New York Day Four

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Today was a lazy day. After breakfast I met up with Bex for a stroll in central park. Her camp seems worse for the kids, but more fun for staff in the form of subsidised parties and suchlike every other weekend when the kids had gone home. It had no internet though, so I'd have hated it!

After she departed in search of one of the many art museums, I went for a swim in the free pool in central park. I cunningly left anything of value locked up in the hostel, leaving me with only my clothes. As I walked through the gates, I was accosted by the drawling park attendant. Apparently one must bring a lock to go swimming. I wondered if I could, pretty please, just go for a swim and leave my shirt by the poolside. This was apparently impossible. If it had been a towel, well that would have been another matter. Not to be defeated, I just went and hid my shirt in the park nearby and dived in.

After lunch, I went to the Rockefeller Plaza which was impressive, but lacked anything much to do, so I came back to the hostel, went for another swim and came back to the hostel. By now it was about seven o'clock, so I sat on the terrace at the back of the hostel to be a little social. Here five or six of us sat, two passing an acoustic guitar between them. I was also offered free alcohol from two sources: a Brazilian girl called Andressa who had a bottle of pineapple rum (and was feeling the effects of a couple of glasses), and an American named Dan who had, like me, been confined to a summer camp for the last two months and had more palatable whiskey in a hip flask.

We sat for an hour or two, until someone suggested that we head out to see Les Paul play. With the cruel logic of the young, we figured that at 92 (ish) he'd be dead soon, so we may as well see him while we still could. By this time, the Brazilian girl was more than a little bit the worst for wear, and attracted some especially leering comments from the african americans we had to pass to get to the subway. Once inside the subway, things got a little more amusing as she attempted to start singing 'Another Brick in the Wall', but forgot the words after the first two lines, and had to be coached a line at a time. The result was largely beyond any words.

The show itself was short, but fairly impressive. At times, it felt like he'd lost the plot a little, but still managed to be amusing. It was probably intentional that he stuttered when described his female bass player as 'a great ass-asset', but that didn't seem to matter all that much. Afterwards, we got a pizza between us (I'd had 3three plums for dinner) and headed back as a group of three, leaving Dan and Andressa (by this time the others were trying to decide whether she was a lap dancer or prostitute because of the cost of the drinks she was getting, which they couldn't see how she, as a brazilian, could afford. - and because she was amply equipped for either role) to, in her lilting brazilian asset, 'party'. The next morning, he looked very much like the cat who'd been given a great deal of cream - yet had the gall to complain about how exhausted he was.

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