Travel Like a Local
A Positively Authentic New York Experience
Are you ready for your first post-pandemic vacation? Then Positively Authentic Tours has just the trip for you. Our itineraries get you off the beaten path. Try our one-day tour of New York City and learn what it feels like to actually live in the Big Apple!
A Local Travel Experience
Our tour begins promptly at 7 AM when you will begin your Positively Authentic New York experience with a rush-hour commute. You will be packed into a genuine MTA subway car that will provide no heat in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer and no intelligible announcements over the PA system all year round. While tourists over-pay for double-decker buses and expensive river cruises, you will experience an authentic taste of local travel. Feel free to join your fellow passengers in a brief nap as the train meanders through a seemingly endless expanse of tunnels. Savor the fragrance of both unnamable foods and unwashed bodies as you start your day with this most traditional New York ritual.
Positively Authentic Dining
While your hotel may have a breakfast buffet stacked with a perfectly generic selection of eggs, pancakes and waffles, we will instead enjoy an authentic New York breakfast. As soon as we depart from the subway, we will line up at a genuine local food cart and choose from a selection of greasy donuts and rubbery rolls. See if you can find the bagel that hasn’t gone stale! Like true New Yorkers, we will scarf down our breakfasts as we navigate the crowded streets, following the local custom of elbowing any pedestrians who walk too close. If you’re lucky, you may experience a slight indigestion after your meal is complete.
Architecture the Way New Yorkers Experience It
Since real New Yorkers can’t be bothered to gawk at the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, our tour will instead offer a more authentic architectural experience. You will be led into a midtown office building, complete with an elevator that opens and shuts with a sliding gate. Feel the dread and resignation of a native New Yorker as you stare at mouse droppings on the 15th floor and consider the rust on the exposed overhead pipes. Walk through the genuine offices of an import/export company and marvel at the sounds of electric typewriters and rotary phones. If you’re lucky, the boss will emerge from his office to expose himself.
Lunch-Time like a Local
New Yorkers don’t have time for lunch, so instead of stopping for a midday meal, we will participate in a more Positively Authentic New York experience: going to the dentist at noon. Feel free to read the magazines as you sit on a reupholstered sofa and wait for the receptionist to call you. Don’t worry if you forgot to bring your insurance card. The dentist won’t accept it anyway. But she will be happy to give you a check-up for the cash that you would have surely wasted by dining at a themed restaurant in Times Square. Open wide!
Home Stay with a Family of Native New Yorkers
We end our tour with the rarest of New York experiences: an evening with a Positively Authentic local family. No fewer than three generations have lived in this rent-controlled apartment we will visit in the Bronx, a veritable museum of security locks and window guards and TV cables dangling from the ceiling. Your hosts will present you with a freshly prepared glass of tap water as you get settled on the love seat that you will sleep on later tonight. You will choose from a variety of regional dining options, ranging from slices at the neighborhood pizzeria to chow mein from the Chinese take-out joint. Gather at the kitchen table and break bread with the locals as they regale you with Positively Authentic New York stories about the horrible mayor, the impossible traffic and, most of all, why they should have left the city years ago.
Bonus Street Crime Experience
For many visitors, a trip to Gotham would be incomplete without a taste of the criminality that once made the city so infamous. While New York has experienced a decline in crime since its heyday in the 1970s, there are still any number of devastating experiences — ranging from pick-pocketing to mugging to outright murder — waiting for the adventurous traveler. Meet your guide just outside Pelham Park at midnight for an evening that neither you nor your loved ones may ever forget.
New for the Summer of 2021: Get Assaulted by a Police Officer!
