OH MY GOD! where do i start about Manhattan? The flights went very quickly. Thought things may have been held up a bit more with the unbelievable security. It seemed as though every few hundred yards through LAX i had to randomly to take my shoes off and/or show my passport to a whole succession of people. Finally burst through the doors at JFK to find our Kel standing not ten yards from where i'd been stood waiting 30 minutes for my bag! Cue big hug and bit of a blub.

We just did so much and simply hardcored our way around as much of the city as possible. A lot of walking and a lot of map reading and deciding what we really wanted to do. I'll try to list just a sample here: - We visited Central Park and sat on Alice's mushroom, went up 86 floors of the Empire State building, got chased out of the Chanin building for taking pictures, ate a pastrami mountain, had lunch in Little Italy, saw Elijah Wood, saw Ed Norton (oh my word), saw Chris Rock filming and directing his next movie and walked into the background on a take, had Cosmopolitans (frequently), sought out lots of famous movie/TV locations (Tiffany's window, Seven Year Itch grate, Friends building, When Harry Met Sally orgasm deli, Seinfield lunch spot, Empire Diner), did Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Grand Central, Battery Park, Washington Square, Soho, Nolita, the Meatpacking District, Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, got depressed in the supermarket because fresh food is prohibitively expensive, ate huge pieces of apple pie with butter pastry, argued with security personnel, felt weird at Ground Zero, had poos in Bloomingdales AND the Waldorf Astoria, got invited to meet Lou Ferrino but decided not to bother, got ripped off by taxi drivers, got ferried in a rickshaw by a beautiful man at dusk down 42nd Street and ate hot dogs in Times Square.

This list is not exhaustive.

We did struggle with a few things. With jetlag, with staying in a flat full of cat hair and roaches (but it was free accomm and we're very grateful!), with the New Yorkers and their strange inability to understand what Kel was saying ("how does the egg come?"), with the lack of freedom spawned by the culture of fear that thrives in the States and with the poor signage for tourists. We had a ball but it will probably be a few years before i feel ready to take NYC on again.

God Bless America!! x