Well the big trip is finally happening!

The flights from Dublin to New York (via Manchester) were fairly straightforward so we used them to catch up on a few Z's. The hardest part of the trip was trying to stay calm in the stinking taxi out to the airport while the doddering old taxi driver ambled around the city streets. After being overtaken by what must've been the twentieth car, in the space of ten minutes, on the motorway, while we cruised along at 40, I was about to explode. Luckily the airport was in sight and once we reached it, everything fell into place and went without a hitch.

First impressions of NYC are super; this city has so much attitude and constantly keeps us smiling. From the moment we stepped off the plane we have had nothing but good experiences. The service we received in the train stations out of the airport was an absolute saviour. Feeling like complete travelling newbies, with our overloaded backpacks delicately balanced on our backs, a big uniformed guy with dreads spotted us out and helped us find the correct lines to get to our guesthouse. Later, another uniformed lady with an amazing Puerto Rican accent even held our hand through the whole procedure of buying a ticket from the automated machines. I think we might be in for a rude awakening when we reach Latin America next week; we are going to have to toughen up bigstyle.

For the first couple of days, we spent a lot of our time making the most of the $21 weekly Metrocard (this entitles us to unlimited travel on the subway and bus networks). This has turned out to be an excellent way to get a feel for things in "The Big Apple". Included in the weird and wonderful stuff that we've encountered while strolling around, are things such as a couple of young black dudes doing a hip hop serenade across the tracks of a subway station to a giggling girl, running into an excellent street breakdancing session and watching a guy jumping out of the bus door and then climbing over a car's bonnet which was blocking his way.

After getting a nice feel for the city, we started checking out some of the more touristy sights. To help us do this we bought a city pass that allows us to see probably six of the best things here. Included in this is the Guggenheim over by Central Park, which is worth going to just to see the building itself. We also took a nice cruise around Manhattan and it took us up close to the Statue of Liberty. There's millions of things to see around the area which could take months if you wanted to take in properly so we already know that we will only be able to view a subset of those in our limited time.

The guest house, "East Village Bed & Coffee", is exactly what we were looking for in our first stop of this RTW trip. It's a really comfortable "home away from home" in a nice and chilled out area. We're going to be dipping our toes in very slowly to this whole backpacking and 'roughing it' lark and the website did a good job of describing what to expect: www.bedandcoffee.com
We're staying in the TreeHouse if anyone's interested!

That's all for now. Over and out.