New York New York

Time of our lives!

We had four nights and five days in NYC (Arrive-Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, Depart-Tue). You could stay here four months and still not see everything! Amazing place!

On our first day there we hit the showers hard, very hard, as you may have read earlier we had been on Greyhounds for the previous 3 days! With all that behind us we were so excited to be in the big bad city. We went for a walk though central park into the city. A casual 25 minute walk.... much longer than the "close to the city" as advertised on the website of the place we were staying. A very nice walk though and lots of squirrels. Ok so we know that they don't have squirrels in Australia, but seriously these little suckers are awesome! The funniest characters and we have become slightly obsessed with them!

We stayed on the Upper West Side which had a bit of character and to be honest it was really nice to stay in an area where real New Yorkers lived and not where there was stacks of tourists. We spent the first day or two just walking around with our mouths open. The place is a concrete jungle. So many varieties of people sqaushed into one place.

You may have heard people say that there is a magic in the air in New York and its true. There is a real sense of atmosphere and no it wasn't due to the mushrooms we had dropped. Before heading to the US we had so many people tell us that the clothes were cheap there. We kind of didn't believe until Zoe bought two pairs of boots for $18. It is ridiculous, Simon picked up a pair of jeans for $50 that would be worth over $150 in Australia. We simply don't understand and quite frankly we think it is unfair, but hey when in Rome! So we ended up buying more clothes than we could fit into our back packs which is another blog in itself. We also found speakers for our iPod for $10... crazy!

We were in NYC over the weekend and chose the Saturday afternoon to go up the Empire State Building... bad choice Zoe and Simon... correction bad choice Simon... it was so bloody busy, it took almost 45 minutes to get from the street to the out side platform. There was a line outside of the door onto the street when we first arrived and to make matters worse there were lots of tourists groups and christian camps getting off by the bus load. Damn christian kids getting in our way and being so happy about it at the same time... "Where are we from" Insert camp name in chant reply... end with a big "woo hoo yeah"! Nothing worse than standing in a line going no where with people who actually enjoy it! Ahh it wasn't all that bad... just different over here, they really get into it! Maybe us Australians are just too cool for school....christian school that is! Amen! Parts of the building are set up to accommodate large numbers of people, so when you finally think you are about to get to the level with the elevators to take you to the 86th floor, you walk round another twist to another turn to more barricades. If we had anymore "woo hoo's" and "oh yeahs" we were contemplating throwing someone over the side! When we finally got to the top though, it was all worth it! Stunning views! You realise the size of the place and how many things are going on. It is one of those moments when you can't really speak for a while as you try to take it all in. We are really glad we did it and we chose the perfect time, we went up in the late afternoon and witnessed the evening sunset turn into night time. Such a contrast in the day to night experience! We highly recommend going in the late afternoon and waiting for the sun to set! Amazing! Maybe check the weather though. We had a perfect clear sky but it was 0 degrees celcius... freezing!

On the Sunday we caught up with a friend of ours, Jill. Jill and Simon went to University together when Jill was an exchange student from San Diego State University. Jill has been living and working in New York for about 2 years as a pharmaceutical sales rep and is such a legend, we had a great time meeting her and her New York buddies over some Mexican for lunch. We also granted Jill some temporary Australian citizenship because she requested that we bring her some Vegemite from Australia. We could only oblige, spreading the love of Vegemite world wide... did you get it... it was a condiment joke... "spreading the love".

One of the things we really wanted to do was go to the live taping of a tv show, either Dave Letterman or Conan O'Brien. It is really hard to get tickets to these shows and you have to turn up early in the morning (9am-12:30pm) and line up to get yourself into the draw for a lottery type ticket system. We decided to do this on the monday morning because it was our last full day there and we were changing accommodation for our final night there, do it all in one big hit we thought. Wouldn't you know it... we slept in! So the plan for the day was wake up early... ambitious I know, pack our back packs put them in storage and get to the Ed Sullivan Theatre by 9:30am. We got there at 12:15pm wondering what the hell is wrong with us. The tickets are allocated via a lottery as mentioned earlier, so you put your name down and cross your fingers that you get called back in the afternoon to watch the nights taping. We got talking to one of the staff members Paul and were having a laugh with him when i mentioned that we didn't have any credit on our phones... he pulled us aside and said "At 3:30 this afternoon meet me at the corner of 46th and Broadway and i'll have your tickets". Nice work Micth and Zobo... it's true you get more with sugar than you do with salt... just ask any of Americas busy diabetes practitioners. Paul was a legend, we had a really good laugh with him later that day and we are now even facebook buddies. So we scored tickets to see Letterman in New York and we were stoked. The show was great fun live and it was really impressive to see how they worked people into a frenzy before the show starts. If you pay close attention you realise that they do it from the moment you line up for tickets... another well oiled machine. Jay-Z and Mary J Blige finished out the show and they were top shelf, so it was just a top day all round... even with the sleep in!

Just to finish off quickly, later that night we bumped into a lovely old man walking his dog. The dogs name was Chi Chi and the owners name was Ralph. Ralph was born in New York City and was 70 something years old. He has never been up the Empire State Building, never been to the Statue of Liberty, never seen a live taping of a tv show and has pretty much never left the island of Manhatten. He was such an interesting guy and almost the highlight of the day!

So much to blog about and sorry it has taken us ages to get the time to write some more stuff. You can see all of our photos from the link at the top left hand side of this page. I may even update this blog as i go along! Coming soon we'll blog about Vancouver and the flight out from New York... very funny... did we miss the flight or did we make it!

Thanks again for stopping by, although we are far away you guys are not far from thought... much Love MitchnZobo xoxo