'lounge' (the bar in a less posh establishment): it's the same food and often half the sit-down price.

Certain locations are hot, hot, hot for restaurant openings - namely, the East Village, Lower Manhattan, the Meatpacking District and the Lower East Side. The Upper West Side is probably the most culinary-deprived neighborhood, but even it has a couple of solid standbys. You'll never go hungry in NYC, unless, of course, you can't decide where to eat.

16. Commune with the wild things

Giving new meaning to the term 'urban jungle,' the 265-acre Bronx Zoo works hard to entertain and educates visitors while preserving the natural needs and rhythms of the animals it houses. More than 4500 creatures totaling more than 600 species roam through the mostly unfenced outdoor settings, often separated from the public by nothing more than a moat or other natural barrier. Opened in 1899, the Bronx Zoo has survived by changing with the times. Check out the high-tech Congo Gorilla Forest, for example.

It's a 6.5 acre re-creation of an African rain forest, with treetop lookouts, natural pathways, overflowing greenery and about 300 animals, including two troops of lowland gorillas and some red river hogs.

Admission fees go toward caring for the zoo animals, and to the Wildlife Conservation Society's projects around the world. The Bronx Zoo often takes in wounded, sick or endangered animals that WCS partner programs discover in the wild. Three different rides, a monorail, an aerial tram and a shuttle offer you alternative perspectives of the park. Kids go wild for the mini-zoo built to their scale, and the monarch butterfly exhibit is positively otherworldly.

Reproduced with permission from New York Encounter ©2007 Lonely Planet Publications