Thursday, 31 July 2008

Monday 28th – Central Park (properly this time!)


One of the first things I did when I got to New York was visit Central Park. When I wrote that day’s blog entry, I wrote:
‘Walking into Central Park was definitely the strangest experience of the trip so far (though I’ve only been here 15 hours, so the competition’s pretty weak). Within seconds of being in the park, I could no longer see any of the surrounding buildings and skyscrapers that filled the rest of Manhatten. If it wasn’t for the sound of a police siren in the distance, and some black dude walking past me shouting “Daiyam!” into his phone (sorry, cell), I would never have known I was in NYC.’
Since that time, I have had plenty of strange experiences. I’ve slept on the subway, jumped out of an aeroplane and worked a 16 hour day on about 5 hours sleep. I also realised after going to Central Park the first time that I hadn’t even scratched the surface of the park. So today I went back into Central Park to finish what I’d begun. My New York guide book had a three hour walk round the park that I was planning to do, but I soon discovered that the best thing about the park is getting lost in it.


The whole place is a mish-mash of overlapping paths that weave inbetween giant fields, trees and rocks. There’s a section called the Ramble that’s kept in the style of an overgrown woodland that I got lost in for about half an hour as I tried to find my way out and back to the carefully tended lawns that make up half the park. I saw a guy rollerblading about whilst trying to balance cups on his head. The weirdest bit of the park though happened when I was at the John Lennon memorial. This tiny spot was easily the most packed place in the whole of Central Park, and it didn’t go down very well when one guy asked his friend who the f*** John Lennon was.

After Central Park, I met up with Cameron and Maria and we went out for a couple of drinks before getting the train and a taxi home.

Sunday, 27 July 2008

More Skydiving Photos

Here's a few more pix from the jump that I've got from other people






Sunday 27th – Sticky Hands

I didn’t originally apply to be a waiter at Piping Rock, I was hoping to be a bartender over summer. However when I was offered the job of waiter instead, laziness got the better of me and I just accepted the job offer. So when I realised that Ryan (the current bartender) was going to be leaving over a month before me, I was all too quick to ask if I could take his job. Obviously, I had my complete lack of bartending skill against me, but the assistant manager was still keen to give me a try-out. So the morning after asking, they gave me a bar to run.


Obviously I can’t have done too bad a job, as later on that day I was told that I could have Ryan’s job if I wanted it. Obviously I said yes.
So this week I haven’t been waiting on people that much, instead I’ve been bartending a lot of the time and waiting only a small amount of time. Which I’m very happy about. Except for working, I haven’t really been up to much this week. I had a couple of evenings off, but these were worse than useless to me as the weather has been crap so I haven’t been able to beach it up. Went to the cinema twice this week, once to see Wall-E, and again on Saturday night to watch the new X-Files film. Both were good, but neither were as good as Batman (which we’re going to try and watch again, this time at the Imax in Manhattan).


Today it threw it down with rain. It reminded me of home.

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Monday 21st – Falling Out of The Sky

Before I left home, my very generous grandparents gave me £100 ($200) to spend in America. I don’t think this was exactly what they had in mind…
At about 10 o’clock on Monday morning, ten of us piled into two cars and drove for an hour and a half towards Calverton. The plan was to turn up for out 12 o’clock booking, get some quick training, throw on some harnesses, and jump out of a plane.
At Skydive Long Island, you get thrown into a plane with up to five other jumpers, flown to 13,500ft above ground level (about two and a half miles high). The idea is to then shuffle towards the door attached to the front of an experienced skydiver, jump out of the (perfectly safe) plane, plummet towards the earth for a minute at 120mph before the parachute opens and allows you to soar down to earth for the next half a mile height.
However when we got there, there was already a back-log of people who had been waiting to jump all morning. It had been cloudy in the morning, so people were being made to wait a while before they could jump. We weren’t bothered by this fact, as the wait was currently only about an hour and most of us needed to get our heads straight before climbing into the planes anyway.
We signed disclaimer forms to agree with the obvious risks (death etc) that are associated with such a stupid sport, and watched a brief training video on what to do once we got airborne. The beauty of tandem free-falling is that it requires very little training whatsoever, as all you need to remember to do is stick your arms and legs out once you’re clear of the plane.


Four hours later, it was finally our turn to board the planes. As there were nine of us jumping, we split into three groups of three. First up was Dave, Natalie and Steph. They were taken to one side, and strapped into their harnesses. Twenty minutes later and they were all back on the ground again, grinning like Cheshire cats and wanting to jump again.
Cam, John (one of our managers) and I were in the last plane to go. We were strapped into our harnesses along with the second plane-load so that we could go straight up after they came down. We waited and watched as Irene, Min Ji and Kirsty did their jump, and before I knew it, it was our turn.
We each climbed into the little plane one by one behind our instructors, before sitting down in the plane along a couple of benches. I was the last in out of us, followed only by three individual divers. I wasn’t nervous until I actually boarded the plane - that was when my heart started pumping harder and faster than before. The plane started its engine, took off and quickly climbed to 13,500ft. The journey up into the heavens was quicker than I thought it would have been, as the whole way up my time was taken up with being strapped tightly to the front of my instructor, Ben. You get attached to your pro by four clips – two on the shoulders and two on the hips. Once I was securely clipped onto Ben, he tightened all of my straps so that there was no way I could fall out of the harness when the ‘chute opened.
As the plane levelled out and one of the solo divers opened the door, I really began to wonder what the hell I was doing. The three guys in front of me all shook hands and clunked knuckles before diving out into nothingness. Then Ben shifted us along the floor and towards the door so that we could follow suit.
I stuck my legs out of the door, immediately getting them blown to one side by the speed we were flying at. I held onto my harness as instructed (so that you aren’t tempted to grab the door), tucked my legs under the fuselage, and got rocked back and forth once before plummeting out the door.
Videos don’t do the situation any justice. In the couple of seconds that it took for me to accelerate to terminal velocity (about 120mph) all of my internal organs felt like they were rising up inside me. I screamed my lungs out with excitement as we fell quicker and quicker. The air rushed past me so fast that I could hardly hear myself screaming. I was getting a rush a hundred times better than any roller coaster could ever give.
Less than a minute later, the parachute opened and we slowed down to about 14mph. We whooped and cheered, and then glided back down to earth at a speed that felt like a snail’s pace compared to what I’d just experienced.


The whole experience from sitting on the edge of the plane door to hitting the ground took about six minutes, but feels more like 30 seconds in my head.
I would do it again at the drop of a hat.
ps. I'll post more photos (and a video) as and when I get them.

Saturday, 19 July 2008

Saturday 19th - Tired and Burnt.. At Last


Being a Saturday, today meant starting work at 8am for me. Like I've said before, this situation isn't THAT bad, except for the obvious tiredness issues. But to get round being tired due to having to get up two hours early, I tried to go to bed two hours early last night.
Which obviously prompted my room-mate to decide to return from his bartending course at 1am this morning with one of the other russian girls . Normally I wouldn't mind this happening, except that he seemed hell bent on making a crap-load of noise in the process of doing this. After being asked politely (and in rough english) to shut the hell up, he did (and Natalia left the room).
After being woken two further times that night (once so Arturo could borrow my laptop; and then so he could go to sleep) I woke up at half seven feeling like crap.I did my 8 hour shift before collapsing back into bed.
I'm writing this before going back into work for another four hours, and suprisingly enough, I actually feel really awake. Though if he wakes me up again tonight I'll kill him.
On a side note, I'm burnt from spending an hour on the beach yesterday afternoon. Score

Friday, 18 July 2008

Thursday 17th - Why So Serious?

Ok, quickest blog entry ever...


Last night I saw The Dark Knight at a cinema in Glen Cove.


It was amazing.


I pity everyone who's going to have to wait until it hits screens in the UK.


That is all.

Thursday, 17 July 2008

Wednesday 16th – Night (Day) At The Museum

I apologise in advance if my English in this post is crap, but I didn’t know how difficult it would be to write three blog entries in a row. Yes it’s my own fault for not keeping up with writing these as often as possible, but it’s still tricky. Speaking English is especially difficult when you spend most of your time chatting to Americans.
For about the fourth time, Wednesday was going to be central park day. Whilst I did go to Central Park when I first got to NYC, I only explored the top quarter really, and that’s where the least stuff is. So the past few times I had a day off, the plan had been to visit Central Park. As with every other time, I didn’t even set foot in the park this day.
Instead, we spent the afternoon looking round the Museum of Natural History, looking at dinosaur bones, walking through fake rainforests and looking up at the nights sky in the biggest planetarium I’ve ever been in. This museum was huge, with each exhibit room being the size of a typical museum. There was a room on sea life, which had a full-size replica of a blue whale hung in the middle of it. I tried to take a photo, but it was so huge that the flash wasn’t really enough to light it up well enough. The dinosaurs covered about 5 exhibit rooms, and as well as reconstructed T-Rex’s and Stegosaurus’ there was Woolly Mammoths and more recent weird creatures which I don’t even remember the name of.





The original plan had been to go home early after going to the museum, and spend the evening resting infront of the TV. But when we first arrived in the city on Wednesday, we had decided to go and see if there was any upcoming shows in Madison Square Gardens (which is right above the station) that we might be able to get tickets to. When we got in, it appeared that there wasn’t going to be a lot on in the near future that interested us, but a tiny little information sign caught my attention just as we were leaving. It spelt “Ricky Gervais, tonight only”. Whilst the tickets they had left weren’t exactly worth bragging about (5 rows from the back, stuck in the corner), we were still happy to part with $46 each so we could sit and listen (I was going to write watch, but you couldn’t see much from back there) to some good ol’ English comedy. The set was an amalgamation of the three previous English tours which meant that I’d heard all of the material before (and owned two thirds of it on DVD), but it was still hilarious to watch, even from the cheapest seats in the house.


Tuesday 15th – Half and Half

Tuesday was always going to be a long day. Being told that you have to be in work at 7am is tough hearing, especially if you are used to strolling in at half 10. However, there are perks to this, such as the free breakfast that Norman (he’s Mexican, though the name’s not a giveaway) cooked me, and the fact that when I left at 3pm, I had worked an 8 hour day and still had all afternoon left to enjoy.
Cam, Del, Maria and I got a lift into Oyster Bay off Leah. We would have just got the train like on any other day, but Del locked herself out of her room for the fifth time this week and we had to wait whilst she went to pick up the spare key from the front desk. By 4pm, the sun is still warm enough to give perfect beach-going weather, without being strong enough to burn. This was ideal as I forgot to pack any beach stuff whatsoever, bringing Budweiser in a bag of ice, but leaving behind my towel, sun-cream, hat, book and water. We sunbathed, swam, frisbee’d and played games until the sun started getting low, when we set off in search for somewhere to eat.
The thing that I like best about America so far is the fact that there’s so much going on all the time that you can walk into the situations and events that you would never have even thought of looking for. On Monday, Del walked into the Batman premiere (well, found herself next to the red carpet as all of the celebrities piled out of their limos) without having any idea of where she even was.

The same situation was true on Tuesday, as we turned a corner to find ourselves in the middle of a car show. We were walking through a tiny little sea-side village, surrounded by hundreds of cars, ranging from pre-war classic cars to modern day Aston Martins, and covering everything in between.



After we’d drooled over these expensive cars, we stopped off for a meal in an Italian restaurant, where we tried to smuggle drinks in for the under 21s in the group. It’s so weird not being able to order a beer with a meal at 20, considering you can do that when you’re 16 in England.
We spent the rest of the evening chilling on the beach in the dark, working our way through some bottles of Coors Light (or piss as I like to refer to it as) before heading home.

Monday 14th – The City


Another day off, another example of my lack of imagination. Today I went to the city. The original plan had been to go down to Jones Beach, but as we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a thunderstorm, that idea quickly went down the drain. It’s weird to think that the weather in the city is always so different to that on Long Island when it’s so close, but this was as true as ever today when we got into NYC to be greeted by heat and humidity that’s unbearable in anything other than a t-shirt and shorts.
Anahita and I got into the city after lunch as usual, and after looking round a few shops, Anahita run off to meet a man. I was left looking round shops and wondering round backstreets (a backstreet in America is about the same as a motorway in Blighty) by myself for a few hours. I browsed through some big chain shops like footlocker and GAP, as well as some smaller stores including a place called OMG. After a while, I decided that I really was not in the mood for any more standing up as this was all I’d been doing recently. So I spent an hour or so just sitting in a little terrace/garden thing that exists where Broadway meets 6th Avenue.
For people who don’t know, whilst the majority of roads in the city run in the familiar Milton Keynes grid pattern, Broadway runs diagonally across Manhattan (the result of a colonial trading route or something I’ve been told), which means that whenever it crosses one of the Avenues (the long north-south roads named 1st Av, 2nd Av etc.) there’s a couple of triangles of dead space that are filled in with these quirky little parks full of coffee tables and chairs. These little areas are perfect places to sit and watch the world go by in.




Anyway, after a while of sitting here, Del phoned with the question of “how about a film?”. This seemed like the perfect idea, as I didn’t want to go home yet, but at the same time I didn’t want to walk round anymore. However, I questioned this idea when I was told that we were going to watch Sex and the City, but on balance decided that it would be kind of cool to watch Sex and the City… in the City. Overall, I actually quite enjoyed the film, and it was fun to be able to watch it and recognise a lot of places that the film’s set in.

I came back home that night to find that my room-mate had disappeared yet again. My room-mate, Arturo from Russia, slipped off into New York for four days last week without telling anyone, before returning with his friend Alex who was labelled as gay by all the girls, and spent all of his time here with his top off, lying on Arturo’s bed. So when I came home on Monday night to find that Arturo had disappeared again, whilst I wasn’t exactly surprised, it was a little weird. I’m writing this entry on Thursday, and he’s still not back.Finally, it occurred to me that I’ve been here for over a month now. I must be having fun, as time is definitely flying.

Friday, 11 July 2008

Friday 11th July – Results

Undergraduate results are released on 11th July at Bath University. This is six weeks after the last exam is finished, and by the time that I found out my results, everyone else at Piping Rock had long since found out their fates. Results officially go up on the interweb at midnight BST (7pm over here), but normally actually appear an hour or so earlier than that. So I spent most of the time before my 6pm shift refreshing the same page on my computer screen in the hope that they’d been posted early again. However this wasn’t the case and I had to work the entire evening shift wondering if I was going to have to re-sit any exams.



The main problem with failing a module wouldn’t be the inconvenience of having to re-learn any material, it would be the inconvenience of coming home a month early to take the actual exam. I’m currently meant to be out here until September 21st, and re-sits take place around the time of the August Bank Holiday weekend.
We finished work at about 11pm, and drove back home via a grocery store, so that I’d have beer to celebrate/commiserate with. Thankfully, after reading through all the msn messages that were waiting for me (all saying “results are up if you didn’t already know”), I found out that I’d passed everything. Sadly this doesn’t make for as interesting a blog entry as if I’d failed something, because it means that I don’t have to sort out any flights home or anything. But on the upside, I passed everything and feel a whole lot better about it. My group even got just short of 60% on our maths project, which was a shock considering the grilling one of the lecturers gave us during the presentations.


On a non-exam related note, I’m still just as white as when I left the UK (a fact which Ben will be all too happy about), so as I wasn’t meant to be working the lunchtime shift today I decided to take the train to the nearby village of Oyster Bay so that I could spend a couple of hours basking in the sun. The beach at Oyster Bay isn’t even nearly as nice as the one at Long Beach that we visited last week; but it was good enough for my purposes and a whole lot better than a lot of Britain’s beaches. Not to mention the fact that it was about 30 degrees today. I sunbathed for a bit, and walked round the marina that’s at one end of the cove. I was going to go for a swim in the water too, but was a bit afraid of getting my stuff nicked whilst I was in there.
I’m not even sure if I caught any sun at all to be honest, but it was nice just to lay down in the sun for a few hours.

Wednesday, 9 July 2008

Monday 7th / Tuesday 8th July – R & R

Here's how americans do car parks:


After being woken up at a very inhospitable 12.30pm by Del (who used the words “why is everyone still in bed?” despite knowing that all of the PRC staff went out on Sunday night), I dragged myself into the shower, into some clean clothes, and then onto a train that was going into Manhattan. I’d already been told that today we were going to be visiting the Manhattan Museum Of Sex (Anahita’s idea – who else?), and to be honest my apprehension for going wasn’t because I didn’t want to look at sex toys from the 1920s, it was purely because I wanted to spend the day doing nothing except sleeping.

We made it into Manhattan in the early afternoon (as always – next time I visit I’m going in by myself so that I can arrive in the morning) and instead of eating a healthy lunch like last time, we headed for subway to get some $5 foot-long subs. Whilst this may sound like a good deal, I can’t help but feel like I’m only eating crap at the moment and really need to start making the most of my days off by eating as much healthy food as possible. After the foot-long subways had been demolished as far as a group of hungover (and partly still drunk) foreigners could manage we visited the museum of sex, constantly giggling and “eurgh”-ing at some of the weird stuff on show.


Once we’d finished the grand tour of everything sexual from the past century or so, we headed uptown, aiming towards a couple of cinemas in Times Square. On the way there, we walked through a seemingly dodgy neighbourhood. I’m on about the sort of place where every other shop sells fake Louis Vuitton handbags and purses, and the shops that sell genuine goods got hold of them by dodgy means. It wasn’t until I that later looked in my guidebook, read that we’d just walked through Little Korea, and realised why the lettering on the front of all the shops used funny Chinese-looking characters.


Tuesday was a far more laid back day off than Monday. I woke up at about 2pm, rode someone else’s bike into Locust Valley (the club has some bikes that can be borrowed for free, but they’re old and horrible) to grab some food, and then just chilled out all afternoon. At about 6pm, 13 of us piled into a couple of cars (entirely legally), and we drove into Queens to go to my first sports match since I got here.



We drove to the New York Mets stadium, where we got to watch them annihilate the San Fransisco Giants 7-0. We didn’t really have the best seats in the house (look at the photo and you’ll get what I mean), and the beers were stupidly expensive, but a good time was had by all, and I got to tick yet another must-do off my list.

Tuesday, 8 July 2008

Wednesday 2nd through Sunday 6th July – Liberty Bell

When I landed the job at Piping Rock, I remember thinking “awesome, I’m going to be there for July 4th”. It didn’t take long for my mum to point out that as I was working in the hospitality business, I was almost certainly going to be working for Independence Day instead of celebrating it – but that didn’t really get my hopes down. However, at Piping Rock Club, we don’t celebrate the forth over just one day, we turn it into a five day long event called Liberty Bell, an event which we host for two other country clubs along with ours. Hence not having written for a week.
The beginning of last week was fairly quiet, with the usual lunchtime and evening shifts to deal with. It wasn’t really until Friday when things started to pick up. Despite having three days off in total this week, I still clocked up over 40 hours. Sunday was a 14 hour day, and Saturday was about 16 hours long.
This weekend I got the privilege of starting at 8am to help serve breakfast, and stayed in work to serve lunch during the middle of the day. Because Liberty Bell runs for five days and incorporates about twenty different competitions (golf, tennis, softball, bridge, backgammon, fly fishing to name but a few), a lot of members choose to stay at the club for the entire period, staying in one of the rooms that make up part of the main building. Whilst I’m sure this may be good for business, it definitely doesn’t make my job any easier over breakfast time. There was only three of us working both mornings, and in the couple of hours that I was serving for, we took about 50 orders each day.

Saturday evening was a dinner-dance affair over at the beach club, where we served dinner to about 500 people, before more people arrived to help the crowds that were already here party away into the night. I was taken home early this night because of Sunday’s 8am start, but everything’s relative during Liberty Bell, so early translated to midnight. Sunday’s breakfast was easy compared to Saturday, but this was also the day of the Wimbledon final, which meant that by about 1pm, the upstairs lounge room was packed, with every single table in view of the TV being taken by people wanting food and drink. The crowds disappeared when Federer finally lost the match, but this was at about 4pm, the time when I was meant to start work for the evening shift. So that day I worked straight through into the evening, setting up and working at the bar for the evening’s barbeque and firework show.

By the end of the shift everybody had cracked open the beers and we finally got to unwind after the longest weekend of my life by going to the closest bar/club to home, a place called Aqualounge – a bar which opened just for us that night. For Bath people reading this – I’ve finally found a place to go that’s more trashy than XL.
I'll write another blog in a day or so's time explaining what I got up to on my days off, but needless to say it has so far included sex, balls and food.

Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Monday 30th June – On Top Of The World



I woke up this morning feeling pretty hungover from the night before. I’m so glad that I’ve got two and a half days off now, I feel like I have been worked to death over the past week. Rob drove Maria and I down to the Social Security office today at lunch time to sort out getting us social security numbers. Once this was sorted out, we did the same thing people like to do on every day off – we headed into the city



The plan was to check the Empire State Building and Central Park off our list of places to see, though it turned out in the end that we weren’t going to have enough time to do both. We had lunch in a very nice restaurant near Penn Station (though weirdly we were served gherkins and coleslaw as an appetizer instead of bread), before walking to the base of the building.




Even though I knew that this icon of a building was going to be much bigger than all of the buildings around it, I was still overcome with excitement and amazement when we realised that we were almost there and could actually see the building. Despite its height, there aren’t many places where you can actually see the EBS from; due to the fact that you spend your time surrounded by buildings tall enough to block your view.





We obviously chose the wrong time of day to go up the building, because we probably queued up (sorry, ‘waited in line’) about eight times before reaching the top. But the view from the top was definitely worth the wait. It was like standing on the top of the world. We were so high up that all of the skyscrapers that had made me feel minute at ground level suddenly seemed like little model buildings. You could see all the way down to lower Manhattan, across one way to New Jersey, across the other way to Long Island, and up to the Bronx. Before reaching the top, we had gone in a cinema/simulator type thing that simulated a helicopter type ride across the whole city, so by the time we actually reached floor 86, I had a rough idea of what was where.






The Empire State Building took up about two or three hours of the afternoon, and after we had hiked 25 blocks uptown to meet up with Cam, Anahita and Del the day was too late to be able to go to Central Park properly. So we abandoned that idea and hailed a cab with instructions to take us down to Bleeker street so that we could go back the bar we were in this time last week (mainly for Anahita’s benefit). We eat tea in a bar on the edge of Little Italy, where we made our statement about the crap service by leaving a combined tip of less than a dollar. Then we headed back to (what we thought was) the bar we’d spent last Monday in. It turned out that the bar we were looking for was actually next door to Off The Wagon, where Anahita’s dream bartender greeted us with a line of free shots.




I cured the day’s hangover there and then by drinking Newcastle Brown all night, until it was time for us to pile into a taxi to take us back to Penn Station so that we could get the last train back to Locust Valley. Amazingly, I actually managed to stay with the group this time, and spent this Monday night in my bed instead of a subway carriage.