Our room in the Travelodge is fine, and the food in the restaurant on Thursday evening is good, but the service extremely slow. Breakfast this morning is buffet style, but there is no notice saying you should collect your cutlery from behind the bar (so that the barman can check that you've paid for breakfast). This results in soggy cereal and numerous guests wandering around trying to find cutlery!
Reg has done online check in, so when we get to the airport, we just have to take our bags to the luggage drop off point. The young woman at the desk is very chatty, and in a slightly strange conversation tells us how forgetful she is, and that she has to write everything down. We joke that this is par for the course for us oldies!
When we get to passport control, we find that the young bag-drop lady has forgotten to scan Reg's passport, and he has to go to a special desk to get it done. So, she really is quite absent-minded!
The walk-through scanner bleeps at me, even though I've taken off my belt and shoes. I have to have a more thorough hand-skim body search, and then stand in the machine with my feet on the markers and my hands in the air for a couple of minutes. I don't think they find the cause of the bleeping, but they let me go through. It's a relief for us both to relax over a cup of tea in the seating area. We put our tea on the floor as there's no table nearby, and Reg, transfixed while using our new tablet, immediately knocks his tea all over the floor. To my credit I make no comment on this unexpected occurrence. Reg rushes off to tell someone, and then we have to divert people away while we wait for the long-suffering cleaner to come with her yellow warning sign and her mobile cleaning trolley.
Reg has booked us aisle seats on the plane, one behind the other, after our traumatic experience when we flew British Airways to South Africa 3 years ago, & we had so little legroom that Reg ended up with bruised knees.
During the 7 hour flight I watch 2 films I'd really been wanting to see - Philomena, which makes me cry, and Nelson Mandela's Long Road to Freedom. This latter film is a particularly poignant film
for me as I lived in South Africa as a little girl, and experienced separate buses and trains for black people and white people. Having revisited South Africa recently, we see that there's still a long way to go for the people of this country, both black & white, to live in equality and harmony. But they've come a long way, & much of the reason for this due to Nelson Mandela and his extraordinary charisma and, above all, his willingness to forgive.
for me as I lived in South Africa as a little girl, and experienced separate buses and trains for black people and white people. Having revisited South Africa recently, we see that there's still a long way to go for the people of this country, both black & white, to live in equality and harmony. But they've come a long way, & much of the reason for this due to Nelson Mandela and his extraordinary charisma and, above all, his willingness to forgive.
Yes, Elaine, the super beanbag purple neck cushion you got me is superb! Thank you!
Reg gets chatting to the 17 year old Romanian lad sitting next to him. This young man, along with his 3 friends who are with him, has won a competition to do with a space project, and as a result they are all going to Los Angeles to a conference, where they will meet Buzz Aldrin, who was with Neil Armstrong at the first moon landing in 1969. The young men's trip to USA is being paid for by the President of Romania.
As soon as we get off the plane I text Elaine (I don't phone her as she'll be driving to Jake's) and I phone George & Marianne, knowing that with "3" network, it really will only cost me the same as phoning in UK! Yes, downloading too! You have to let them know, but it really does cost the same as UK, IE for my package, 6.90 a month. I know I sound like a advert for"3", but isn't that amazing.
Passport/border control takes forever, well over a painstaking hour - we are all photographed and fingerprinted. After standing in this queue for so long, in a warm and stuffy room, we are both wilting. It's 3.15 PM New York time, but 9.15 PM British time, and we are definitely flagging.
Then follows a short journey on the "air train", (wikipedia tells us that this train is run using advanced technology - magnetic levitation - and has no driver). This trip is followed by a long journey on the subway (underground) to Manhattan, New York centre. At one stop, four black teenage lads get on, place their ghetto blaster, only moderately loud, on the floor, and proceed to engage in an amazing acrobatic somersaulting hip-hop dance. How they don't kick or land on any passengers I don't know. The lads are good humoured, and exhort wry smiles from some of the passengers. What a display! Inevitably a cap is passed around at the end of the dance, but without any pressure to give. There is a vibrancy and positivity about the boys which is refreshing. It beats the begging we encountered on South African trains.
Finally we trundle our suitcases along 34th Street, drinking in New York as we go. We surprisingly encounter a young couple we got chatting to on the plane (and while queuing at passport control) . They both work in advertising, and are here on a business trip, but with time to see New York as well. They take details of the blog!
We continue passed Macy's (huge), until eventually we reach our hostel, on the corner of East 34 Street and 3rd Avenue.
The lovely staff carry our suitcases up the 4 flights of stairs. It's only 6.00 pm, New York time, but midnight British time. We are exhausted and after a quick cuppa ( thank goodness for our travel kettle as no refreshments provided in this hostel room!) we fall exhausted into bed.
Of course our body clocks are all wrong, and we'll wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the middle of the night.
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