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).