Hi hi,
How the hell are you? Trying to release the inner Australian.
New York was fantastic. I can recommend it to everyone. It was very beautiful. All of the buildings are really cool. They are all really different in there own way and all together look very nice. The parks are really awesome too. They are very well designed and are always chock full of people. People all live in apartments so know one has a backyard that they could use to do normal backyard type things in. So, they do everything in the parks. There were several groups with guitars. They weren’t busking they were just sharing music. People also do fancy fighting excersises and BEST of all, there were a whole bunch of women in Central Park lying on towels, sunbaking in their bikinis. You should all go and do this in Kings Park.
We did a lot of things in New York. I took my reference for these things mostly from Futurama. For example, we stayed in a hotel in New Jersey. It was only a 10 minute drive from Manhattan so it didn’t matter but I was reminded of the time when Fry was looking for an apartment. He found one that was awesome and really cheap and asked the real estate guy what was wrong with it. Hi response was ‘Technically we are in New Jersey’ and Fry ran away. There were many Futurama recollections on this trip.
I went with one of my students from the language college. Her and another girl we met up with from Germany were who I hung around with on the trip. It is them you will see in many of the photos. One of them is Nadja and one is Hilka. We went to Times square which is the main tourist drag. It has plenty of shops and is where Broadway is. There were many flashing lights and impressive billboards. There were many people everywhere. We went to the empire state building. That gave us a very nice view of ALL of Manhattan. Everything is very closely compacted together and you can that many of New Yorks famous buildings are very close together. We drove over to Brooklyn and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge back into Manhattan. That was quite fun actually. We went to Pier 17, which was just a mall on the river that had a few little galleries around the place. We then did a walking tour of the financial district and saw the stock exchange and Wall street etc. I thought this was a bit boring but Nadja is very much in to economics and was super excited. It takes all sorts. Then we went on a river cruise to see the Statue of Liberty. That also gave us a good view of the different areas of New York. But, it went for two hours and by the end I was almost asleep. Luckily, at this point the boat turned sharply throwing us from our seats. We awoke just in time to disembark. We did some shopping down 5th avenue and saw the NBC studios, Rockefeller centre, Radio City Music Hall, The Library, Brant Park and some churches.
On Sunday we did Central Park. I didn’t want to spend 4 hours here so I went to the Museum of Modern Art. It was AWESOME. There was a Dadaism exhibition and all of the permanent collection was made up of very famous, instantly recognisable paintings and artist. I saw Starry Night. There was stuff by everybody and you got a free audio tour. It was great.
Then we did Greenwich Villiage, SoHo, Little Italy and China Town. Greenwick Village and Soho were very cool. Interesting shops and cheaper than other parts of the city. Little Italy was like an outdoor bazaar. Busy but very friendly. Chinatown was CRAZY. There were many stall selling discount souvenirs but there were also people walking up whispering “Louis Vutton, Dior, Gucci” or “Rolex, Cartier”. If you said yes you would be ferried around the corner down some steps into a tiny room stuffed to the brim with counterfeit handbags. This was supercool at first but then physically and emotionally draining. Hen we left and sat in a park watching a man do martial arts with his shirt off and listening to people sing and play the guitar. It was fun.
On the way back we stopped at an outlet mall in Pennsylvania. It was awesome. I bought two watches and a pair of shoes.
I have been back working at the language school. It is awesome because so far I have invites to stay with people in France, Italy and Germany. Awsome, This is my longest post ever. You should all follow suit by writing YOUR longest comment ever.
