Mr Xabregas Goes To Washington...

New York was really awesome. Unexpectedly it was really safe no matter where you went. Nothing like those 80's films. I guess Giuliani did some good after all. The subway system is probably the best in the world, even better then London's. I've realised that I tend to judge a city primarily based on it's public transport. I guess it just pisses me off when I find it hard to get around a place.

My first day I went to the Rockefeller Center where the NBC studio's are. That was a small thrill due to my nerdy love of 30 Rock. I booked a ticket to do the NBC studio tour which was kind of interesting. I didn't really get to see as much as I thought I, but I got to see the Conan O'Brien set which is surprisingly small. Actually we were told that everything on the set, like the couches and the desk, are purposely built smaller so that visiting celebrities look bigger. Obviously they had Tom Cruise in mind.

I then checked out Times Square which is pretty cool but is ultimately just a lot of lights and really bright advertisements. Sometime in the afternoon Simon gave me a call (he was staying at a different hostel to me and had headed off to New York a few days earlier). He suggested that we meet up at the World Trade Center site which turned out to be a really bad idea because the place was massive and was full of people. The fact that Simon didn't have a working mobile phone also complicated matters and we never ended up finding each other.

After I gave up looking for Simon I realised I was unexpectedly doing the Nicholas Cage: National Treasure tour of New York. I found myself at the Trinity Church at the beginning of Wall Street, that was the site of buried treasure in the aforementioned movie. There was a church service on at the time so this hindered my own attempts at hunting for treasure.

As the day wore on, I walked uptown to Moby's vegan restaurant, Teany's. I realised it was called Teany's because it was laterally the size of my bedroom. Moby wasn't there but I had dinner anyway. I had a vegan Chicken BLT (a contradiction in terms surely) , which tasted nothing like chicken but was still really good.

Over the next couple of days I also checked out a lot of other shit that I can only be bothered writing about in cryptic point form:

• Museum of Natural History: The Squid and The Whale, Night at The Museum.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Madison Square Garden to watch The Verve play: Bittersweet Symphony payed off after 90 minutes of psychedelic posturing.
• Central Park

Probably the weirdest experience occurred on Sunday night when they played Cloverfield at the hostel in their theatre (they had a big projector). I thought it must be kind of surreal if you're a New Yorker to see your city trashed and pulverised in all those Hollywood films. It's kind of strange when you've actually been to the places that they are destroying on screen.

Anyway, I originally planned to stay in New York until my flight back to Australia. That plan was kicked in the rear when I found out that pretty much all the cheap accommodation in New York had been booked up for my final weekend here due to some sort of cycling event. So I decided to go on to a road trip for a few days to Philadelphia and Washington Dance City.

Philly is notable for being the city where the Deceleration of Independence was signed and it's also the location of the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell is kind of like the Mona Lisa of bells. It's small and ultimately disappointing. Everyone's initial reaction is "I thought it was bigger".

Philadelphia is also where the Rocky movies were set. I wouldn't mention this if it didn't seem to be such a big deal to the tourism industry in Philly. I walked into a gift shop near the tourist information centre and found that Rocky T-shirts were more abundant then Benjamin Franklin figurines.

*CAUTION RANT*

I cringed every time I read anything that said Benjamin Franklin "invented" electricity. Get it right people! He discovered electricity, he didn't invent it! If he could summon fireballs of electrons with his bare hands fighting the British probably would have been a lot easier.

*END RANT*

I met some cool people at the hostel in Philly despite the fact that the place was run by a pair of fem-Nazi's who looked like the frumpy one out of Scobby Doo. The place had a lock out between 10:30am and 4:30pm. I arrived at 3pm and had to sit around for an hour and a half before I could dump my stuff. I realised I may not have finished ranting...

Anyhow, my highlight of Philadelphia was making my way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is where Sylvester Stallone ran up the steps in the famous Rocky montage. It seems like every wanker and his dog was running up the steps and doing the Rocky thing so I joined in. I got a couple of photos.

I realized it must really piss off the people who work at the museum that all the people who loiter outside are only there to do the Rocky jog instead of visiting the museum. Did I mention there is a bronze statue of Rocky out the front?

After Philladelphia I went to Washington D.C. The monuments are aces.