Hi guys
I hope you are well. I'm sorry that I have not been blogging for a while now so I thought I should 'check' in and let you know that I am well.
You were probably wondering if I've traveled anywhere else since India. Yeah, I did. I went to the USA over new years and I (obviously) didn't blog about it. I just feel like there's nothing new to blog about about the United States. But here we are today, weeks later, with a quick review of my trip.
I left the country on the 28th of December for New York. From there I went to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC. The main idea was to spend New Year's Eve in the Big Apple. It was a childhood dream of mine. I have always wanted a winter New Year. The Xmas lights all over the city fascinated me.
You guys would know by now that I'm a culture junkie. I love all things culture and the holiday destinations that I've chosen before reflect that. But once a while I want to take a trip to a place where I don't need to do research about various things such as underground gay bars etc. And this trip was just that.
Getting there
This trip wasn't preplanned, as always. So I had to be creative about how i was going to get to the US. There was no way that I'd have taken the nonstop SAA or Delta services at such a last minute. My trusted friends, Kayak and Skyscanner, recommended that I take Emirates to New York (JFK) via Dubai. I'm even embarrassed to tell you how little I paid for the tickets. It was so affordable that I bought a fully flexible ticket for my return, in the event that I felt I needed to stay longer.
So how was the service? It was alright. No, really, it was alright. Nothing worth a song and dance. The cabin crew was quite disorganised during the service. The food options ran out too soon (not their fault). It just didn't appear orderly to me. All four flights. The food was standard plane food.
But of course I had to make it exciting. If you fly cattle class the airline is kind enough to sell you baby bottles of Moët so that you also feel important. They were $15 a pop and they gave you a proper glass too and sometimes they would bring it with a fruit platter. I was happy. On one flight I got complementary champagne, on tap, from the business class bar on the A380.
The aircrafts were really good. They fly the B777 from JNB and the A380 from DXB to JFK. The aircrafts have free wifi for 100MB. You can buy more for $1. This, for me, was impressive.
Had it not been of the bubbly, aircraft and wifi I really would not rate Emirates anywhere among my top 5 airlines. But I'd fly them again.
New York! New York!
After a two hour stop over and a 14 hour flight I arrived in New York. Oh the flight was delayed due to a baby that was very sick whose family had to be offloaded for precautionary reasons. And of course this being a US-bound flight they brought a team of security experts to sweep through the family's sitting area before we were cleared to leave.
I was staying at my friend's place in Hells Kitchen for a few nights before NYE. I must admit that nothing else is blog-worthy from here on. This was not my first trip to New York so I didn't do much tourist activities. I just drank and ate myself fat.
We went to brunch at Sylvias in Harlem and later to Harlem tavern to drink and look at the gorgeous Harlem boys *looks for Chinese fan*.
We walked the Brooklyn Bridge on NYE. That was a nice experience. Then went to look at street art in Williamsburg.
And then there were the drag shows in the evenings and bar crawling. Oh yeah and the restaurants were also amazing.
PS: The Dollar was at R16 - something so I didn't have money to shop.
Internal Travel
So from New York I went to Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, Baltimore and DC. I used a combination of the bus and Amtrak train service. I'd recommend the train for the longer distances and a bus for the shorter ones like NYC-PHL.
I will see if I can blog about Philadelphia soon. It really is worthy of a post.
Till next time...
MelM
