A Week in New York & Jet Lag

Our week in New York was everything I expected and more.  Now being back at work and feeling extremely jet lagged, it seems strange to think that just a couple of days ago I was still in the Big Apple.  Being jet lagged isn’t any fun and it makes you stupid.  It feels like you are hours behind everybody and everything and you experience uncontrollable bouts of drowsiness and energetic rushes at the most inconvenient times:  Falling asleep at your desk at 11am and being wide awake and ready to climb Mount Everest at 2am.  My body’s clocked is fucked, but they say it will reset itself and things will go back normal in a day or two.  In the mean time everybody just have to deal with me somewhat incoherent and sleepy the whole time.  But I digress; let me tell you about our week in New York City.

It should not come as much of a shock to learn that a certain airline didn’t upgrade hubby and I to business class.  We had to fly cattle class and it was awful!  Imagine spending 23 hours in a plane, cramped in like sardines with what sounded like a 100 babies screaming at the top of their lungs none stop.  This happened on both our departing flights as well as our return flights.  I have come to learn that I hate babies, especially on planes.  Luckily I was armed with sleeping pills and my iPod and if I didn’t have this combo you were sure to have read about a certain passenger who tried to open the plane doors at 35 000 feet threatening to throw babies out of the cabin.  It was that bad!  On our flight to JFK I also learned a valuable lesson the hard way – never fly with boots because your feet will swell up and you will have one hell of a hard time putting your boots back on again.  Needless to say when I arrived at JFK I could hardly walk.  I was in pain and my ankles looked like those of an 8 month pregnant woman who was retaining water.

Waddling my way through customs must have looked very funny as I was walking like a disabled person.  We stood in line for just under an hour and for the first time in my history I did not experience any problems.  Hubby and I were processed and welcomed to America.  No interrogations, no searching our luggage, no strip search (I was kind of disappointed about the strip search part though seeing as the one security guy was rather hot).  We made our way to the taxi and we were whisked off to our hotel in midtown Manhattan.  We stayed in the Yotel on the 24^th floor and had the most amazing view of downtown Manhattan.  The only disappointing thing about the hotel was the fact that it was a “non smoking hotel” (yes, I am smoking again) and they have a $245 fine if you were caught smoking in your room.  So I was creative.

I did smoke in our room, practically hanging out of our little window that could open and I went through two air fresheners in one week.  I did not get fined and I sure hope that no one of the Yotel’s staff actually read my blog.  On our first day in New York we decided to do the open hop-on-hop-off bus tour mainly because my feet were still throbbing and secondly because we wanted to get our bearings and find out where everything were and how far certain places were from our hotel.  We managed to see midtown and downtown Manhattan and we also saw a large part of Brooklyn on the first day.  It was fabulous!

The first thing that I noticed was that New York is loud.  Everything makes a noise and it doesn’t stop.  The noise level practically stays the same 24/7.  The second thing I noticed was that New Yorkers are some of the friendliest people I have ever come across.  Sure most New Yorkers mostly keep to themselves walking down the street with their iPods firmly lodged in their ears, a cup of Starbucks coffee in the one hand and checking their messages on their phones in the other.  All New Yorkers clearly have places to be and everyone is constantly in a rush, but if you look confused or lost New Yorkers will take the time to stop and ask you if they can help.  In South Africa that will never happen.  The only people who will stop and take an interest in you are the ones who will most probably rob you.  Which brings me to crime in NYC.

There wasn’t any time during our stay in New York that I felt unsafe.  Not taking the subway or walking the streets at night.  The NYPD are everywhere and if you don’t do anything stupid chances are nothing bad will happen to you in NYC.  The one thing that I did notice was that there are a lot of homeless people in Manhattan, people from all ages, from the druggies to the mentally ill.  The funniest homeless woman I saw was at Battery Park.  She was your stereotypical bag lady and clearly was suffering from mental illness.  She was screaming at puddles of water on the ground and at one point she collected these puddles in Starbucks cups screaming at them “I will deal with you later!”  I didn’t know what the water puddles ever did to her but clearly she had issues with them and I didn’t want to get involved.

There is a reason there are so few obese people in Manhattan.  You walk a lot in New York and you walk long distances.  This is why we quickly learned to use the subway.  It’s cheap and convenient once you have figured out how to use it.  On the first day of venturing underground we were struggling to buy our metro cards.  The machine kept on saying “NO” much to our frustration.  The fact that it is hot as hell down there also didn’t help much either.  Eventually a homeless man came to our assistance and it freaked me out.  I almost broke my Botox!  We got our metro cards and the guy left by saying “Have a nice day now” and he didn’t even ask for money.  It felt quite surreal!  I did see a really fat lady on the subway the one day though.  She was too fat to use the turnstiles and she had to use the emergency exit which sounds a rather loud alarm if you open it.  I recall hubby turning to me and saying “Shame, it must be horrible to be reminded everyday by an alarm that you have a weight problem” as we watched her struggling to climb the stairs.

Some of the highlights of our trip to NYC must be Central Park which looks amazing in autumn, watching Mamma Mia on Broadway which was awesome, seeing Picasso’s Black & White exhibition in the Guggenheim and generally just walking around in New York and experiencing the city as it rushes by you, rumbles underneath you and brushes past you on the sidewalks.  We took a couple of cab rides as well and contrary to what I heard taxis aren’t that expensive in New York.  However, I would not recommend using it as your primary form of transportation but every now and again it is convenient.  Owning a car in New York is also way too expensive as your parking fees per month could easily cost you the same, if not more, as your rent as parking spaces is a problem in the city.

We also saw a lot of people walking their dogs.  Some dogs having been quite large and it begged the question, how do you keep a Labrador in a New York City apartment, but clearly many people do.  The nastiest thing about being a dog owner in New York is that you have to pick up your dog’s poop with a plastic bag.  I gagged twice when I saw people do this and it made me really grateful that I am a cat person.  I cannot imagine having to kneel down and pick up dog shit and then having to walk a couple of meters with that in my hand to deposit it into a dustbin.  It’s gross, but I guess if you love your dog and you live in New York, that’s what you have to do.  New York is also one of the cleanest cities I have been to.  You won’t find the street littered with trash and there are very few, if any, cigarette butts on the street.  Every now-and-again you will catch and odd smell coming from vents in the street but mostly you will smell the food of the street vendors.  I ate two Halal hot dogs from said street vendors and they were scrumptious.

The weirdest thing we saw in New York was a prostitute (or at least we think she was one) a few blocks from Times Square.  It was just before 9am and she was wearing a very tight fitting red dress that accentuated all her fat rolls of which she had many.  Her plunging cleavage also revealed her aversion for brassieres and she was talking to a man who clearly though her eyes were down at her sagging tits.  This was not the normal morning attire of your round of the mil New Yorker and she looked like a two dollar whore.  We could not help but stare at her whorishness.  I wanted to take a picture of her because I knew nobody back at home would believe me if I told them this story, but I didn’t.  I didn’t know where her pimp was at.

Our time in New York City was fantastic and I desperately want to go back some day.  In the time we had we managed to get around to seeing everything we had planned.  But there are so much more in New York that I want to experience and see and one week clearly is not enough time to do that.  So hubby and I will have to save up money and plan another trip to New York.  It’s easy to fall in love with a city and I did with New York.  We took a big bite out of New York City and New York City took a big bite out of us and we loved every minute of it!

Till next time.

*This blog post was written while experiencing extreme jet lag.  Apologies for any incoherence, my biological clock is fucked.

Jealous Much?

In a week’s time hubby and I will be leaving on a jet plane bound for New York City *Jumping with joy*.  And this trip could not have come at a better time.  Of late, walking into my office feels like walking into an Alfred Hitchcock movie and I am not always quite sure what the plot is or if I will make it out alive.  I am tired, stressed the fuck out and I am in some serious need of a change of scenery and where better to go than the Big Apple.  Seeing as we will only be there for a week, we needed to do some serious planning about what we wanted to do and what we wanted to see within the confines of the limited time we have to do it in.  So after much deliberation this is what hubby and I have agreed on.

We have booked our flights on Etihad Airways and being the opportunistic little shit that I am, I took the liberty to write to them and politely asked if they would be so kind as to upgrade our economy class tickets to business class for free.  Needless to say I have not heard back from them.  So I will take that as them saying to me “ROFL! Nice try, but NO!”  The flights promise to be grueling.  We depart from Johannesburg to Abu Dhabi on an eight hour flight.  Then there is a three hour layover before we get onto a fourteen hour flight to New York.  The return flights are not much better.  It pretty much is the same thing but to make matters slightly more uncomfortable, we only land back in Johannesburg at the ungodly hour of 04:25am.  Flying business class would have made the flights a little more comfortable, but not being millionaires we are stuck in cattle class. Fuck!

As for NYC from all the hotels we could choose from we decided to stay at the Yotel (NO, this is not a typo, it really is the hotel name).  We choose this hotel for three reasons: 1) The hotel has the quirky meets modern combination that I like and has free WiFi (which is essential for me) 2) The hotel is centrally located (practically on Time Square) and walking distance away from some of the places we want to go to and 3) It has a fucking fabulous terrace and they serve cocktails with brunch!  Seeing as we will be on a tighter schedule than Lady Gaga while on tour, I do suspect that we will not spend a whole lot of time in the hotel apart from sleeping there and drinking all those fantastic cocktails at brunch or happy hour.  But at least we know what to expect from the hotel and they are somewhat affordable.  So what do we plan to do while in NYC?

Like I said before we plan our trips with military precision (we are synchronizing our watches to NYC time as I type this).  If anything, hubby and I are pedantic bitches when it comes to itineraries and we had a good few heated discussion when we were busy deciding which touristy things we were going to do (FYI: a democratic voting system does NOT work when there are only two people involved in the voting process).  So after a few books and maps got hurled across the room in a dramatic drama queen fashion, we eventually came to a mutually agreeable itinerary that’s broken down into days and hours.  Don’t worry, I will not bore you with the fine print, I will just give you a general idea as to what we got planned for our own general safety.  You never know who is going to read this and I don’t want to get kidnapped by a stalker in New York never to be seen or heard off ever again.

One of the places I absolutely have to visit is The World Trade Centre and the National September 11 Memorial Museum.  I am not quite sure if the museum is open for the public yet though.  I lost a friend in the South Tower on 9/11 and I do feel a strong urge to go and pay my respects to her.  We also decided to go to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty.  We will not actually go to her as that will waste too many hours.  Besides I have been inside a woman once and I didn’t like it, so I have no urge to go inside Miss Liberty even if people are now allowed to do so again.  Seeing as we will be close to the financial district we will also go to Wall Street, if only to stare at all those folks who are “Occupying Wall Street”.  That should make for an interesting photo opportunity and I really do hope they are still there protesting while we are there.

Another important item on our list of things to do is going and spending half the day at the Guggenheim Museum.  They will be exhibiting Rineke Dijkstra’s “A Retrospective”, Kandinsky 1911-1913 and the Thannhauser Collection.  Naturally there are also a number of other art pieces that I want to see and I am really looking forward to it.  You also cannot go to New York and not see a Broadway show.  After some deliberation we settled on watching Mamma Mia.  It was really hard to choose which show to watch but, in the end, we chose the gayest one!  Who wants to see “Spiderman the Musical” anyway?  It just sounds stupid and like some performer is bound to get hurt.  Oh wait, that actually really happened.  Off Broadway also seemed like a good option but we won’t have time.

Being married to a Fashion Designer (a creative god and bat shit crazy genius at times) he insisted that we also work Parson: The New School for Design and Mood Designer Fabrics into our itinerary.  We both love Project Runway and this is our equivalent of the Sex and the City tour.  Also on the list is the Empire State Building.  I am terrified of heights so it should be interesting being on the 86^th Floor’s Observation Deck – I might throw up, so be warned people!  At least I know we will find the building really easily – we just have to look up, apparently you can’t miss it.  We will also be spending some time in Central Park, it’s really big and we have to work in a romantic horse carriage ride.  I know Peta and some New Yorkers have an issue with how the horses are treated and that it’s not ethical.  But hey, I don’t know when we will be in New York again, and this is on our must do “to do list”, so sorry.

Buildings and attractions are not the only touristy things that we plan on doing, we also want to go to certain well know neighborhoods and different New York Boroughs.  These include the now trendy Hell’s Kitchen, the Meat Packing District, Soho, Little Italy and China Town.  There is also plenty to do and see in Queens, Brooklyn and Bronx but I fear that we may only get to see Manhattan due to our time constraints.  I guess this is a pretty good and convincing excuse as to why we will need to visit New York again.

Yep, in a week’s time we will be in New York City and as you can see we are going to be fucking busy.  My iPad is uploaded with everything we need to make every second of our trip count:  Subway guides, Foodspotting for when we get hungry, The Essential New York Tourist Guide and plenty more.  I can’t remember the last time I was this excited for a trip and when last I had so many people green with envy.  New York here we come.  Hope you are ready for us bitches!

Till next time.

New York City

It’s official.  The end of September hubby and I will be leaving on a jet plane bound for New York City.  I am more excited about this trip than a six year old child on Christmas morning.  I can almost loose bladder control – I am that thrilled!  The only part of the trip I am not looking forward too is spending 8 hours in economy class, then a 3 hour layover in Abu Dhabi and then another 13 hours again in Economy class until we finally touchdown at JFK in New York.  I have wanted to visit New York for a very long time and now it is finally going to happen.  The only thing that currently stands between me and New York is the Visa application.

As some of my regular readers know I have travelled for work and for pleasure to some interesting countries in the past.  Hubby and I have been to Egypt and Madagascar twice respectively, I have been to Kenya three times and a while back I travelled to Luxembourg for a meeting.  Some of these countries required visas with some visa applications being more labor intensive than others.  The procedure normally is simple.  You complete the plethora of forms; attach the supplementary documents, photos and your passport, all of which normally would take you less than an hour to complete.  You drop your application off, pay the fee and wait between 3 to 5 days and you are done.  So when I needed to apply for the US visa I assumed to process would be similar, but I was wrong.

You can apply for your US visa online and as such one would assume that the process is fast and simple, but it really isn’t.  You complete the DS-160 Nonimmigrant Visa Application online and it takes just over an hour (86 minutes to be exact).  The reason it takes so freaking long is because there are so many questions one need to answer.  Some questions are quite relevant but others are pretty odd.  While completing the forms, at one stage, I got so confused that I had to phone a friend.  I was searching a good twenty one minutes for a number in my passport that did not exist.  It was frustrating and nearly drove me nuts.  To add further pressure and frustration, if you take more than 20 minutes before answering a question (while for example you are searching for a fictitious number in your passport) and you did not write down your application ID number you have to start the whole process afresh.  I can guarantee you that you will only make this mistake once.

After completing your personal details, travel plans, education and work experience you get to the security related questions.  It is here were it gets a little bizarre.  “Are you planning on engaging in prostitution or have you in the last 10 years engaged in prostitution?  Are you the child of human traffickers?  Have you ever received any specialized training in weapons, chemical weapons or nuclear weapons?  Have you ever been involved in any Nazi activities?  Have you ever been involved in overthrowing a government or plotting to do so?  Are you a terrorist?  Are you associated with a terrorist group?  Do you fund terrorists?” These are just some of the questions that had me scratching my head.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand and have a full appreciation for why some of these questions are being asked.  The US is currently still involved in a war and after 9/11 the world has never been the same.  But with that said if a terrorist, a spy, human trafficker or former Nazi complete the visa application form what are the chances that they will answer yes to any of these questions?  It is not like human traffickers wear t-shirts that reads “I can sell your daughter, ask me how?” or drug traffickers will pitch up at the consulate with a t-shirt that reads “I can carry 22 condom wrapped heroin bullets in my intestines, can you?”

Sure some people at whom these questions are directed will lie when completing these forms and it is for this reason, I suppose, the US consulate schedule the personal interviews.  After you completed what feels like a thousand questions you submit your application and print out your application page with a barcode on it.  Then you are directed to another website and a good hour later you have paid for your visa (which is non-refundable of course) and have scheduled your personal interview.  Our interviews have been scheduled for July 13 at 8am.  I hope that this is not a bad omen.  It is Friday the 13^th and it is early and I am not a morning person.  I hope I will be more articulate and dazzling than what I expect I will be after having had to get up at 5:30am in order to drag my tired gay ass all the way to the US consulate in Johannesburg in peak hour traffic.

Look, I don’t see any good reason why our visa applications could be denied.  As far as I know we are not on any terror watch lists, don’t know how to assemble a nuclear weapon or are involved in drug smuggling or human trafficking.  And the only countries that I know off which definitely would deny me entry are Uganda and Zimbabwe only because I am gay and they despise my blog.  So in the mean time while we wait for our personal interviews hubby and I are busy researching and planning what we want to do while in New York.  There are so many places we want to visit, Broadway shows we want to watch and famous landmarks we want to see that for the short time we are going to be there I suspect we will not be getting a lot of sleep.

With me being a tad OCD and hubby being a typical Virgo and meticulous planner I know that we will have one hell of a detailed and tight itinerary.  Every second from the moment we land to the moment we leave will be accounted for with a comprehensive multimedia schedule uploaded to my iPad paired with a New York City app.  I am so looking forward to it.  I can barely contain myself.  Punch me in the gut and call me Betty.  We are going to New York!

Till next time.