This is a brief documentation of an awesome 2-3 week trip of the United States.
The pictures will be organised into the following catagories:
#1 The South (Myrtle Beach and North Carolina)
#2 New York (Manhattan and Brooklyn)
#3 DC (Washington DC)
#4 Comments and observations
#1
I'm not exactly starting at the begining of the trip, more at the end. My last 5 days were spent in the south and here is how they went. First we headed down to Myrtle Beach to catch some sun...
Myrtle Beach has great sand and it is very very hot, this is before I got totally burned. Me on the left, brother in law in the middle and mate kris on the right.
hooters had some good food. (notice the red mark on my neck where I missed the sunscreen
)
plenty of cheesy shops on myrtle beach aka redneck heaven
anyway I am now heading back towards washington and to do this I had a couple of days travelling through North Carolina...
haha, welcome to Bath! This was a very nice town but obviously no comparison to the real deal.
Enfield (for whoever lives there, kris is the attorney for Enfield, NC)
There are a lot of houses like this in the south i.e. absolutely huge houses inside towns, not expensive either.
Before heading into Wilmington NC I had this BBQ meal (reference will come later)
Me and brother in law in Wilmington
I met this girl at a clothes shop in Wilmington, she gave me her number so I called her later for a bite to eat..then the bad BBQ struck and I was in the restaurant, having ordered, feeling too ill to eat anything! oh shit! Fortunately it was ok and I took this picture back at her house before going out to meet her friends
Me showing the yanks how it's done...
I lost 5-2 : /
Anyway that concludes the south for now, unless I decide to add any of the many pictures I haven't used yet. New York next.
#2
After the original stay in DC when I arrived my sister and I headed up to New York to shop, see the city and meet her friends up there (she has friends in every city/country)
Anyway we took the chinatown bus (chinatown DC to chinatown NY with a stop in Chinatown Philadelphia). The rules of the chinatown bus seem to be don't ask what happens to the people who paid for tickets but didn't have a space on the bus and were forced to get off, typical reply = 'me no engrish'.
It was cheap though, and in New York we found ourselves deposited outside this suspicious looking fast food restaurant.
After negotiating our way out of chinatown to our apartment in soho we took the metro to Central Park
Then we walked to times square (can you spot p-diddy?)
My brother in law joins us again at this point after working the first couple of days and it is on to Brooklyn, home of biggie smalls and chris rock (well we went to brooklyn heights which is more like the home of bill cosby)
Some of the NYC crew gather near the brooklyn promenade whilst I observe a dance music rave in an old tobacco warehouse a couple of blocks away, wandering what the odds are of these 30 year olds joining me there.
interesting fact: the girl to the left of this photo has an uncle you may have heard of, he went to a 'whites only' cafe in greensville (or greensboro, dont remember) with 3 mates and refused to leave before being served; like rosa parks this was one key moment in sparking the civil rights movement. She is very modest about it though.
We watched the final at a Liverpool supporters bar in NY then walked to little Italy afterwards..
It generally got more hectic as the night went on there, apparantly it's ok to run red lights when screaming and holding flags, and ok to block the road with a parade, when your team wins the world cup!
Again that's the end of NYC unless I decide to get more pics.
Washington DC and other pics to come soon.
#3
So, on to the begining of the trip. I arrived in DC in the middle of a very hot spell (which compared to the average miserable English weather that I left behind me, well you get the idea)
We went to watch the DC nationals vs Tampa Bay in a game which is called baseball. It was 38 C.
me and sister outside stadium
all stand for national anthem
big stadium
we had a party for my sisters birthday (and Canada day)
Shenandoah National Park, Virginia:
We now go on to a reserve to do hiking and admire the view with a sense of patriotic pride like good Americans.
I want to live in the middle of nowhere in a crap house
the view from third of the way up
A few rock climbing skills (there is a nasty drop inbetween the two sets of rocks you can see, my skills > gravity though)
We reach the top (about 3300 feet)
That's all the photos you are getting. I apologise for the lack of actual DC pictures, I did go around the city and to museams/memorials/white house but didn't bother taking any pics.
#4
A few comments to make:
Despite common opinion, in most ways the south beats the north. The people are more friendly, the scenery is better, the weather is nicer, it's all a bit more relaxed. The problems are there are a lot of rednecks, and a lot of towns completely turn dead on Sundays because everyone is so religious.
Every american town name is stolen from the UK.
Some americans can drive, the majority don't have a clue.
This could be argued about all day but from the impression I got in my short stay most ethnic groups get on with each other well, better than in the UK. There are obviously places I didn't go though.
21 year old drinking law sucks, but in a lot of places enforcement isn't very good.
Shopping is SO MUCH BETTER there. No comparison. It just shows how much of a ridiculous price we pay for everything over here, it disgusts me to think about it. The most expensive rip off clothes in the US are at sale prices for what they would cost here, and that is no exagguration.
Does being better looking than someone give you the right to put them down? I'd rather be insulted by someone equally as ugly.
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