New York day 2

The next day was going to be a pretty busy one for me, so I got up early and headed out around 8. Unfortunately I hadn't had the best night's sleep - New York is crazy loud at night and drivers honk their horns way too much for it to be meaningful in any way, which ultimately just makes them honk longer and, somehow possibly, louder. Round the corner from my hotel lived the neighbours from hell: Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 5. Four or five times during the night the fire engines were called out, and seemed to do nothing but sit in traffic with their sirens going non-stop right outside my window. New York firefighters have been held up as incredible inspirational heroes for the last 12 years, and with good reason, but to me that night they were just bastards.

Hot dogs are easy to come by in New York, and there aren't many things that feel as authentically American as picking one up from a street vendor. I was anticipating something awesome, the best hot dog I'd ever had perhaps, but a New York hot dog is just as plain, small and disappointing as a UK one. That was gone within 20 seconds and I promised myself something a bit more substantial once I'd ticked the first thing off my sightseeing list, which was a thing I had definitely been looking forward to.

30 Rockefeller Plaza is a 70 storey art deco slab that stands as the centrepiece of the Rockerfeller Center. It has the second highest Observation Deck in New York and was the setting for the famous Lunchtime Atop A Skyscraper photograph, often incorrectly attributed (possibly just by me) to the construction of the Empire State Building. Side on, there doesn't seem anything remarkable or characteristically recognisable about its blankly monolithic form, but standing end-on to it from the plaza shows off its strikingly slender, tiered art deco architecture. The art deco styling continues inside the Mezzanine area, all dark sculpted pillars and moody marble, totally different to the bright, optimistic atmosphere you might expect if you've ever seen an episode of 30 Rock.

30 Rockefeller Plaza

The elevator makes the 70 storey trip up to the Observation Deck in around about 30 seconds, and the clear ceiling gives both an exciting and unsettling view of the elevator shaft as you're launched skywards, watching the blue LED lights marking each level whip past at frightening speed. At the top, on the 70th floor, you can see the entire length of Manhattan from either side of the Observation Deck, and, if you're a total nutcase, down to some of the rooftops below. Thankfully, due to the plexiglass barriers that keep you a little back from the edge and the gothic gargoyles that block the view, you can't see straight down the 850 feet to the street below. Otherwise some poor hapless pedestrian would've been getting a faceful of vomit.

It may not be as famous as the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but then you can't see the Empire State Building from the Empire State Building, and so 30 Rock probably gives you the best, most iconic view of the city. And, as I had arrived at opening time, there were very few people up there so I could take my time and enjoy a totally unobstructed view of every part of the city. I asked a lady to take a picture of me in front of the skyline, but she inexplicably decided that the Empire State Building looks best with me blocking it. I spent about 40 minutes up there before I started to freak out about being up so high and decided to head down. Back to the Mezzanine level, I went to the Potbelly Sandwich Shop (definitely somewhere Liz Lemon frequents) and sat munching my roll in the plaza before heading off to the next thing on my checklist.

My sandwich view

Apparently he doesn't work there :(

Ellis Island, home to the former immigration station of New York, is still closed due to the damage it sustained during Hurricane Sandy, which is unfortunately something I really wanted to visit. Thankfully Liberty Island has reopened, so at least I was able to take the ferry and visit the statue. It is incredibly striking up close and, if you listen to the immigrant testimonials and ignore the rest of the simperingly dramatic content on the audio tour, is quite an emotional experience. Afterwards I hung out in a bar in Battery Park for a while, enjoying the sun and a couple of pints of some local IPA. Another emotional experience.

New York

It's one thing to book a flight, but it's a totally different thing to actually get on the bloody thing. What on earth have I got myself in for? was all I could think; I had thought about going to America for a while, but a little common sense and quite a lot of fear had prevented me from seriously contemplating it and actually getting organised. Unfortunately that didn't seem so much of a factor after half a dozen pints one night, and as the haze cleared the next day, it became harder and harder to convince myself that I hadn't actually booked a flight, hotel and hire car. I would've been impressed with how organised and thorough I had been after all that beer if I wasn't concerned that I was now in a massive amount of trouble.

To make things easier, rather than spending the day before my flight sorting out my luggage and all the last minute details, I sat in the pub with my friend Ciaran for over 7 hours instead. Stupid perhaps, but it actually did make things easier; instead of being terrified about spending nearly a month alone in a country half way around the world and worrying about all the things I could have forgotten to pack, I was tired and grumpy instead and was more interested in just getting the airport palaver and flight over with rather than dwelling on what was to come. How on earth I ever manage to enjoy myself, I don't know.

Getting into the city from JFK airport wasn't all that hard and finding my hotel was pretty easy as well as it was just off Times Square, a place so loud and busy and blindingly-bright that you can probably see it from space. It was late in the afternoon by the time I got there and I was far too dazed after the 8 hour flight to consider doing any sight seeing, but I got to meet up with my lovely friend Caroline who was working in New York that week for a burger. By which I mean we met for a burger, not that she was being paid in burger. Although it was a pretty nice burger. We sat outside Shake Shack in Madison Square Park while we ate, watching the sunlight thicken and glow on the buildings opposite as the sun began to set and the evening rolled in. I was absolutely knackered after a pretty bad night's sleep, an early morning and a plane journey, so unfortunately my contribution to the conversation wasn't particularly scintillating, but it was nice to see a familiar face all the same. Knowing before I left England that I was going to meet up with her made a huge difference, as I knew it was going to help ease me into the trip rather than dump me right in the deep end alone and made the entire prospect far less daunting. Thanks Caroline, you're a champ.

Times Square

Big building

I realised pretty soon, after we went our separate ways, that I would have had nothing to worry about even if I hadn't got to meet up with Caroline; New York is nowhere near as vastly imposing and terrifying as I had expected and, although I won't go as far as to say I felt like I belonged, there wasn't one moment when I felt like I didn't belong. After a life saturated with American culture, every part of New York felt familiar to me and the friendliness I experienced made me feel more comfortable there than in any other city I've visited for a first time. And the street grid system makes it almost impossible to get lost, which is a good thing if you're trying to not look like a tourist.

I was struggling with the jetlag that night, but forced myself to go out until it was more of a respectable bed time in the hope that I would adjust to the time difference as soon as possible. I went to a place called Latitude round the corner from my hotel, which was actually a bar and grill, not a hooligan club like the name suggests. It was there, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers play Cincinnati, that I met Mike. He works for Standard Chartered in California and was in New York on business. We talked a lot about New York, London, American football and real football. A drink turned into several and my sensible bed time was well gone when we finally decided to leave the bar at half 12 and go our separate ways. Mike was a nice guy.

USA! USA!

So I'm in America. That's weird. I'm also having way too much fun to write. So you're just gonna have to wait.

Paris - finally

From the pics online, I thought the hostel I'd booked in Paris looked a much more friendly and sociable place than where I stayed in Strasbourg. It was, but only slightly. A sign in the reception and social area said "we want to keep a friendly and warm atmosphere in the lobby, so we don't provide WiFi access in the rooms. Come down, connect, and share a moment with us! That's the youth hostel spirit." When I got there, the place was packed. Every single person had their face buried into a phone or laptop screen. No one moved. No one looked up. Silence. What an atmosphere.

I went for lunch in a cafe that was only semi-busy, but the way the waiter behaved you'd have thought the entire population of Paris had descended upon the place all at once. He was bad tempered, flapped about constantly and met every request with an open-armed invite to look round the half filled restaurant that he seemed to be suggesting he was barely keeping on top of. A couple of American businessmen dared to make more than one request at a time and he responded by holding his hands up in front of him, palms together, and bowing to them mockingly. Suffice to say, I liked him immediately.

I decided to try steak tartare for the first time in my life, and it was rubbish. Raw beef tastes of nothing, raw egg tastes of nothing and the only flavour I got was from the raw onion, gerkins and capers that came with it. A beer cost €8.50 - I had just eaten raw meat, but that nearly made me puke.

As much of an utter pain in the arse as she is, it was nice to meet up with my friend Helene in the afternoon. We went to the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain to see an exhibition of the sculptures of Ron Mueck, which were unsettling to say the least. His human models are creepily ultra-realistic and he plays with scale to such an extreme level that you're either freaked out by the vastness of his subject matter or disturbed by the intensity with which his miniature work depicts its grotesqueness. My favourite piece was called Young Couple and from the front it appears to be a sweet, heartwarming sculpture of a teenage boy and girl stood together, arms around each other, and he with his head bowed towards hers. But circling around the piece reveals the back of the figures, and you realise it's not an affectionate embrace at all, but a violent, oppressive one, with the boy yanking back the girl's arm in a viciously spiteful grip. That's art.

'Couple Under an Umbrella'

'Young Couple'

In the evening we met Helene's boyfriend Jonathan for dinner. He's a really nice guy from Madrid who has two sisters who live in Slough. Not sure who would swap Madrid for Slough, but still. After some food, wine and a little French-bashing, they invited me for a stroll along the Seine, but I didn't want to get back to the hostel too late. Plus it would've been a little less romantic having me along. Maybe.

It was hometime the next morning. I headed to Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar back to London, which I was feeling pretty ready for. As I was queuing to pass through the ticket check there was an explosion, and several hundred people ducked in unison like the world's shortest flashmob as sparks, smoke and flames billowed from the top of some train's engine. The air stank of burning. Luckily it wasn't my train. Oh, and also that no one was hurt. I made it back to England in any case.

Bye sun, hello rain - Strasbourg

Strasbourg was a very strange place for me. After a whole weekend of sunshine and friends in Munich, the drizzle of Strasbourg and the lurch away from familiarity left me fed up and with absolutely no desire to explore the town. Usually, when I go away with friends, returning to normality and not having everyone around me anymore leaves me feeling incredibly lonely. It wasn't like that in Strasbourg; I just felt bored. The hostel didn't help either, being incredibly impersonal and lacking any character; it needs to decide what it wants to be, as it advertises itself as a hostel but also claims to be a conference centre. The guy on reception said they didn't have internet, which I couldn't quite believe; every other hostel I've been to in the past month has had internet, even the one where it was broken, and it makes no sense for a place offering conferencing services to not offer such a basic one.

I had been recommended Strasbourg by a few people as they had said the old town was incredibly beautiful. They weren't wrong there, with so many of the medieval timber framed buildings still standing, but, unlike most of the old towns I've seen on my trip, nothing very much seemed to be happening. I arrived about 2 o'clock but there was hardly a soul around, with everything seemingly prepped to open later in the evening. I decided to head back to the hostel and, with the bar not opening until later and no entertainment and no internet, I went for a sleep instead. Back in the old town at half 6, the weather had cleared a little and there seemed to be more life to the place. Well, a bit. I spent ages wandering around trying to find somewhere that had WiFi and ended up having the most expensive beer of my entire trip just to be able to get online.

The evening in Strasbourg never seems to pick up. As soon as cafes and restaurants start putting out their tables and chairs, they're packing them away again. I managed to find a bar Peter had recommended, Academie de la Biere, and ended up having a goats cheese sandwich as it was the least American thing on the menu. The bar was a pretty cool place, with a huge selection of beer not just from France but from all around the world. I didn't see anything from England on the menu, however. With little else I could see to do in town, I just waited it out there until it was less of a pathetic time to go to bed.

The hostel bar, which is supposed to open at half 6, was still closed when I got back. The only good thing about the place was the night watchman, who was very pleasant and chatty and insisted on opening the bar and getting me a beer, even though I kinda just wanted to sleep. Back in my room, no one else had arrived and I looked forward to a night with the place to myself. Unfortunately I was woken at God knows what time by someone arriving, who then proceeded to unpack their bag in the dark with what I assumed was some sort of hammer. After a good 10 minutes of farting around, including having a pee with the toilet door open, they finally settled down to sleep. Then they started snoring. Great.

The shower in the room didn't have a door, just a curtain, and I was woken by my late-arriving room mate using it in the morning. It was one of those stupid timed push-button ones, so after every 10 seconds or so it cut out, meaning there wasn't even running water to mask all the other sounds. I'm no snob, but I don't think it's pleasant to be woken by the unmistakable coarse scratching sound of someone lathering up their pubic region.

I could have given Strasbourg another go today, but with my Interail ticket running out and the Eurostar prices doubling on Thursday until well after the weekend, I'd decided to bring my trip to an end and head to Paris. On the train I got seated next to an American girl who was obviously the sort of person who would describe herself as a 'free spirit'; she had the obligatory Chinese tattoo, spiritual symbols and the phrase 'Purpose of Unity' on her T-Shirt, and I'd be willing to wager a fair bit that she had a Dream Catcher in her bag. She got out her right-on MacBook Air, her anti-corporate Beats headphones and started throwing shapes right there in her seat to some dubstep music like she was at her own private rave. After a while she got out her spiritually-themed book, Tears of Love, of which she had already made it all the way to page 31. I spied a quote from it that went something like this; "Think of a piece of paper. One side faces you and one faces the beloved. You can read the side that faces you, but more importantly you should be able to read the side that faces a true friend, the beloved." Fuck. Right. Off.

After 4 pages of that, she went back to her MacBook music and had a little snooze to such classic hits as 'Healing Frequency Sounds', 'Native American Earth Drum', 'Chakra Balancing Meditation Music' and 'IQ - Intelligence Increase Tones'. When she woke up she spent some time putting on a fair bit of her (I assume organic) make up, then, when she saw what I was reading and realised I spoke English, bent my ear for the last 15 minutes on what she's been doing on her travels. She told me that she'd spoken to the universe and asked for one of her 'bitches' to be sent to visit, and, like, 2 days later one of them got in contact and said she was coming over to meet up. What an arsehole.

Hottest day in Munich in 9 years

I've been staying with my awesome awesome friends Peter and Anne, who are two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and they always come up with fun stuff to do. Peter and I went to the BMW museum, then up to a beer garden on top of the hill next to the Olympic Park for a couple. Later in the day we headed to a Greek restaurant with some of the gang from Friday and also our friend Merik, who was also happened to be in Munich. Afterwards, Niño and Silke, friends of my old colleague Marcel, invited us back to their house where plenty of wine, grappa and English bashing was to be had. It was a really fun evening and Niño and Silke are wonderful hosts. It didn't feel like we'd done a whole lot, but with the heat, we were absolutely knackered by the end of the day.

On Sunday, after a traditional Bavarian weißwurst breakfast (boiled white sausage, pretzel, sweet mustard and a weißbier - trust me, it's amazing) we headed to the Allianz Arena to watch 1860 Munich play FSV Frankfurt. It reminded me of going to see Brentford vs Carlisle in the Johnson's Paint Trophy final at Wembley, because the ground was just over a quarter full, but it meant we got the premium seats, almost on the half way line and 3 rows back, only the day before. I came up with the genius idea of checking where the sun would be during the match so we could sit in the shade, for which Peter was very grateful. I know they're a second tier team, but it still makes me want to puke that the most expensive seats in the place are £35 each while the cheapest seat at White Hart Lane is around £40. The Premier League needs to buck its ideas up.

The busy home end

Fair play to the guys on the pitch, because, with the temperature peaking at 36 degrees, you could really see it affecting their game, but they run their hearts out nonetheless. I was very impressed with their number 29, Yannick Stark, and the number 10, Moritz Stoppelkamp, and they combined to score the winner in the last few minutes. They're both new signings as well, so maybe this year will be a good one for München. Oh yeah, and FSV are a bunch of dirty bastards.

We got back to Peter and Anne's and the guys were kind enough to let me use their apartment block's washing machine, as I suddenly realised I had nothing left to wear. Then we headed out to a beer garden about 20 minute walk from place for a quick drink and some food. That's when the wind began to pick up, the clouds rolled over and I saw my first rain since leaving England 3 weeks ago. It didn't last all that long though, and we were able to take a nice stroll, with a lovely cooling wind instead of a hot one for a change, back to the flat. We were all pretty wiped and after some ice cream (vanilla, of course) it was most definitely time for bed.

If you're ever in Munich, look Peter and Anne up, because they're truly special people. I feel bad for taking up their time on a weekend so hot, all they probably wanted to do was absolutely nothing, and also because I know I would never be as wonderful a host as them. But no one ever wants to visit Slough, so it works out for everyone.

Friday - Salzburg to Munich

Normally I avoid sightseeing tours because I prefer to explore a city on foot; it's a more leisurely way to experience a city, instead of speeding through it on a bus and being bombarded by info from a tour guide as they desperately try to keep up, and I think you get to see more of how a place really is. I most certainly wasn't going on foot today however, and instead took an hour's guided bus tour of Salzburg to get as much in in as little time as possible. It wasn't your average impersonal open-top bus journey though; our guide drove just me and a girl from Turkey around the city in a beautifully air conditioned people carrier, in which we were free to ask as many questions as we'd like. He was such a nice guy, very funny and chilled out, and he treated the Austrian rules of the road with a charmingly laid-back attitude. My ticket also got me up the lift to the cafe at the Museum der Moderne, high up on one of the hills, for a free coffee and applestrudel, and from there I was able to enjoy one of the best views of the city. In the shade thankfully, as it had got to 33 degrees by lunchtime.

My strudel view

Back in town, I walked around the Mirabell palace and gardens, featured in The Sound of Music, then sat in a cafe in town for a couple of drinks while waiting for my train. I like Salzburg a lot, as there always seems to be something sweet going on, and everyone seems genuinely happy and glad to be living there. As I mentioned before, it is an incredibly beautiful place, and that goes for many of the people as well; I challenge any straight man to see a smiling girl wearing traditional dirndl cycle past on her basket-fronted bike and not want to instantly marry her.

The palace

The fountain from that famous scene in The Sound of Music.
So I'm told, I've never seen it.

I realised I'd left myself too little time to walk to the station (that, and I didn't want to) so I found a cab, which was just dropping off a little old lady, and the driver said he was free to take me. But with time ticking down, the old lady took her sweet goddamn time getting out of the cab, stubbornly refusing the cab driver's offers of his arm to help her out or to take her bag for her. I continued to smile politely as she gradually eased herself out over several minutes, but the urge to scream some key German phrases I'd learned from old war films at her was almost too much.

Eventually I was able to get in and made it to the station just in time. The train journey was another wonderful trip though the Austrian and Bavarian countryside, and the view of the Alps as we rolled past them was absolutely stunning. I've only ever seen them from the air before, so it was nice to finally get to see them up close. That was until the stupid old bitch sat over the way pulled down the window shade. "What are you playing at?!" I wanted to shout, "they're the fucking Alps!!!"

I had a wonderful evening in Munich. I'd aimed to make it here for this weekend as my pal Mike has quit his job with my old company and I really wanted to see him and his lovely wife Erin before they move back to Seattle. It was great to see so many other old work colleagues too, catching up in a Bavarian beer garden well into the evening. I've realised the best thing about traveling is that when I meet people I haven't seen in ages and they ask what I've been up to, I actually have something more substantial to say other than "oh, y'know...working n'that". Am I becoming interesting?