Biting the Big Apple

Past halfway in my whistle-stop tour of the Big Apple, and this is the first chance I have had to take a breath (no, I won’t be featuring in The Colour Purple; it’s a figure of speech).

I have just got back to the hostel, which is small but has everything we need, after a fantastic night on Broadway. Following much deliberation, waiting in the cheapo tickets queue for two hours, Kate and I decided on teenage spectacular Rent. It was a tough choice, and taken with a heavy heart because of the disappointment of Les Miserables not being in town.

In the end the show turned out to be brilliant. The music, the voices, and the storyline were all captivating, powerful and, at times, heartbreaking. I will spare the details of the show, but I would recommend anyone to go and see it (especially ahead of overblown Disney theatre remakes).

Broadway is just a small portion of what we have crammed into the first few days in NYC, and still the activities are coming thick and fast. This city is like no other; it dwarfs anything I have seen before- London, Paris and Berlin included. You can’t cover downtown in a day or two, like in Montreal and Washington, and you can’t see all the buildings that you need to see over a weekend. We have given it a good effort, though!

Even on budget, we have been busy on our feet. We took in all the big sights, such as the Rockefeller Tower and Empire State Building-which offered magnificent views of the sky-scraper fest of Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty was also a Western world ‘must-see’ which has now been ticked off the list, and the sombre atmosphere of Ground Zero was somewhat a harrowing experience as we remembered the events of 2001.

So it has been a touristy affair in the Big Apple so far. One thing that we never saw coming was our attendance in the audience for one of the biggest TV shows in America- The Late Show with David Letterman! We were approached on the street by a typically over-enthusiastic Yank, who asked us an apparently simple trivia question about the show to qualify us for a seat the following day. With both of us having an inherent lack of knowledge about American chat-shows, we took a wild stab at the answer, and lo-and-behold, we were right!

So the next day, there we were in the CBS studio, within feet of Charlize Theron, Paul Schafer and Dave Letterman himself. It was great fun as a host of comedians ‘warmed us up’ before the show, and then they had us clapping to live music, and then over laughing to every joke that was uttered forth. It was strange, but the more I faked laughed the more jolly I became!

It has definitely been an action packed few days- again- and it will surely be another packed bunch of days as we head off to Boston and then onto Quebec City. In between the cups of Starbucks’ white chocolate mocha the photographs and holiday moments will be coming thick and fast.