On Wednesday we caught the Chinatown shuttle bus from Washington DC up to New York. When we arrived in the evening it was raining and it took us ages to walk to our accommodation. It was another of Marc's its only 500 metres away, when actually its about 30 blocks away! Finally we arrived at the Whitehouse Hotel expecting to be able to crash until the next morning. Outside our hotel were a couple of tramps and when we went inside there were a couple more sat in reception; we began to think that maybe this wasn't going to be the most pleasant of places to stay! When we went upstairs to our "room", I joked to Marc that the doors looked like cupboard doors. However, when we opened our door we realised that it actually was a cupboard with 2 beds in. The room was not big enough for 2 proper beds and so there were childs matresses on a plank of wood attached to the wall! Lovely! There was bearly enough room for us to fit our bags in with us, and it didn't even have a ceiling. Luckily we hadn't paid and so changed our reservation from 6 nights to just 2!

That eveing we went out to the internet cafe up the road and booked into another hostel.

Our first full day we went up the Empire State Building, unfortunately the weather wasn't great and so we just a view of a foggy city! In the afternoon we spent time exploring the shopping areas and had a look down 5th Avenue. On Friday we hailed a yellow cab and headed to a new hostel, much nicer, and with room for all our shopping bags!

That day we went to the Guggenheim Modern Art Gallery and had a look at work from Picasso, Renoir and Cezanne, along with some of the more wierd pieces containing old doors etc. Also that day we had a walk through Central Park and had a hot dog from one of the vendors. We finished the day with a bit more shopping!

Saturday was our big shopping spree day, checking out the areas of Soho, Noho and the market running down Madison Avenue. We had some Greek food for lunch and then went back to 5th Avenue again and also had a look round Times Square.

On Sunday we caught the Ferry over to Staten Island just to get some great views of the skyline and the statue of Liberty. There's not much over on Staten Island and we didn't have a map so just caught the ferry straight back home again! Next we went to Ground Zero at the World Trade Centre, although there's not any memorial there at the moment as they are building another skyscraper on the site. In the afternoon, we went to Century 21, possibly the best store ever! Its a designer discount store and has pretty much anything you could want as really low prices, heaven!!

On Monday we had planned to go over to see the Statue of Liberty close up, but we woke to torrential rain and it didn't stop all day, so we didn't go. Instead we decided to head back down to Century 21 again and stay inside as much as possible. So we didn't really do much this day apart from dodge the storms and pick up some final bits of shopping.

Today, Tuesday is our last day of our trip! All sad, but decided to make the most of our time and catch up on some of the sightseeing we missed out becasue the of the weather. The sun was shining and so after a breakfast of Dunkin' Donuts we first headed down to Wall Street to catch a glimpse of the Stock Exchange and Federal Hall. Afterwards we caught the Subway back up to Central Park and had a good explore. Lunch was a pretzel sat on one of the lawns. We went to the Lake and then onto Strawberry Fields and finally to the Dakota Building where John lennon was shot. This evening we ate our Dominos pizza on a bench in Central Park and are now off to the airport for the night before our flight home in the morning.