Merry Xmas everyone! Hope y'all had a great day, bet it was warmer than ours! Ha! Updating from NYC today, but haven't written about San Diego and Tijuana, so I guess we'll start from there...
We went with a group from the hostel we were staying at to Tijuana on the 22nd, what a mad place! Crossing over the border to get into Mexico is easy, there's just a big gate that you walk though, getting out was harder, the line we waited in was massive, stood in line for almost an hour. And they check your passport to come back in to America, such a contrast to crossing over the other way! As soon as we walk over the border, it's obvious that we're in a very different country. There are taxi's on the street all lined up and the drivers come up to you asking if you're 'ready to go' and 'where do you want to go, I take you' etc. They wouldn't really take no for an answer either, they just keep hounding you! Next are the people trying to get you into their restaurants. Some of the places had 5 or 6 guys lined up outside begging you to come in and eat/drink! Some places were tempting too - beer for 99c??!!! We had an initial plan to take off by ourselves and check out the city, but after going in, we decided to stick with the group. Every street corner in the main street had a donkey painted like a zebra with guys charging a dollar for a photo on the donkey with a sombrero, the poor animals looked so sad, we felt really bad for them. We had dinner and a couple of maghirtas and beers then left with the tour group back to San Diego. It was a very interesting day. Glad we went over, but we decided that we wouldn't have stayed any longer than a day down there. It was a pretty scary place.
The next day we took the bus out to San Diego zoo and spent the day out there. They had some pretty wicked animals, and it's a HUGE zoo! Saw some pandas and even a polar bear :) It was good fun. After we finished, we headed straight to the airport for our 9pm flight to NYC.
I'm going to have to do the NYC update later on today, or maybe tomorrow because my internet card is just about to run out. Have also been trying to find somewhere to add photos, but all the internet cafes here have the computers in a box, so no memory stick input or cable input! It's frustrating! Will keep looking for somewhere to upload though.
Write more soon.....
J & X
xx
