"The end of my affair with the west coast" / "No sleep til Brooklyn" / Chicago and all that jazz!

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Alright so again I've not done so well with updating this. I even forgot to update about the most bizarre thing i've done on this whole trip - I saw a movie in a funeral home! Don't ask why, that's just weird American weirdness for you! Actually I should correct myself, that's California for you!

What else have i been up to? I got a tatoo in San Francisco, I went to Yosemite national park, I did lots of fun things in Palo Alto like visiting the Jelly Belly factory... um I forgot what else.

Kyli (another one of the counsellors from camp) and I went to New York, which was crazy, intimidating and amazing. On the day we got there the airport people tried their best to lose our bags (and were so blase about the fact that they hadn't arrived on our flight, which was what really pissed us off. They turned up on a later flight but it was still annoying), and then the hostel told us (at 10am) that despite advertising a 24hour check-in, we couldn't actually check into the hostel til 4pm! Again, extremely pissed off. We were exhausted from not sleeping on the overnight flight (which had two stops! Two! Even my UK-USA flight only had one stop!) and had nowhere to go (they even made us pay to store our bags, hmmph! Don't stay at HI New York, even if it is the biggest hostel in the world) so we slept in Central Park like bums. Not the best welcome to the city.

The next day we did sightseeing tours of Manhatten Island, which was ideal cause I got my bearings a bit and saw lots of the city. It's kind of an artificial way of seeing a place but it was exactly what i needed in this case. The night tour was brilliant, Times Square at night all lit up is insane. It's actually law that the first 6 stories are clad with advertising billboards, and they have to be lit up in some way. They make so much money from the advertising that a good proportion of the apartments around it are empty, they don't need the money! Crazy. The next day we did a tour of Brooklyn but it was so rainy and miserable all I wanted was to go inside somewhere, drink nice hot tea and sleep. We also took a ferry to Staten Island so we got a good view of the Statue of Liberty, which was cool, but I thought it'd be bigger actually. Maybe we just weren't close enough. Kyli has some good pictures on her camera which i need to steal... actually i need to steal pictures from a lot of people since mine broke at camp. I have disposable cameras but i don't know how well the pictures will turn out on those.

Anyway from there Kyli went home and I flew on to Chicago to stay with my friend Kate USA, who i used to work with at the Old Bar. Chicago seems really nice, although I've just had a little taster of the city as mostly we've just been hanging about in her brilliant apartment which is near the DePaul university campus where she studies. I did a big walking tour one day, I went to Millenium Park with the big shiny bean sculpture (i love it and took lots of pictures), and up the Hancock observatory, did a whole load of things, it was fun. Yesterday we went to Lincoln Park Zoo, which is great fun. I forgot I love zoos. I haven't been to one in ages before the San Francisco Zoo (a LOT bigger) and now this one. Today we didn't really do anything cause it's been all rainy and horrible and i had to organise dumb things like a hostel in Toronto, but it's been great just relaxing here in comfort. I even have my own room here cause it's a 4-bed apartment and (until yesterday) it's just been her and her flatmate Kathryn (who is awesome too). The other night we went out drinking, and ended up singing No Diggity at a karaoke bar! Completely bizarre!

Anyway I leave tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn so i should really a) pack and b) get to bed!

I go home in a week tomorrow, I'm looking forward to all my travelling in Canada and the north-east but i do really want to go home too.

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