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.
Hello from sunny New York, blog fans! I’m currently sat in a Ben and Jerry’s bar somewhere near Times Square, which is the only place I could find that would sell me net access.
I arrived at my hostel last night after 15 hours travel, soaked through with sweat and utterly running on empty, but feeling good. Harlem is a really exciting place and it looks exactly like the movies said it would. New York subways look just like the ones in Silent Hill. Basically, modern culture has prepared me for life here.
Well, believe it or not, I’ve finally got round to organising myself, and I am now in possession of a rather expensive collection of flight tickets that will take me around the world. My flights are as follows:
London - JFK, New York 30th June 07
New York - LA Airport, Los Angeles 16 Aug 07
Los Angeles - Nadi, Fiji 30 Sep 07
Fiji - Auckland, New Zealand 10 Oct 07
Christchurch, New Zealand - Melbourne, Australia 30 Oct 07
Cairns, Australia - Singapore, Malaysia 5 Jan 08
Bangkok, Thailand - Heathrow, London 15 Feb 08
The last 2 flights are subject to change depending on how long I work in Australia.
Imagine a festival, a big one, perhaps Glastonbury. Take away the bands. Pave over the mud. Turn the tents into hostels, turn the market stalls into shops. That’s Amsterdam, more or less.
I was out there for the weekend to visit my World of Warcraft guild, which may well be the geekiest thing I’ve ever done, but in my defence, at least I was going outside to see them rather than just talking to them on Teamspeak. We were supposed to meet them at 6pm and go to a restaurant, but our flight was delayed by four hours, so we blew our compensation refreshment vouchers on beer, got drunk, and eventually left the plane feeling hazy in a totally unknown place with no-one to meet us or help us get to the meal. We set about trying to find our hostel but the directions that they gave us were extremely poor, so we ambled about looking like lost tourists with a bad map. Seeing our obvious confusion, a rather odd gentleman who smelt of weed asked us if we needed directions, but rather than pointing us in the right direction and carrying on, he walked with us and talked to us. At first I thought he was just being friendly, but it rapidly became obvious that he expected money. Eventually we convinced him that we only had English money and pressed a two pound coin into his hand to get rid of him. We took a long detour before turning around, for he had led us right past our hostel and to the other end of the street. We checked in, headed out, met up with the others, and sat in a bar for the evening drinking beer out of very small glasses.
Today, while we were waiting for our presentations to begin, two people opened the door to the room we were in, whispered to each other, pointed at me, whispered some more, and then closed the door.