London & New York

Finally – the time was there.

The Kerkstraat was basically empty, bags were packed, people came to say good-bye, and after an early wake up on Friday May 1st, Karen, Boris and Monica brought us to the airport. Of course some tears, but we couldn’t wait to get into the plane.

First stop: LONDON, England. At arrival, we wanted to pick up our luggage, where we discovered that this was not possible since they already checked it through to NYC right away. Luckily we had all our important belongings in our small hand-luggage.

We booked a small AirB&B place on forehand, dropped our luggage and made our way to the city. Since we only had about 18h in London, the schedule was quite tight. The weather was beautiful, still only 13 degrees but sunny… a perfect start. So there we were, looking at Big Ben, walking across the Tower Bridge, looking at those funny guards in front of the Buckingham Palace and enjoying some Fish&Chips in a small, yet very cute restaurant in the middle of the city (Pam was suuuper happy since obviously Fish&Chips is not as big as we thought – we kept looking, and looking, and looking until we finally found a place after asking some dude in a coffee shop where to find this typical English dish. He told us some direction, which we followed and indeed –F&C for $10. We sat down, wanted to order right away. Before we could open our mouth, the waitress told us that Fish&Chips were sold out! OMG. We almost gave up, until we in the end did get lucky J) Checkmark for F&C .

After an 8h flight, second stop: NEW YORK, U.S. – WHAT A CITY!!

It took us quite a while to reach Kim’s place in Manhattan, Lower East Side (Sven’s friend where we could stay for the first two nights). We right away made our way to Central Park to meet up with Juan Paulo (Columbian friend of Sven), who had a farewell party in the Park since he was going back to Columbia the next day. It didn’t take long until especially Pam felt the Jet lack (time is 6h backwards.. so 9.00pm was already 3.00am in the morning in Vienna). We said goodbye to Juan Paulo, but we will be seeing him soon enough again in Colombia!

The weather the next couple of days was just amazing – sun & 28 degrees. NYC has so much to offer – we rented roller blades one day to cruise through Manhattan, Brooklyn and along the water; went for a walk on the High Line; visited Time Square and the Broadway; took a boat to Staten Island to have a great view of the skyline of NYC and got very close to the statue of liberty. Although drinking in public is not allowed in the US, on the boat Sven was allowed to enjoy his beer -which he did fully!

Our last two nights we stayed in Brooklyn. This part of New York is the complete opposite of Manhattan! A much more laid-back atmosphere with many bars and restaurants where hipsters were dominating the scene.

The last evening Kim and we went to an amazing theater “Sleep No More”, played in a hotel (the story was connected to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”), where the audience was basically within the story – we could follow the actors into different scenes, making our own decisions which caracters to follow and what scenes to witness. Really cool and very unique!

After the theater, we said fairwell to Kim and went back to our room to pack and get ready for our next destination: TORONTO, Canada!

to be continued..