Friday, November 04, 2005
"You say tom-a-to, I say tomato..."
...New York, and a very belated blog post! After an epic flight through Miami we arrived at JFK (enormous immigration queues in Miami, and fingerprints & digital photo's for everyone entering the country, followed by our flight being cancelled). The only upside was we got upgraded to 1st class! NY is great, and oddly familiar from watching so many movies and TV shows (Law & Order;). We did some fun tourist stuff - the Empire State, Staten Island ferry, Central Park and the Met. All great fun, but the best thing was just hanging out, visiting bars in different areas (East Village was our favourite), shopping, and trying loads of yummy food (the diners were awesome). I had my belated birthday here (the real one was spent searching for Anacondas in the Amazon), so we went to a really nice Vietnamese restaurant in Chelsea and a couple of cool bars. I also treated myself to a "hot towel shave" at the local Greek barbers to get rid of the travel beard. Best shave i've ever had but a bit nervy (big Greek guy with a cut-throat to your neck). Washington Square Park was funny - the guys playing chess, and two runs for big & small dogs respectively - we wondered what to do if you had a medium sized dog! I also had a toilet emergency and needed to use the "cubicles" only to find there weren't any (cubicles that is, although the toilets were still there). I guess they had too many problems with drugs etc. Anyway, not very British really (just don't make eye contact I kept telling myself...)! A lot of Manhattan is really a bit ra, monied and swanky (Chelsea, Soho etc) but there are also some really cool places. NY is an amazing place and really steals a little bit of your heart...we'll definitely be going back.
# posted by Pete @ 10:46 PM 
