Week 1
Phoar, it’s been a busy week. On Monday morning I met a couple of girls, Romi (Australia) and Sarah (Scotland), who were awesome. Sarah and I ended up going to the Natural History museum and later we met up with Romi to generally run around and eat and suchlike. In the evening we got drunk and played a card game called Spoons with some others from the hostel, including 2 new guys, John (Britain) and Dave (Ireland). We decided that everyone would be known by their nationalities at that point and I’m struggling to remember real names.
Tuesday was a busy day: we walked for 14 hours in total. We started with the Empire State Building (Oh the views, the views), then we went to Times Square and ran around the M&Ms store and Macy’s. We went over to Statten Island and all of us thought that, to be honest, we thought that the Statue of Liberty would be a lot bigger. On Statten, we bought iced coffee and relaxed by the sea front, and it was perfect: we talked and laughed, and sunbathed, and watched the sea, and it was everything I could ever want out of a holiday afternoon. That kind of moment is the reason I always wanted to travel, and it feels great to find out that it really happens. By then it felt like I’d known everyone there for years, which is a really strange feeling.
As the sun started to go down, we headed for Brooklyn Bridge, and after a considerable amount of subway faffing which probably cost me in the region of $6, we made it up there. The view of NYC at night is utterly unreal and I just don’t know how to describe it - I don’t think I even managed to take decent pictures of it. The whole place glows.
Wednesday was the 4th July, which is a public holiday here, so we wandered through Central Park. The girls went out to the shop and we (the boys) left without them, so we were treated to a torrent of abuse when we returned to the hostel. We started drinking and then wandered down into Brooklyn to watch the fireworks, which were fantastic and thousands of times bigger than any display I’ve ever seen before. I didn’t bother taking any photos becase I wanted to watch the whole thing instead of looking at my camera all night, but I’m sure some will turn up from my friends eventually. We went home and I collapsed pretty fast.
Today I move hostel, and Sarah goes to Boston, and Romi goes to Mexico, so I just had to say goodbye to everyone. That was a pretty weird thing to do, but I guess it’s all part of it. They were a really great bunch of people and I’m glad I met them because it’s really put me at ease about the whole traveling thing. Romi was especially cool to talk to because she’s almost finished a year of traveling so she starts sentences with things like “when I was in the Czech Republic” and tells stories about times when she accidentally hired a prostitute in Vietnam. She makes me feel like I might make it home in one piece. Sarah is exactly, 100% like the Scottish girl in Green Wing. Actually identical, it’s scary, but brilliant.
Also, would you bloody believe it, I met 3 girls from Southampton last night.
I move to a hostel in midtown tonight. No more Harlem for me - it’s been a really cool place to live though. Harlem’s got bags of character: hardly any franchised stores, street parties, little kids playing ball, everything you’d want from the NYC suburbs. Living in midtown will be dull by comparison, I expect to leave in 2-3 days and go to, ooooh, I don’t know - maybe Detroit or Chicago, maybe Boston.