13/06/10

reporting on the 16th

Our room at the motel included a cooked breakfast at the diner next door, so obviously had pancakes. It was good to have a decent breakfast before the long hard day that we had ahead of us. We had to get all of our stuff to the centre of New York using the public transport system. Firstly we had to get to the train station that was 1 kilometre away. 1 km is not far at all if you are not carrying 45kg on your back and I had somehow hurt my foot a couple of days before, which wasn't doing me any favours. After a fairly unpleasant walk we got to the station to find that it was a crappy little station that only had trains at peak times on weekdays, so we had to walk another 2 km over to the next station. Well... the walk wasn't fun, in fact it hurt quite a bit, but we got there in the end. After a train, two subway trains and another short walk we found the hostel and I was very glad to put the bags down and go for a shower.

At the hostel we met a couple of French girls who we chatted to for a bit before going out to find some food. According to the girl who spoke English, I was quite hard to understand as apparently I have a strong English accent. I have never considered my accent to be particularly strong, but there that is. G0N had decided that he wanted to give blood whilst in America so we wandered towards the blood doning place looking out for places to eat. En route we managed to find the Puerto Rico parade. Although it was towards the end there were still lots of people wearing the Puerto Rico flag and lots of shouting. We grabbed some pizza before G0N went over to bleed, I left him there as there is no way in hell anyone is getting me anywhere near a blood donating centre. I went back to the hostel so that I could repack and weigh my bags. Unfortunately, on the way back it rained pretty hard, so I ended up soaking wet but thought that it would be best to wear the wet clothes to dry them out as wet clothes weigh too much to fit in my bag. Before the repack my bag was way too heavy, in fact it broke the scales, so I had to be brutal and throw quite a bit of stuff away and transfer the dense stuff into my hand luggage. After another few attempts I managed to get my bag under the 23kg that was needed to be within weight :)

After the epic reshuffle it was time to go out into the city. Last time we were there we never really saw anything at night due to our jet lag, so we went to see Times Square. Another reason for visiting Times Square is that it has wifi and we couldn't seem to get ant internet at the hostel to do our plane check in with. In the end we were unable to do the check in at Times Square either, but we did get to see the square lit up at night and get a couple of flattened pennies to add to the collection, leaving one solitary space left in my penny passport. When we got back I managed to find a spot in the kitchen that had wifi so we could do our check in,but by that point there were not many seats remaining, so we would have to sit separately on the flight home, but on the plus side we did get seats at the front of the blocks that had leg room.

Cube out