New York, New York

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29th May - 2nd June

We arrived at LaGuardia Airport in New York at 8pm and took the Bus to get to the hostel, this was okay although it did get quite crowded and travel through some interesting neighbourhoods. A $2 fare made it really good value.

The hostel (Candy Hostel) we were staying at was quite basic with nothing in the room apart from the bed and shared bathroom / toilet. Luckily it was quiet this weekend and the people did a good job of keeping it clean. The location was very good though on the upper west side (96th Street) and only a block from the subway station.

On Friday we had a look around. The subway is quite old and the stations are grotty but there are lots of trains, lots of lines and you can get basically anywhere in Manhattan on it. We went and had a look at the World Trade Centre site, which was quite sombre, it was interesting to see construction has started. After this we went along Wall Street (saw lots of tall building) and then went on the ferry to see the Statue Of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty, has a lot of visitors and a security process similar to boarding Airports. It was a frustrating 30 minutes. The statue is quite impressive and the view looking back at the New York shows is very good, you really see how big the skyline is.

After this we explored Chinatown and little Italy which border each other. It was evening at this point so we had dinner and had a look at the carnival stalls which were out. On the way back we stopped at Time Square which was bustling. This city is certainly alive in the evening..

On Saturday, Brenda went shopping at the Woodbury Common Outlet Mall and I explored a bit of town. Unfortunately it started raining so that stopped my plan of walking across Brooklyn Bridge. That night we had dinner around our area.

The next day we went to Central park, which was full of New Yorker enjoying the start of Summer. We walked around looking at the sights such as the Chrysler Building, the Empire States Building and Madison park. We also saw a parade for the Philippines independence day which was a surprise. This was our last night in the US, amazing how time flies.

On Monday we left for JFK Airport to catch our 3:35pm flight to Frankfurt. Once we got there we found the flight was delayed by 6 hours which meant we 8 hours to kill at the airport. After deciding that was too long we took the AirTrain to the nearest stop, the suburb of Jamaica with a plan to watch a movie. Jamaica was run down, and I wouldn’t recommend walking there after dark, but we found a theatre and watched ‘What happens in Vegas’. It was a pretty funny movie place we now recognised a lot of the locations in Vegas and New York.

We got back safely to the Airport, waited and eventually got on our flight. After three weeks in the US it was time to say goodbye and head off to Frankfurt, Germany to begin the European leg of our trip.

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