Making the most of our time

With a (semi) decent night's sleep under our belts, we set out to see lots of New York. First up, breakfast in a typical American diner. Great food although we certainly aren't living in the cheaper part of NY. Next, we headed off on the Hop on, Hop off bus to get the big picture view of the city. It is a pretty touristy thing to do but there is no better way to figure out what you want to see in detail.

The first spot that really grabbed our attention was Greenwich Village. We spent a fabulous few hours wandering the streets including, I admit, a photo stop in front of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment building. We had lunch in Grand Central Station while admiring the amazing architecture. En route to Central Park, we stopped at St Patrick's Cathedral which was suitably impressive. Central Park was moody with the bare trees and overcast skies. We will head back there later in the week. Our final stop of the day was the Museum of Modern Art where I was partially overcome when I realised we could see Van Gogh's Starry Night, Monet's Water Lilies and a whole bunch of original Picasso's.

New York is such an amazing mix of neighbourhoods with wildly different characters and architecture. I really didn't understand how historical a city it was. Ronan says New York has his kind of energy. He can totally see himself living here.

The funny story of the day was when Ronan thought he was being conservative by ordering the medium pizza for dinner at Ray's Pizza. He got a pizza large enough to feed a family. New Yorkers clearly eat pizza by the slice!

Long travel day

Here we are in our hotel in New York. It has been a long, long day of travel - around 27 hours from our front door to where we are now. It all went smoothly, no major hiccups. LAX was a mass of queues, as usual. It is a tough airport to enter a country especially when you are connecting to another flight. Everytime you get through one section, you discover you have just gotten access to another queue. But finally, we got to our hotel, we had dinner in an Irish pub and we are getting ready for an early night.

It is early days but one observation I have of Americans is that they have two modes they operate in. One is super friendly where they are so over the top they sound like they are doing something really helpful for you even though they have only just said hello. The other mode is really abrupt and in your face, demanding what they want from you. It is definitely a different way of communicating from the typical Australian.

Sorry we haven't any photos yet. Wasn't the best day for it today.

Tomorrow, Ronan and I head off to America. It is an express visit, just short of 2 weeks. 5 days in New York, 2 days in Washington DC and 3 days in San Francisco. We have things on our list we want to see but, mostly, we just want to get the feeling of the country. Getting excited now!