New York continued

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I am currently sitting in the car heading to Montreal together with four crazy British lads. Google maps told me we are going to drive 644 km and it will take about 7h20. We rented the car this morning, a Dodge Viper which soaks up fuel like a leaking sponge. But hey, we are finally roadtripping and I am stoked! The plan is to go to Montreal today (Saturday the 19th) and stay until Monday. Then we go on to Mont-Tremblant to do some snowboarding for three days. As the lift pass is ridiculously pricy I am glad we are spending some time in Montreal as well. Will still be an expensive trip, but definitely not as expensive as it would have been if I had gone through with my original plan. I wanted to go to Whistler to go snowboarding for ten days, but after some calculations it ended up being about 2000 dollar. Bit pricy.. I might go to Vancouver with the British gang after the term ends, which is around the 23rd of April. Isn’t as expensive as snowboarding and the flight is much cheaper because you can book it a few months in advance. But I still have to run some more calculations on that to make sure I keep enough money to stay in Canada until July. The trip they want to do starts in Vancouver and goes through the Rockies to Jasper and Banff and some other places. The concept is that you buy a bus pass that takes you to all these places and you can get on and off whenever you want. So if we like a place and we want to stay longer, we can just stay as long as we want. On the site it said you can do the tour in 7 days, but you’ll be in the bus for most of the time I recon. The Brits are planning on doing the trip in three weeks. I am seriously considering going, but I haven’t decided yet. Would be awesome though.

There has been quite a while since my last entry. I felt a little bit guilty to make everyone waiting for new stories about Canadian adventure. Unfortunately after my trip to New York I had so much school work to catch up to. I was insane. They really do not consider students having a social life here. The amount of work they give is not funny. As I missed the first week of school because of my exams in Holland I was behind already. The second week I still hadn’t figured out all the classes I was going to take, plus I already had a quiz that week and an assignment to write. The third week I spent most of my time in New Jersey and New York, and didn’t do any homework of course. So the last couple of weeks were mostly filled with sitting inside, attending classes and reading textbooks. It made me realize how much I love to be traveling and visiting new places, and how little I like to work hard. It’s pretty bad but it’s just how it is. Luckily I can put myself to work when I really need to.

So let me tell you a little bit more about my time in New Jersey.

After the visit to Dan’s school we went back to the house and I already felt quite at home. They have such a beautiful house, I was really amazed. Especially because all the houses look so cute from the outside. They seem all the same to me, wooden houses with a porch, little windows, a flat roof and three cars in front of the house. They may appear cute and small from the outside, but once you enter the house it is quite big! They had massive, incredibly comfortable couches, beautiful chandeliers, a big dining table, a massive fridge of course, a kitchen island to sit at, and everything is open so that makes it look even bigger. Oh and of course multiple TVs in the same room..

(passing Kingston, Ontario)

I went to bed early because I was tired from the long bus ride. And I was excited for the next day, finally heading to New York! We left around 11 o’clock to go to NY. We went to see the Museum of National History where the planetarium is. It was so big, there were all sorts of different themes in the museum like dinosaurs, sea life, humans, geology, planets. Basically anything you could find in a museum. After walking around there for a bit we headed off to the planetarium to see a movie in the big globelike structure about how starts evolve and die again, called journey to the stars. It was really impressive, it looked like you were actually floating around in space. The movie was displayed on the ceiling, which was round. The whole movie dome was one big ball, never seen anything like it. Whoopi Goldberg was the narrator, it made it extra special. I love the way she told the story, nicely exaggerated.

We measured how much we would weigh if we were on the moon (didn’t tell me anything because it was in pounds) and we were on our way to get some food. I could see central park when we got out of the planetarium but we didn’t have time to go through it. We went to Ray’s pizza for some HUGE pizza slices. I thought I could finish three, but I already had a hard time with the second one. We didn’t stay long because we still had to take the subway to Broadway. That was where we were going to see the Lion King. We were both really excited, Dan had already mentioned he wanted to go there in Tilburg. We actually had tickets for the week before, but as my bus was cancelled because of the snowstorm he had to cancel them. I’m happy we were still able to go, the show was amazing. How the stage was designed was so beautiful and I even got goose bumps at one point. The woman playing Rafiki sung so beautifully, it was amazing. It reminded me of how much I loved the Lion King, hadn’t seen that movie for so long. The funny thing is that almost everyone in the audience was above18. Wasn’t expecting that.
The next day we stayed in Jersey and had a typical American day. A lot of eating, watching tv, going to the mall and hanging around. A friend of Dan from Holland came to visit, Raoul. We picked him up and went to the bowling alley. I sucked at it, but I had fun anyway.

On Saturday we went back to New York again. This time we had more time to wander around the city. We started off by going to Central Park. It was beautiful, all white and really huge. We walked along to some big mall where they had a cartoon network store (closed unfortunately) and a electronics store where you could sit and watch movies on different massive flat screen tvs. I dragged the guys out of there and we were off to Dunkin’ Donuts. I had the most amazing chocolate filled donut ever and some more mediocre American coffee. Then we walked to the Rockefeller center. The big Christmas tree wasn’t there anymore but you could still see people ice skating on the square. One man in particular caught our attention; he was skating like some fairy on acid. Really funny, no shame.
We carried on back to Times Square to get tickets for a comedy show. There were guys selling tickets on almost every corner and we bought tickets at the first place we came across. After that we looked at some shops and there was another guy approaching us for comedy shop tickets. He convinced us the place we bought tickets from was awful. We ended up getting two tickets for two different comedy shows for about 10 dollars. The comedy shows were amazing! I am so glad we came across that guy. We went to two totally different places and they were both so funny. My cheeks were hurting so bad after that night. It was a good end to my trip to New York.

Now I finally understand why my aunt loves NY so much. I didn’t think I would find it as good as she did, but it was amazing. That town really gives you the feeling that you can do anything you want. And I have the feeling that the town never sleeps. Don’t know if I would ever want to live there, but I’ll definitely be back some day!

As a last funny remark before I forget; the guy I told you about that was trying to be cool, apparently he remembered my name when he helped filling in my form and he added me on Facebook! I couldn’t believe it. I asked him if that was even legal and he said I could delete him if I wanted, he didn’t care. So that’s exactly what I did.
We are now in the hostel in Montreal and I’m going off to bed. Will make sure to write some more about the weekend we had in Toronto and my birthday.

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