NYC

NYC

In August I set off for New York, I was meeting up with University friend Wee Dave.  Wee Dave has lived in Chicago for the last few years and I’d never been out to visit him.  I’d arranged to meet up with my travelling partner Niall, or Nev as he likes to be known, in Sydney.  I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to visit Wee Dave and then see a bit of the west coast of the States before flying onto Oz.  Dave’s brother Ryan and one of our friends Numan were meeting up with us in NYC where we would spend a long weekend before flying to Chicago.

My travels didn’t start well.  I hate night flights, so I arranged a daytime flight which would arrive a day before everybody else, and booked the cheapest Hotel in NYC.  Fortunately this Hotel happened to be just around the corner from the Sheraton Tribeca, the Hotel we were staying in for the rest of our duration.  When I arrived there was a major thunderstorm, the plane arrived on time but it took hours to offload the baggage due to the lightning.  After waiting for ages at the stationary carousel my bag never even turned up.  I left grumpy and shattered looking forward to a good sleep.  When I arrived at my Hotel I immediately realised why it cost just $35 per night.  There were four floors and each floor had 80+ rooms.  The rooms were tiny, just enough room for a single bed, with cardboard thin walls which fell a few feet short of the main ceiling, complete with a wire mesh cover for security.  I felt like I was a battery chicken.  You could hear everybody else on the floor, and as the Hotel was in the heart of China town, there were lots of unpleasant noises.  The main light was on the whole time, so not only was it noisy, but it was very bright.  I was prepared for this kind of eventuality and fully stocked with earplugs and aeroplane eye masks, so I did manage to get a fairly decent night kip.  The next morning I had to queue for nearly an hour for a shower, the facilities fell well short of adequate with only 4 toilet/wet rooms for 80+ people.  I checked out and left in a hurry for the luxury of the Sheraton.

I met up with Ryan in the Hotel bar, followed by Dave and Numan.  Unfortunately all the twin rooms were sold out so I had to share a bed with Numan, this would not be the last time on my travels I had to share my bed with another man.  The beds were massive so it wasn’t too bad, you’d have had to do at least two complete rolls to end up on the other side of the bed.

We’d all been to New York before so we weren’t that fussed about seeing all the sights again, apart from Numan as this time round he was armed with a fancy camera.  Dave’s cousin lived in New York, and Ryan hadn’t seen him for around 20 years, so for the first couple of days we kind of hung around with their cousin, in bars, hearing a lot of the New York banter from the punters, and abusive comments from barmen.   The long weekend passed very quickly and to be honest I don’t have much recollection of it.  We wandered about Central Park, and Times Square, we ate lots of good food and drank lots of great beer.