Hm, now seeing as it's almost the end of June, perhaps it's time for me to start writing about a trip I had back at the beginning of May! I blagged some cheap flights to New York, and went to stay with Rich & Paul for the best part of a week.

It's ages since I've been to the States. For one thing, the euro is a whole lot stronger against the dollar than it was last time. If only I hadn't just bought a load of stuff in India! I could have done a majorly inexpensive shop in the Big Apple. Instead, I just ate & drank my way round...

So I flew out of Munich on the Friday morning, and had to change at Frankfurt. It was a very quick turnaround there - just long enough for me to phone Rich & Paul and ask them their address, which I needed for visa formalities - and then an uneventful flight to Newark.

Rich picked me up from Newark at around three in the afternoon local time (for my body it was more like nine in the evening, but I didn't let that bother me) and drove me to his house in Teaneck, New Jersey. Newark is much handier for his house than JFK because it is already in the same state, and more importantly the right side of the Hudson river, which is a total bottleneck as we were to see on subsequent trips into the city.

They're having some remodelling done, and Rich was very apologetic about the state of his place, but I was able to overlook the building work and focus on the jacuzzi in his garden! Oh yeah! We hit that baby EVERY night, gin & tonic in hand!

The entertainment on Friday evening came in the form of their friend Bern, who arrived shortly before Paul came home from work and spent the evening drinking & snacking with us. It was so crazy to hear someone talking with a real New York accent! I felt like I had been dropped into a TV show. And the feeling didn't wear off for the whole time I was there.

After breakfast on Saturday, the three of us drove to Washington Heights (which is uptown New York, or in other words further north on Manhattan island) to pick up another friend Tony and then we went on through Little Dominica and the Bronx to the Botanical Gardens. What a fabulous place! It reminded me of Kew Gardens in London, even down to the Victorian-style glass house. Only my last visit to Kew was in winter whereas now we could enjoy a profusion of blooms and trees in the full thrust of their springtime growth.

A few hours later, we drove back to New York and ended up in Greenwich Village. First we parked the car round the corner from the famous Christopher Street, site of the Stonewall gay rights protest, and then we headed to Rich's favourite cheesemonger's. There I chatted away with one of the serving girls - who by the way had an astonishing set of pendulous breasts! - and managed to get free tastes of loads of their cheeses. Either she was impressed by my bluffer's knowledge of European cheeses, or she just liked my accent. Either way, we got good service!

We stopped in Tye's, a regular haunt of Rich & Paul's, for a couple of beers and then headed home to gorge ourselves on cheese and wine. Not forgetting a lovely relaxing soak in the hot tub! After all, our feet were very sore from all that walking about...

Day three of my trip started in grand style, with a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, grits, and bagels. Then the three of us drove back into the city, parking in the Village again and jumping into the Subway to City Hall for a quick wander round the centre of Downtown. I also ran into an electronics shop to buy a card reader for my camera, so I could share my copious amounts of photos with Rich & Paul.

From outside the Federal Courthouse we caught a cab to the New Museum, recommended to me by Karin in Munich. And what a building! It looks from the outside like a badly stacked tower of enormous white cubes. The only decoration is a huge rainbow-shaped and rainbow-coloured sign over the front entrance that reads "Hell, Yeah!" - how cool is that!!

From the inside, it's pretty bare, leaving plenty of space for art installations. To be honest, the art on display wasn't particularly inspiring. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was basically tosh. Once again, I enjoyed the descriptions more than the pieces. I smiled especially widely on the inside upon reading that some piece of crap drawing with a bunch of small doodles on was "a floating universe of sublimely mismatched equivalencies".

Perhaps the highlight of the New Museum is the view you get from the viewing balcony on the top floor. We could see right into Downtown, from the Woolworth building and Ground Zero to the Empire State building; over Midtown to the Village, Chelsea and beyond, and across the East River to Brooklyn and Queens. So many familiar place names! And now I could begin to be able to pinpoint them in my mind's map.

We left the museum and walked a long meandering walk through SoHo, along Bleecker Street and Broadway (where we stopped for a Mr Whippy ice cream), through Washington Square Park (where I took a photo looking all the way up 5th Avenue) and then (via a bubble tea bar) to the University and then The Piers, where we enjoyed a glorious sunset.

As dusk fell, we walked up Christopher Street to the Dugout for a few beers, before going back to Tye's, where we had a drink with their friend Ray. He joined us for pizza at New York's best pizza restaurant, John's Pizzeria on Bleecker Street. And thence to the car and on to the hot tub for another well-earned soak!

Okay, I'm going to stop there, because I have to pack my bags in readiness for our trip to Egypt tomorrow morning. Did I mention we're returning to do the seven-day live-aboard diving tour in the Red Sea that we did last year? No? How remiss of me!!