New York, New York

Note:We wrote this a while ago (a week or so) but we haven't had a chance to upload it until now. We'll be writing again very soon (maybe today). Enjoy!

In our fourth night in NYC we hace finally decided to tell you what we've been up to lately.

We've spent the first three nights at the Crter Hotel, in Times Square (not close to or nearby, but in Times Square). It's quite decadent and it's seems like it's been taken straight out of an adventure movie full of policemen chasing the bad guys ecause of the long corridors, old sheets and fitted carpet. Anyways, it's worth the price if you think about the location. But don't expect daily sheet/towel changes or room service, not even a mirror in the bathroom (!!!).

In this case, as we're spending many days here and the city is widely known, were not telling what we've done but just giving some advice and elling weird stuff that has happened to us.

You know people from NYC are knwn for their loving to eat out, right? (Like Carrie Bradshaw had a kitchen at home but never used it). Well, it's true, they always eat out and there's a reason for that: getting food at a supermarket is way more expensive than getting it at a restaurant (a package of bread and meat for sandwiched can add up to $8 and eating out can cost $5). And that happens all day long, from the morning coffee and bagel stands to the night greek and arab food stands and including the thousand and one McDonald's, Subways, etc.

As a result, it's almost impossible to see someone in the street who is not carrying a cup of coffee/smoothie/ice cream/sandwich/bagel/muffin/paper bag with food inside.

Another weird thing is the Chinese expansion through NYC: not only Chinatown is Chinatown, now Little Italy, Nolita, the Soho and Tribeca are also Chinatown and we can only see the original signs and the little village feeling in the narrow streets of the original neighborhoods.

By the way, the names of the neighborhoods, for those of you who don't know, have a cool origin: SoHo stands for South of Houston St., Nolita is what there is North of Little Italy and Tribeca is the Triangle Below Canal St.

Yesterday we went to Broolyn: we crossed the river through the Brooklyn Bridge and walked around for a little, we bought some food in a not-so-expensive supermarket and we ate it in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

We wanted to eat in a park in front of the supermarket, which seemed nice at first. And we say at first cause after that we realized there were a lot of NYPD cameras around it and NYPD signs and there were several policemen around the park at the door of some stores and the pople looked really weird when you looked at them closely so we diceded to go have lunch somewhere else. This somewhere else turned out to be Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is a really nice park righ next to the Hudson River from which you can see Manhattan and the bridge. There were kids playing with their feet in the water, a couple of Asian newlyweds taking pics at the beach. There was also a family of orthodox jewish who would not take off the thick tights of their little girls for them to put their feet into the water (their put them in the water anyways).

Curious fact: in NYC tha Starbucks and McDonald's have wifi without a password wich can be used even if you are quite far from them. There's also free wifi in public places such as Times Square.

And last but not least some recommendations for those of you who are planning on visiting NYC:

–                   Eileen's, in 17 Cleveland Place. Kenmare St. wth Centre St. (Little Italy). It has the best cheesecake in NYC and it's cheapper than some other places that claim to have the best one. There's no restroom and there are only a couple of tables. It's also really small and not very easy to find.

–                   Big Daddy's, it's an American lunch and dining place. The hamburgers are soooo good, but there's also sandwiches, mac and cheese and smoothies (the Oreo smoothie is the best we've ever tried).

–                   The prices of the food from the street food stands can change a lot from one another, it's good to walk around for a while and compare the prices before choosing one.

We just moved today to a quite weird hostel in the Upper East Side, so we'll tell about it in the next post.

(The Flatiron Building) 

(Brooklyn Bridge)

(Restaurant tables where the skating rink is during the winter)



(Spoted: Darth Vader ice skating with Princess Leia in the Rockefeller Center skating rink)

Wa-shing-ton (DC)

The day in DC has been deadly tiring. We ave to admit that we could have used one more day to see the city calmly and to get to know Washington as a city and not only Washington as the capital of the USA.

Our day has started in the US Memorial Holocaust Museum with a very well organized exhibit on nazi propaganda. There were walls and columns imitating actual brick walls and columns full of nazi propaganda as well as interactive parts in whoch one could choose among different documentary videos, both old and modern, about the subject.

But that was it, the rest of it was a bit diappointing (besides, the exhibit itself was kind of propagandistic about Israel).

After the museum we went the the National Mall, crowded with monuments and official buildings: the Smithsonian (a bunch of free museums, although we didn't have time enough to visit them proprely), the Capitol (with both the House of Representatives and the Senate and with the Father's Day compulsory protest about shared custody and father's rights), the Congress' Libraries, the Supreme Court, the office buildings of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Washington's obelisk, the Tidal Basin with Roosevelt's Memorial, the WW2 Memorial (a good place for refreshing one's feet in the fountain), and finally Lincoln's Memorial, in front of which Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced his famous speech “I have a dream...”

Do you remember the huge pool between the Obelisk and Lincoln's Memorial? The one to which hippy-Jenny jumps yelling “Forrest! Forrest!” while Forrest Gump is talking to thousands of people about Vietnam? Well, it's not there anymore. Now there's a lot of mud and bulldozers in its place. Not a great view.

After the monument and government buildings marathon we decided to change the subject, so we went to the White House, where Obama welcomed us with tea, cookies and some snipers on the roof.

The truth is the actual size of the White House is way amaller than it seems on TV. It seems like poor Obama, the first black president of the USA, isn't even able to fit in his... famous oval table.

In front of the White House there were lots of tourists and small groups of demonstrators, among which there was an antinuclear camp made up by only one man who, apparently, has been there from 1982 (you could tell by his beard), an Asian woman singing fragments of the Bible while holding signs of “Obama fascist” and Israel flags, a goup of people from Bangladesh calling for democracy in Bangladesh and a guy wth some 15 signs of all kinds from Bin Laden to go vegan, gay marriage and free software.

And finally our first real stop: six o'clock dinner. As the whole day we had been visiting American monuments and since the prices in DC incite to fast, we decided to honor the world's most famous clown and eat a Big Mac.

After walking the embassy row, we arrived in Dupont Circle, a really cool neighborhood full of bars, restaurants, bookstores, cafes and people, where we walked around a little before heading to the National Mall again to see all the monuments at night.

We finally made it to the hostel, whose walls were covered in theatening signs describing the fines one must pay when doing anything inappropriate (this is, anything different from eating, sleeping, taking a shower and walking barefoot).

Next day (by the way, it was pouring) we caught the bus that would take us to NYC, but that's a different story.

(Washington's Obelisk at night)

(One of the Smithsonian buildings)

(Miguel pronouncing his very first speech at the Capitol)

(What was the pool next to the Obelisk)

(Nuria and Lincoln)

 (Miguel screaming to the White House)

Megacool Megabus

We're wrinting from a megacool megabus bus with megawifi on our way to DC, the capital city of the most powerful country of the worls (until China feels like waking up).

These last days have been relly intense, we've seen all of Philadelphia and we've almost overcome the jet lag that was haunting us at night/in the morning.

Yesterday wewalked to U Penn, the Univesity of Pennsylvania, one of the Ivy League universities that from a touristic point of view leaves people indifferent; it's just another part of the city in which biuldings are the same, but wth school names.

However, on our way there, we had the opportunity to live something really weird: we were at the entrance of a store in South St. waiting for the rain to stop. After cointinuing walking we started to notice that something was wrong: we could hear the rain falling but we weren't getting wet, so after exhaustive investigations involving the FBI and the CIA, we concluded that it was raining on the sidewalk in front of us, but not in ours.

The rest of the day was pretty normal: we continued our visit trough Philadelphia, the city of opposites, in which glass skyscrappers similar to Manhattan's are chaostically mixed with red brick brooklyn-like condos and sppartment buildings and with two-story houses for rich people and gardens.

We walked a little around the financial district, we licked the liberty bell to honour the contemporary hero Barney Stinson and we travelled back in time to listen to the pilgrim fathers (and mother) read the declaration of independence.

On our way back to the hostel, Nuria made her first stop in boxes (aka Sephora) only to discover the huge difference of prices and number of brands between Spain and the USA (she was shocked for a while and wanted her mom to be there and walk around the store with her).

Miguel did not have a birthday cake this year, so we bought a strawberry-lemon cupcake and enjoyed it so much right before having one of the famous Philly cheesesteaks (basically a cheese and steak sandwich with onions, ketchup and mustard).

To round up the day, we joined the movie night the hostel was hosting and we watched Hall Pass (not bad, although a little disgusting) with free beers on the hostel.

We'll see what DC (or Wa-shing-ton, as they would say in China) has prepared for us.

(Nuria writing this blog post in the megacool megabus)

(Philly from the Fine Arts Museum)

(Miguel just about to eat some seaweed biscuits bought in Chinatown)

(Nuria licking the Liberty Bell)

(Philly from U Penn)

(Miguel eating his birthday cupcake)

PS. We have aded a page under the name of “Trip” in which we talk about our plans for the whole two months and we hve also added pics to the previous posts and tags so that it's aeasier to find a certain post according to the subject.

Philly!

As we said, we are writing from Philly.

First of all, I (Nuria) need to say that one of my wisdom teeth must not be very wise, cause it hurts like hell. Now, moving to the interesting part.

The party started even before leaving the airport in Madrid: Miguel's ESTA registry (where one registers a petition for entering the USA and the government accepts it or not) was apparently wrong cause the passport number had one more letter than it was supposed to, so we had to find a place with internet access at the airport, do it all over again, pay the $14 again and wait for the response again. There is not a word to describe how nervous we were. If the petition was not accepetd withing 1 hour, we would not be able to fly.

As you can imagine, we finally solved the problem. Otherwise, we wouldn¡t be in Philadelphia right now.

We took off almost an hour late and we sat next to some Americans who had just come back from walking in the north of Spain. Literally; just come back. No shower between walink and flying. For eight hours. Nothing else to say. Apart from that, the fligh was as usual: a little cold and with unbelievable amounts of food that change the biorithms of travelers for getting them unudes to their own eating schedule.

The airport control in Philadelphia was pretty normal. Each of us had a different police officer, but both of them were surprised of how little money we were carrying for two months and asked us if we had a credit card just in case... Despite what people say, they're nice... Sometimes.

We took the train to downtown Philadelphia and after half an hor we got off and walked for ten minutes (and discovered that the bus for Washington leaves from right next to the hostel, and that's cool).

The hostel is modern, clean, in the center and cool in general. We're in a couples room: only for couples, girls-boys groups and girls who travel alone, but not boys who travel alone. It's quite big and we're almost alone. Everything is calm. The only bad thing is that the air conditioning turns on ad off in the middle of the night and it's horribly noisy.

It's amazing how clean the hostel is, how cool the kitchen is and how bought in Ikea everithing is. It's one of the best hostels I've ever been and it has a lot of activities: last night was free dinner and tonight was free drinks and pub crawl. We just had a drink and stayind in, jet lag is still too strong.

Right after getting to the hostel we met a Spanish girl and boy, really nice, who left this morning to go to New Jersey for working at an amusement park. And right after meeting them I had a fight with my suitcase and it won, so now one of the only two jeans I brought for the two months are broken and I have an injury on my knee. Nothing serious, I'm not going to die, a leat not now and at least not because of this.

Today we've been wandering around, we've see a lot of stuff and been to Chinatown, that has a big Chinese gate that's cool and that you'll see as soon as we're not as tired as today and can upload the pics.

(Miguel running up the steps Rocky-like)

(Reading of the Bill of Rights)

(Kitty bubble gum in Chinatown)

(Philly's city hall)

We've been to some Chinese supermarkets and bought some weird rice-seaweed cookies stuffed with seaweed paste that are sooo good. They remind me of the Chinese cookies Cris bought in Toronto. You'll see photos of the cookies too.

We'll write again soon, but we'll probably wait until the jet lag is not so strong and our feet don't hurt so much (so maybe in a couple of days).

Bon voyage!

Just one more day to go and we'll be starting our journey through America, so we have finally decided to publish the blog we've been rambling about so much lately.

Here you will find posts about the places we visit, the accomodation, the food, the people, the curious and eccentric facts that are common in America, the arrests... I mean... how comfortably we sleep in the car. All in all, everything that we forget to tell when we come back home and our parents ask for a detailed account of what we have done.

We hope you are so excited about this as we are and you can live a little of our trip through this blog even if you live on the other side of the Atlantic.

Next time we post we'll be in Philadelphia, so get ready for implausible airport control stories, cause there are always some (specially when one of the traveles somehow seems Arab...).
Bon voyage!