Day 1!

I slept very little on Sunday night because I was so excited about the graduation trip that we've been planning for over 2 years had FINALLY ARRIVED! Woke up at 3.30am, and headed to the airport to meet Julie for our 6am flight to Paris CDG. We had a 5 hour layover in Paris, which sounds bad but was actually pretty cool. Charles de Gaulle airport is about the best airport I've ever been to! It had a museum (about tapestries, it was a tiny and terrible museum but still - a museum in an airport is pretty cool..), lots of shops way too expensive for us to shop in (apart from the book shop where we discovered that Where's Waldo in French is Ou est Charlie), lounge chairs that you could sleep in, and music pods that you could sit in and listen to music for free. The only downside was the lack of pubs/bars, we would have loved to have had a drink with our lunch.

Our flight to New York JFK was on an AirBus by Air France, a HUGE double decker plane which was pretty cool! We asked for champagne when the drinks trolley came round and the hostess asked us if we were 18 and if we'd prefer a juice instead - revenge of the baby face once again.

Once we arrived in JFK we headed to the subway station on the AirTrain to get into Manhattan. Turns out the AirTrain splits off two ways, both of which go to a subway station but only one of them was the one we wanted to go to. Turns out we got on the wrong AirTrain and ended up at a subway station where we had to take 3 subways to get where we wanted to go, taking a grand total of an hour and a half instead of about 45 minutes. Oops!

We eventually made it to Manhattan hostel where Catherine had been waiting patiently for hours for us (she got separate flights from us) and checked in! Pretty basic place, but it's clean and it's a bed for the night. We decided to head downtown a bit to look for somewhere to have a couple of drinks to celebrate our first night, so we got the subway down to Grand Central and walked to Bryant Park. They were showing a western film on the big screen (after investigating found out it was Blazing Saddles) and thousands of people were in the park watching it. We ordered frozen margaritas in a bar ($12 each, ouch!!) and enjoyed the atmosphere - it was so warm and a perfect way to end our first night.

We headed back to the hostel to get some sleep after being up for over 24 hours. There was a crazy thunder storm in the night which I loved, I love thunder and lightening! Then thanks to the time difference woke up at 5.45am and have been awake ever since. Oh well, things to see and do today so better get up and at em!

L x

P.s. Never written a blog before and was worried I wouldn't have anything to say... Doesn't seem to be the case!