Day 1 in New York

OK, so before I start, I need to tell you about Vodka Woman. So we get to Tullamarine airport (Melbourne) at 8am, and join the United check-in queue (4th in line wooo!) and we up behind a woman and her daughter, travelling on the same flight as us. Remember, this is 8am. Anyway, Vodka Woman heard an announcement telling passengers that there is a 100ml limit for containers of liquids onboard. Oh no! Vodka Woman has a litre of vodka stashed in a water bottle in her carry-on (crafty, no?) What is Vodka Woman to do? Vodka Woman's cunning plan was to proceed to pour vodka into a half-litre coffee cup and DRINK IT ALL RIGHT THERE IN THE QUEUE! She was still 400ml over limit though, so SHE DID IT AGAIN!

Wow. Needless to say, Vodka Woman (yes, the caps are necessary) probably had a good flight :)

Oh, one other quick thing. The airport code for Melbourne is MEL, for Los Angeles it's LAX. Printed on our ticket, therefore, was my new favourite word... MEL-LAX. Just chill :)

So, skip forward to today, we had tickets for the Show "Wicked" at the Gershwin theatre on 51st Street (just off Broadway). Since we're staying on 57th, we decided to walk to Broadway and take our time seeing a few sights. Yeah, that plan failed. We got as far as 8th Avenue and discovered a gigantic street market, which ran all the way from 57th to.... well, beyond 46th because that's where we left. The market was amazing. Ok, it was repetitive, but we spent a few dollars on knockoff sunglasses, I HEART NY t-shirts and a few other things, before heading towards Times Square.

Charlie & Paul's ITALIAN SAUSAGE! So big it needs a whole VAN!

It's at this point that I need to mention this fact: Movies and television lie to you! No, really. According to these tools of el diabolo, New York is a hideous, ugly, messy, crowded place, full of rude, angry people, with bonus hookers and muggers on alternating corners. This is not true. The city is relatively clean for its size, we haven't seen a single hooker or mugger, and New Yorkers have, almost without exception, been noticably more polite than Australians.

Polite to the point where a lady actually stopped us in the street to tell us how beautiful Lisa looked, and it wasn't even a distraction so her accomplice could steal my wallet. Just wow. That would never happen at home.

Even the cops here are nice, so long as you're behaving yourself. There are a lot of them, although to be fair it WAS "Prayer Day" here today, so they were probably expecting trouble from that rough bunch :) Lisa, taking advantage of her "dumb Aussie tourist" status, wanted to take a photo of some cops. The particular bunch she picked turned out to have someone "assisting with their investigation" so we moved on, but in Times Square we approached a couple of flatfoots (flatfeet?) and asked for a photo. They were kind enough to pose, and even crack small smiles. Nice job.

Damn, I was going to talk about Times Square, but this is getting too long, so I'll keep it to 10 words: huge, amazing, sparkly, busy, cool, fun... that's only five, what am I missing? OH! Hershey. Hershey, hershey, hershey, hershey.

More later :)