Arrival in New York

Having to get up at 5:00am is horrible. Having to get up at 5:00am after you finally gotten used to not getting up at 3, 4 or 5:00am due to jet lag, is just plain cruel. Well, we had to do it anyways. Our flight was leaving early from Chicago O'Hare airport, so we set out to catch a bus at 6:00am to get to the airport.

Thankfully, it was an uneventful ride from start to finish. Delta even put us on a plane that left an hour earlier, so we managed to arrive in New York at 11:35am local time. First impressions of New York... it is kinda big. Getting from LaGuardia to our destination in Bedford-Stuyvesant a part of Brooklyn took quite some time.

Isi found a lovely appartment in the center of it. Bed-Stuy is one of the new hip areas to live in New York apparently. A little to my surprise, it turned out to be majority African American neighbourhood.
This was the first time since my early PhD student days when I lived in Manchester's Southern part in Moss Side that I was actually belonging to an ethnic minority (among mainly people from the subcontinent and Africa). It took me some getting used to, because I prefer to walk around the blocks unnoticed as just another face. That is not really an option here :-D

Check out the very cool appartement we got for our time in NY

It even has a Plasma Screen TV with Netflix, Hulu and Youtube

...and last but not least, a yard out back to have quiet beer in the shades

Nonetheless, I met one of our neighbours for the next couple of days, a 55-year old by the name of Divine, who was having a barbecue in his frontyard. I just wanted to introduce myself and say hi and we got chatting. It turned out that about 20 years ago, he was stationed in Stuttgart on one of the US military bases over there. He reminisced a little about his old times and I told him of what I remembered of the US soldiers stationed in and around Würzburg... very little to be honest, but it kept the conversation afloat and it was a nice chat. I then asked him the best route to get to Manhattan and if there are things to observe while being here.

Afterwards, Isi and I were just chilling in the appartment. We were just tired after 4 days of pure walking with today mostly consisting of dragging our luggage to an airport, then away from an airport, up and down stairs in Metro stations and all the rest. We decided it was time to stay inside.

Tomorrow, we will start exploring Manhattan for a bit...