OJ From The Hellmouth

Ten hours sleep works wonders. I can't remember the last time I slept for ten hours straight. I know a lot of my friends have similar problems sleeping a lot of the time, so I'm not going to gloat, but it was nice to wake up knowing that I'd slept that well.

When we went downstairs for breakfast we made two discoveries. Firstly, real New York Bagels are way different from the token efforts made by bakeries in the UK. The second was that there existed big cartons of orange juice with "Sunnydale Farms" written across the top. I'm well aware of how sad I am to be picking up on that, but hey, when has that stopped me before?

We set out heading down Broadway without much of a plan in mind, other that I wanted to get to Best Buy to get a digital camera. As we walked through Times Square Alison noticed something alarmingly wrong with an advertising hoarding. It was an ad for some underwear or other, and featured a man and woman lying on a bed together in their underwear. As far as either of us could tell, the man had no willy. I mean, obviously there was something in his pants, but there wasn't much. It all looked very wrong.

The city looked so much different in daylight. That's a bit of a silly statement to make, I know, I guess I was just wowed by it all. My first proper glimpse of the New York Skyline wasn't much, compared with what I saw later on, but it was still amazing. It was a cold day, but it was also bright and sunny, and I think that probably added to the spectacle.

Our Hotel was on 54th Street, and Best Buy was on 23rd. In getting there, we passed Macy's, and more Starbucks than we bothered to count. Considering it was 30odd blocks it didn't seem that far. After passing Macy's we decided that we wanted to find a Starbucks for some food and drink, and then of course that was when all the Starbucks decided to disappear. We saw one just as we found Best Buy, at which point the scent of digital technology had more of a draw on me.

So yeah, I got a digital camera. A dinky little Fuji, if you must know. Opposite Best Buy there was a Barnes and Noble (bookstore). Inside this bookstore was a certain coffee establishment. Yes my friends, in there we made our first stateside Starbucks visit. While I decided to RTFM with the camera, Alison perused the Rough Guide and made some more important discoveries. First was that the Rough Guide had a section on Comics Stores, and that there was a Forbidden Planet a few blocks down from where we were now.

The second was a lot more impressive. A block further down from Forbidden Planet was a second-hand bookstore called Strand. The Rough Guide said it had 8 miles of books in there. I was a little sceptical, but I shouldn't have been. The store just seemed to unfold as you headed inside. The more I explored, the more I was left thinking that sooner or later I could take a wrong turn and end up in a similar store I visited in Llangollen a few years back. Both were bookshops that could make you believe L-Space exists. And in this treasure trove of books, what did Alison find? A book set in Sutton Coldfield. Only my girlfriend could come to New York and buy a book set half an hour away from where she grew up.

As we carried on walking we entered SoHo, by which time we needed more refreshment. It would've been far too predictable for us to go into Starbucks again, so that was exactly what we did. This time however we took our drinks with us, arguably the way you're supposed to drink them in New York, if sitcoms are to be believed.

As we got near the end of Broadway, we found a big brass bull in the middle of the road. I've no idea what it was meant to represent, or even what it was called. Given the number of pictures of it I've seen, I'm guessing it's quite a landmark. In typical me style, I just looked at it and tried to work out how many different amusing pictures I could get out of it. Thankfully, with Alison keeping me in check, none of these pictures (and some of them would have been pretty funny, trust me) got taken.

Battery Park marks the Southern end of Manhattan, and was a place that Alison wanted to visit because (amongst other reasons) it plays an important part in the film Desperately Seeking Susan. We decided that we weren't interested in taking the ferry out to look at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, seeing as you weren't allowed off the boat at either landmark. Instead we thought it was time to have our first proper pretzels.

The next stop was supposed to be the South Street Seaport. Unfortunately, we think we missed it. The Pier 17 shopping mall is right next to the South Street Seaport, but isn't actually the South Street Seaport. Still, it had the coolest gadget shop ever, complete with the coolest funkiest huge flat LCD clock I have ever seen and a variety of other handy gizmos that every woman would roll her eyes at and that every man knows are perfectly useful and justifiable expenses.

After walking all that way down Manhattan, it was time for us to immerse ourselves in the delights of New York's Mass Transit system. Buying metrocards was easy, naturally. It said in the Rough Guide that the New York Metro was complicated. I'm not entirely sure why. I don't know if being born and bred on the outskirts of London and being familiar with the Underground contributed to me failing to find it complicated, or if I was just missing something.

It hadn't taken much for us to decide on a destination. We headed for Grand Central Station. The place is amazing. Even what you see in films can't prepare you for what it looks like for real. Makes all our London train stations look rather, well, shit. It was built to be impressive and it's been maintained so it's stayed that way. In some ways it's the sort of opulence I usually find offensive, but on the other hand there's nothing about it to suggest that it's been overdone.

Two or three blocks along from Grand Central is the Chrysler Building, also known to the geeky and the ignorant as the Ghostbusters building. So far (and I'm writing this up a day and a half after the fact) it's been the most impressive building in New York to me. It may not be as tall as the Empire State Building, but it looks a darn sight better :-)

The New York Public Library shares a block with a tract of open space known as Bryant Park. This had a special significance to one of us that I'm not going to explain here, although we couldn't really appreciate it that well as most of it was playing host to the Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week (or something).

Onward then to Macy's. In a flare of stupidity I'd managed to leave my gloves behind in Warwick, and with it being cold I was starting to miss them. However, gloves in Macy's were $25. This seemed a little extravagant. Alison was after some shoes, although it seemed that for the biggest department store in the world, it's choice of women's shoe styles was somewhat limited when it came to the more relaxed casual shoes. Oh, and in Macy's they had a Starbucks. It would've been rude for us not to stop for a drink, if you think about it.

By the time we left Macy's it was dark. This is relevant on the grounds that our next destination was the Empire State Building. I'd been wowed by my first proper glimpse of a New York Skyline, I'd been wowed by Grand Central Station, but both were insignificant compared to the night-time view from the Empire State. The only downside was that outside, 86 storeys up, in a cold biting wind, $25 dollars no longer seemed an extravagance for a pair of gloves. We must've spent at least half an hour up there, just staring at the views. I made the promise to myself that later in the week I'd go back up there during the day to make a comparison. Wow.

There was one other thing we kept noticing at the Empire State Building. There were a number of other British couples, and they stood out like sore thumbs, to us anyway. I don't know if it was just that we were British too and they just looked so familiar, or if it was something that we had too, and that all of us Limeys were standing out so that everyone knew where we were from.

The Diner that we'd seen mentioned in the Rough Guide and decided to check looked a little too dodgy for our tastes when we actually found it, so instead we elected to go to the Grand Central Station Dining Concourse. That was an experience of its own. We went to Juniors had 10oz cheeseburgers, which made Big Macs look like pansies, and our waiter was a pleasant and friendly old gentleman, a little on the rotund side, with a walrus moustache. There was something very familiar about his voice, something that kept bugging us throughout the meal. It was Alison who finally got it. He sounded a lot like the voice of Winnie the Pooh!

Compared to meeting someone who approximated to Winnie the Pooh, the rest of the day was uneventful. And one of the best things about the day was something I hadn't realised until Alison pointed it out to me the next day. Not once had I felt the need to stop because I was worn out, or had I hit a real sugar low. Whether it was just from getting caught up in doing the whole amazed tourist thing, or something deeper than that, it was cool. A good sign.