New York City, Manhattan

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New York, New York. We landed in the Big Apple, and well it is big. We thought Las Vegas was crazy. This place is something else. The whole of New York needs to take one big deep breath and count slowly to ten. Everything is a hundred miles an hour. It just doesn’t stop. The roads are chock a block. Have no idea how anyone one drives around here, don’t think I would even attempt it. It seems you drive flat out when you can, honk the horn and then wait and wait. Then honk the horn again. Manhattan, like the rest of the US has been, is clean. Which is amazing considering there are 7 million people plus god knows how many others here. People are friendly and helpful, but still have that rude New York thing going on, which I think is brought on by the flat out society they live in or maybe they think they have some sort of reputation to live up to.
The only seedy and scary thing we’ve seen here, apart from the price of things, was when we first arrived. The shuttle bus taking us from the airport to the hotel made a drop of in the middle of Harlem. The look on the faces of the people who were getting dropped off was priceless. They had obviously booked their hotel over the internet or without doing much homework on its location. It must have been real cheap and they probably thought they had the bargain of a lifetime. The place looked like something out of a gang movie. There were people hustling on the street and groups of people all hangin’ tough. They all stopped doing what they were doing, even the guys in the shop were looking out the window in amazement as these two nervous white, and getting paler by the minute, people walked across to the street to this shambles of a hotel, It was half boarded up and covered in graffiti. I think the bus driver even asked them again if they were sure that this was where they were staying. I bet they caught the first taxi out of there, probably after they were mugged.
Our hotel was located between Times Square and Central Park, in Broadway, right next to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Skyscraper National Park is what it should be renamed. It is hard to take photos of anything because everything is vertical.
We did all the touristy things, went to the Top of the Rock, Rockefeller Tower. Great views over the city. Saw Ground Zero, which is just one big construction site and doesn’t look anything like it must have. Statue of Liberty, which has had the most stringent security we’ve ever seen or experienced. It is worse than an airport. You have to go through two lots of screening, taking off half your clothes, shoes etc. Then you go through metal detectors and then another bomb scanning machine. Talk about freedom and liberty. Saw were John Lennon was shot, passed the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld shop, went to Wall St, gave them the bird for destroying the value of our dollar, saw Phantom of the Opera at a Broadway show, caught the ferry to Staten Island, rode the subway, saw Heath Ledgers house, and saw a heap of Paparazzi hanging around out the from of the Ritz Carlton. We stopped for a few minutes and then out walks Jessica Simpson. It could have been a real celebrity, but we got the photo nonetheless, now if we can just sell it to some trashy mag we’ll be right.
Everything is pretty expensive, but we knew that. The best bargain though is the little Hot Dog vans. $1 for a hotdog, $1!! Can’t go wrong at that price. Also found a bloke that sells coffee and a doughnut for $1.50. But the best part is that it is probably the best coffee we’ve had since we left Australia, and it’s cheap. The Americans cannot make coffee, any sort of coffee. It all taste like swill. They don’t even have kettles and I’m yet to see a jar of Nescafe or even International Roast anywhere.
Bye for now. Next stop, Boston, for a tea party.

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