New York City

Johnny and I arrived in New York yesterday evening. We hopped on the bus, transferred to a subway, and arrived to Eric's place [the couch surfer we're staying with]. He lives in lower Manhattan and has an awesome place. We went to eat pizza & crepes in Washington Square Park and then came back to crash and recharge for today. 

Today we walked all over the city. We went to see ground zero and the construction of the Freedom Buildings. There were news reporters ALL over talking about the recent news regarding Bin Laden. The President will be here tomorrow to speak on the subject of  9/11. 

We then continued to the Financial District and watched all of the important business men as they hurried by, engrossed in their blackberries, clearly without a minute to spare.

We headed up to Time Square and looked around the shops, I even held the world's largest Hersheys bar--it was not easy to leave such a heaven-sent behind.

After attempting to find reasonably priced tickets to a Broadway show, we gave up just in time for an all too stereotypical New York scalper to offer us tickets to Wicked for $40 bucks a piece. Skeptical Johnny told the guy we think he's ripping us off. The man then pulled out a huge wad of 20, 50 and 100 dollar bills. He then shouldered up against us and thumbed through his cash claiming that he has enough money, 'why would he need to rip us off?' Although this little demonstration convinced us less of this guy's validity, the fact remains, Izzy knows every word of Wicked the Musical but had never seen the play. so we couldn't pass this up. We had our new scalper friend come with us to the entrance to make sure we weren't getting ripped off, payed him, and happily walked in to witness the best show we had ever seen. 

After the show we walked for hours around Central Park. There is no way to describe the feeling of escaping the city within a matter of minutes and finding ourselves absolutely surrounded by natural beauty. It was wonderful.

Wish us safe travels to London tomorrow,

I&J