A Stranger in a Foreign Land

It's cliche, but who cares. This is my travel blog. For the next month, I will endeavour to keep it updated with tales of my adventures, probably mostly while I'm killing time on trains, planes, buses or perhaps even sitting on rooftop bars in Manhattan drinking cocktails :)

I arrived safely with no problems whatsoever. The jet lag hasn't killed me yet, although that might be because the Americans make their coffee strong, and I have no complaints about that whatsoever. The Sydney-LA flight was a bit of a killer; I think about 8hrs in I started fantasising about parachuting out of there, but got over that hill and survived the remaining 5hrs without incident. I must say I was suitably impressed by the food; pasta & meat sauce for dinner (hello Eakins lol) with salad (OMG lettuce!), bread roll and even little apple crumble thing as well. Then got a turkey salad sandwich at some point, followed by this amazing omelette & sausages thing for breakfast, so can't complain about that.

LA is massive (at least from the air) - seems very sprawly. Did see some of those iconic palm trees out the window at LAX, so I can confirm they are definitely a thing. Had a pretty short stopover there (yay for free wifi) then got the connection to Newark. That was basically the equivalent of a Jetstar domestic flight - had to pay for dinner, boo :( Stayed at the Marriott at Newark in a massive King bed, which was extremely welcome after the long trip. Got disturbed twice during the night by the fire alarm, if it went again I would have probably just stayed in bed and burned. Their room service breakfast was pretty good, scrambled eggs, ham, smashed potatoes and the best blueberry muffin I've had for a while. The delivery man even offered to pour my coffee for me. I told him I'd probably be able to figure that part out on my own :p I'm now on a shuttle bus heading towards Manhattan, this will hopefully drop me right to the hotel for the princely sum of $20.

It's also oppressively hot. The sun isn't intense like Australian summer, just heavy and humid (and pretty smoggy, to be honest). Shorts and t-shirt are definitely the order of the day for this traveller. Think I'll need to carry around a refill of the deodorant once I start having to wear the suit around in a couple of weeks :(

OMG, just go my first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, gottagobye :)