8th August-11th August, NYC, USA

8th August-11th August, NYC, USA

After nearly 9 months of travelling, our final stop was New York!! I was so excited as so many films have been filmed here, and I wanted to reanact all the places Macaulay Culkin had visited in Home Alone 2 and also Hitch with Will Smith!

Not keen on getting the old Greyhound again, we were told we could get a 'Chinese Bus'! So we headed to China Town where you can get a cheaper bus (20 dollars instead of 40) which would take about 4 hours or so. Other than the horrific toilet, it was pleasant. Driving in is so exciting, as you see all the famous skyscrapers including the Empire State Building and I also caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty!!

We were dropped in Chinatown, so needed to jump on the Tube to our hostel, which Jake had pre-booked with Hostel World. Once off, we realised we were actually nowhere near the hostel, and I strated to feel slightly intimidated walking through the famous Harlem! You hear bad things about Harlem all the time, so you immediately associate it with gangs and shootings! However, after 15 minutes of walking towards the Hostel and seeing some people presence too, I liked it! The culture was nice to experience and I like the way they talk! Theres lots of children playing on the streets and I liked the smaller scale corner shops. We found our hostel, which we thought would be a gangspot, which was actually pleasant! We dropped off our stuff in the dorm (I was sharing with 9 boys again!) and headed out to experience NYC!!!!!!!!

1st impressions of Manhattan, I loved it! chaotic, noisy, crowds and too many lights, just as it appears on the television, but thats what you love it for! We got the tube to the famous Times Square, which is probably the busiest place I have ever been too! I have never seen so many people in one place. The advertising all around on billboards was on such a huge scale. There is a place you can sit in which faces out onto Times Square, and its just over whelming! I dragged Jake into the huge Toys R' Us which even grown ups get excited about! For children, its like a gigantic play room, with impressive lego structures, including one of the Empire State Building with King Kong at the top, which I think took over 300 hours to build! Masses of screaming excited children were running around, but I didnt mind, I was acting just like one of them!

We visited Madison Sguare and also the Rocafella Square. These places are fantastic for eating out, drinking, and sight seeing! New York is famous for its food, so were excited to try everything. We had some pizza for dinner, which you can buy by the slice for about 2 dollars off the street. These are enormous though and definitely filling! Delicious, I wanted more grease! Jake got a hotdog and I had pretzels. The atmosphere wandering around New York is elcetrifying, as a tourist it was spectacular for me, as everything was on a gigantic scale. I spotted the MNM shop! You cant miss it as giant MNM's look like they are climbing up the building. Inside, it was chaos! I couldnt get over the amount of merchandise being sold under the famous brand! I didnt realise anything other than the confectionary chocolates existed! There was towels, mugs, tshirts, ornaments, sweets, clocks and jsut so much more. It's over whelming, and the queue is like something you'd expect when somebody famous was signing autographs or something! The queue was enormous, so it put me off buying anything!

Across from the MNM shop, you find Hersheys!!! Famous American chocolate. Jale only wanted to go in because he saw free samples being given out as you walk in.

The next day we visited Brooklyn Bridge, which was stunning but scary to walk across, as Ive developed an annoying fear of heights (after those reckless drivers in Ecuador speeding round high mountains, with sheer drops) so I couldnt really stand near the edge. One thing that I didnt like is the fact, that the bicycle lanes marked on the bridge are reallyy wide, so every couple of minutes you have to watch out as the cyclists were arrogant enough to think they had not just right-of-way, but right of the whole bridge! One cyclyst who nearly ran me over deserved to go flying over the edge. Arrogant Yank.

In Brooklyn we walked around and ended up at a restaurant called One Street Pizza which is another famous spot for the stars. This time, pictures of Whoopi Goldberg and Al Pacino were on the wallks, and Im not suprised they liked it, the pizza was delicious, huge slices which I quickly devoured! And at only 2 dollars a slice, you cant complain!

The following day, we had put aside to visit the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Lucky for us, the weather was scorching hot, brilliant for pictures. Boats leave every half hour or so to Liberty Island, also stopping at Ellis Island. Im surprised the boat didnt sink, with the number of people packed on it. You have to book tickets in advance to go in the crown, but we'd left it until the night before, so we only had tickets for the island, not to go in the famous statue. Views were fantastic, the statue was spectacular, huge and it was brilliant to finally be able to see it, after all the films Id seen with her in. You can stay as long as you want on Liberty island, but once you've seen the statue, there isnt anything else to see other than the gift shop, so you can queue up and wait for a boat to take you to Ellis Island and then back to Manhattan. Ellis Island is famous for the huge number of immigrants that would pass through into the states, and has a musueum which attracts thousands each year.

We headed back to Manhattan where we went for some lunch and then the famous Empire State Building. You should pre-book tickets to avoid some of the queues. Security is not as bad as I thought, you cant take in any sprays, but Id left mine at home, after learning my lesson at the Capital Building! A lift takes you upto the 80th floor in just 45secs! From here you can wait for another lift to teh 86th floor, or you can just walk.! We walked up (I was out of breath and it was only 6 floors, shameful!) and the views were out of this world! Spectacular, and because the sky was so clear you could really see the detail of most buildings! The major downpoint was the number of people up there at one time. Almost 100 or maybe more, all wanting pictures were crowded around at the top, all of us trying to get a picture with a view, which often included someones ponytail! But it felt amazing to be at the top, looking over Manhattan, seeing all the tiny yellow cabs at the bottom!

We got some fantastic shots, then headed down back to Times Square for some gift-shopping! We had been away from home for nearly nine months, but as we'd been backpacking, it wasnt practical to buy stuff along the way, as we simply didnt have the room, the money and didnt want anything to break. But we couldnt go home without buying our families some famous Hersheys chocolate from Times Square! Spending our last night away in New York was so much fun and I couldnt believe we'd made it through South America alive with enough cash to visit NYC! The atmosphere was fantastic, and I got upset as I didnt want to leave.

The next day, would be our last day away, as we would be flying that night. We decided to spend it in Central Park! The weather was great, and the park is beautiful. Just enormous! And it feels surreal to be sat in such a peaceful spot, surrounded by Skyscrapes, but you cant hear the traffic as the trees block out the sound. It took us the almost the whole day to walk from the start to the end of the park, brining us only a few blocks from our hostel in Harlem! I decided I would definitely come backto New York, but with more money next time! We did New York on a very tight budget, so unfortunately couldnt do any shopping, which NY is famous for! So I would definitely be coming back.

That evening we headed to JFK airport, not looking forward to the next 24 hours home! It was cheaper to fly via somewhere else in Europe, than it was to fly direct to the UK, so we would be flying via Amsterdam to Dublin, then jumping on a cheap Ryanair flight home. I was very sad to be leaving and also not looking forward to the long travel time. I just wanted to go home and make alot of money, so I could come back out and do it all again!

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