Boston and New York - Better Late Than Never..

---

It's currently October the 28th, and it was almost a year ago that we began our round the world trip. More importantly, it's about 3 months since we arrived in Boston. "3 Months" I hear you cry?! "Surely you should have written this blog ages ago!". You'd be right, however one the blog writers has been putting off doing this for so long now that I've given up and decided to do it myself. Not wanting to embarrass that person, we'll give her a different name (Gelen Hiles), but it's her fault that you're getting a blog from me rather than her - which I know many of you will be disappointed about - "I enjoyed your blogs Dave, but Gelen's were really good!" (Read: 'much better')

Anyway.. now I have to try and remember what happened..

I'm pretty sure we got a train to Boston from Washington DC, and that it was a very nice train with comfy leather seats and loads of leg room. I'm also pretty sure that the place we stayed in Boston was over a mile from the train station and involved a rather unpleasant walk along the side a main road, past huge shops (such as Wal-Mart) and along a poorly paved footpath.

However, we had a couple of days in Boston and even with the photos I took, I'm not sure I can tell you what we really did. We seemed to spend most of our time there just walking around trying to think of something to do. We did visit Harvard and take a tour around the site, hearing stories of how Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore were room mates, the endless number of modules that the students have to take and how the statue of John Harvard doesn't actually look anything like him as the sculptor didn't have any images of the man to work from.

We also went around a warship and a maritime museum (we were in the area), which were both surprisingly interesting and finally we went to the 'mapparium' a massive stain glass filled room which shows the world as of 1935 (http://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/exhibits/mapparium). Though it was pretty impressive, the most fun thing to do was to stand at each end of the room and whisper. The sound would shoot around the room and anyone at the other end would be able to clearly hear what you'd said, but people in the middle would hear nothing. It was pretty cool and standing at one end hearing strange whispered voices was like being in a horror film. Or at least it would have been had the whispered voices not been saying things like "Dave, I'm hungry", "Dave, my legs are tired"...

And that was about it. To be honest Boston was a bit of a let down. The city wasn't half as nice as we'd expected, there really wasn't a great deal to do but it was big enough that walking around was a bit of pain.

Our final stop on the trip was New York City. So that morning, we crawled out of bed, packed our things and began the walk to the train station. Thankfully, on this walk we met another one of those lovely American people. Shortly after leaving the hotel a car pulled in next to us and a woman asked us if we wanted a lift. As always, her destination wasn't the train station, but she was more than happy to have us dump all our things in her car and drive us there anyway. In fact, the residents of Boston had been nothing but incredibly nice since we arrived, so it hadn't been too bad.

We then got a train, walked to the bus station and got a bus to New York. A little while later (I can't remember how long it took - maybe 2 hours?), we arrived. The bus pulled into a little bay and we collected our things and walked to the nearest subway station.

For anyone that complains about the London tube, take a couple of trips on the New York subway and you'll soon be singing the tube's praises. Not only was every subway station dark and full of shady looking characters but the whole thing looked like it hadn't seen any updates since the early 20th century. Everything was falling apart and, occasionally, signs seem to have been written by a resident 10 year old on pieces of old cardboard. Worst though, was the fact that these signs were often totally confusing and using the (very few and hard to find) maps was, for a tourist, dumbfounding.

For example, Americans don't say 'North' and 'South' they say 'uptown' and 'downtown'. This is fine, but we had no idea what that meant. Where on earth is 'town'?! Surely if you stay on a train going 'uptown' long enough then it will go past 'town' and then be going 'downtown' again...? Often there weren't just two choices either but 6 or 7 different trains we could get on all with different numbers and letters and all just going uptown or downtown.

What was our solution to the problem? It was to just take a guess, get on a train and see what the next station was. If we were going in the right direction, we'd stay on, if not, we'd get off at the next station and try again. On our short trip which should have involved one change, we must have managed to get on and off at 7 different stops.

Sometime later we did manage to 'navigate' our way to the correct place and we checked into our hotel. If anyone is thinking of staying in New York on a budget, I can recommend staying at the 'Pod Hotel', but just make sure you go when all the lifts are working. After a couple of nights both Helen and I would choose to climb 14 flights of stairs rather than wait around for it to turn up.

Here are the things we did in our 6 day stay in New York, provided to you in a neat orderly list:

- Took a ferry to Liberty Island to see the Statue of Liberty. Certainly worth doing, but make sure you book your tickets in advance. The tickets we'd ordered meant that we missed out on about 30 minutes of queuing, but still had a good 45 minutes to stand through. The ferry not only stopped on Liberty Island but also Ellis Island, where there was a decent museum on immigration.

- Went to see Shrek the Musical! Having read a little bit about Broadway tickets we learnt that the cheapest way to see a show was to go to the box office on the morning of a show and enter into a raffle. We did this and were fortunate enough to win (though about 30% of the people there also won) front row tickets for a small fee. Sounds pretty good eh? Unfortunately, front row tickets aren't all they're made out to be as you're so close to the stage that you can't see anything that's going on below knee height, making the tap dancing they did rather boring. Still, Gelen loved it!

- Had lunch with a friendly local. Whist trying to find where the Shrek tickets were being draw at, we met a local who was doing the same. After a bit of a chat we all went to lunch together and enjoyed some good food. He even said that if he won the tickets he would have given them to us, as he could go and see it anytime.

- Visit Times Square. Not a great deal to do but impressive none the less. Would be better if you got rid of all the people trying to sell you tickets to comedy shows. "Hey friend, do you like good comedy?", "No, I prefer bad comedy"

- Went to/saw the other New York landmarks - Grand Central Station, Empire State Building, Flatiron Building, Chrysler Building, Wall Street..

- Got caught in rainstorms. Yes, despite it being the middle of summer it chucked it down with rain on several occasions. The first time we were in our room and got to watch the lightning crashing down over the city from our 14th floor window. On the other occasions we were outside...

- Spend a full day in central park. We'd planned to only go for the morning but it's so darn big that we ended up spending the whole day there. It's a funny place, stuck right in the middle of one of the world's busiest cities, but big enough that at times it seems that no one else is around. We sat eating of lunch whist watching a game of amateur baseball, which was a laugh.

- Went to the international museum of photography. It was raining, and the museum was close so we paid twelve dollars each and headed in. It turned out that it was tiny, it was all on fashion (we should have checked this out before going in) and that it totally sucked.

- Saw several films being shot. In 6 days in New York we saw 3 films being shot, including the new Russell Brand one and one staring Queen Latifah. They tried to get me to play a leading role in both, but I politely declined.

And that was about it.. at least that's all I can remember. The only other thing I can think of is that I ate a 'Cheesy Potato Burrito' from Tacho Bell and that it wasn't half as nice as the name suggested it would be.

We got up very early on the last morning, grabbed a taxi to the airport (which Gelen's parents had kindly paid for) and got on our plane home. We then arrived back in London to another taxi waiting for us to take us all the way to Bristol (again paid for by Gelen's parents). On arrival was a lovely welcome home banner and a home made lasagne. Good times!

---