A week's worth of NYC is lethal!

Trip Start Mar 01, 2010

Trip End Mar 18, 2010

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Where I stayed

Wanderer's Inn West

(New York City hotels)

Flag of United States New York City, New York
Monday, March 8, 2010

During my first week in Manhattan I've covered so much ground that my feet look like stumps now, the kind of grotesque lumps of deformed flesh that Chinese women in olden times would have killed for. Tomorrow will see me trying to make it out of the the city by car, and going to either Pennsylvania or Buffalo, NY. The hostel where I am staying houses an eclectic lot of people. Where else would you expect to help an Egyptian woman with writing a movie script, while partying with southern young folk at the same time? And oh dear me, did we get wasted.

On March 7th, I joined a nice German girl for a ferry ride to Staten Island. It was a shame she had to go back to Germany on the same day, because she was a great travel companion and a right laugh. After a tearful goodbye in the subway - my tears having to do more with raging pheromones rather than sadness - I was just in time to catch my film, the excellent animated featere The Secret of Kells. After that, it was time to wander for a bit through east Manhattan. After having dinner in a particularly depressing McDonald's, it only seemed fitting to go back to the hostel and get drunk with my North Carolina friends. "We're Americans! We want to get fucked up as quickly and cheaply as possible!," Nick, the group's head honcho, fiercely proclaimed. Seeing as these otherwise nice people at barely 20 had already drunk and smoked away any chance of a prospective future, getting fucked up on a budget probably was more of a necessity than a preference.

During my breakfast the next morning I was pondering the day, thinking it would be a quiet one. But sure enough, when one least expects it, the fabric of reality will start to fall apart and surrealism will abound.
So when I looked up from my plate, there he was, Xavier. Now Xavier I hadn't seen for eight years, ever since we graduated from highschool together. What are the odds then, of meeting up in a hostel on the other side of the Free World, some 6.000 kilometers from our hometown? As I am still all over the place emotionally I cannot coherently write about this day, but it started somewhere in Central Park and ended in a noodles bar in Chinatown, with an attendance of Letterman and lenghty stint of Times Square thrown in for good measure, during which we became great friends in just a couple of hours.

Although I really start to sound like Oprah now, God bless her, some things just aren't coincidental, whatever spin you take on them.

So this concludes the first leg of my journey. Tonight I will be either in Pennsylvania or upstate NY. Take care and be good!

Paul

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