What hasn't already been said about New York? Truly multicultural, our impression is that it's a taste of the entire world in one place. Our accommodation was a hostel, just on the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg bridge. We attempted to couch surf in but had no luck since there are few people willing to host, and those that do are generally inundated with requests. Having good proximity to Manhattan we spent our time seeing the famous sights over two and ...

After escaping Syracuse, we arrived in Albany late at night and had a 3km walk in the pouring rain to get to a share house of seven people happy to take in weary travellers while they visited the state capital. Although we were a day early, we were warmly welcomed into the home by Dave (our "host" found on a website, couchsurfing.com, set up to facilitate these meetups) and were very relieved to be comfortable, warm, safe and dry. Albany was a pleasant city with...

Our second stop in the United Sates was Syracuse which was an interesting experience to say the least. We first walked to our hotel and were given our room with the caveat that it might be a little dirty, house cleaning would get to it very soon. We would be very interested to see what a very dirty room looked like to them since the room was an absolute mess. Not only was there rubbish all over the place, dirty towels in puddles on the floor and the fridge had le...

The town of Buffalo was our first stop in the USA which belongs to a region in the United States known as the "Rust Belt" due to the fact that it was once a manufacturing hub but has been in decline for a number of years. We were surprised by the size of the town but more surprised by how quickly areas went from nice, safe streets to dangerous back alleys full of "interesting" characters. We were approached a few times by people trying to sell us drugs which made...