1721hrs

Our room has two bunk beds, or four, depending on how you look at it. I'm above Colin, and next to me on top of the other bed is the first of our two roommates. Whenever I've been here he's been either asleep or absent, so there's not much to say about him, but he doesn't snore when he is here, and he leaves things tidy when he's not, so that's fine.

The guy below him is a raving madman. He turned in last night at about four a.m., but of course he didn't go straight to sleep. He sat in bed with the light on for at least fifteen minutes, rabbitting on moronically to his own bunk-mate and Colin (myself avoiding inclusion in the conversation by pretending to be asleep still, though it must have been very hard to believe). Apparently he's convinced that Prince Charles had Diana assassinated, and his views on other subjects are similarly well informed. He's staying at a youth hostel because his girlfriend threw him out of the house, and if it weren't for the fact that she dated him in the first place I would have the deepest respect for this woman's intelligence.

Colin reckons we went out this morning at about half eight, which sounds right. We took the metro to the coast, where we went for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, this being the best way of seeing the Statue of Liberty short of the boats going out for that express purpose, which were infinitely more expensive, the Staten Island Ferry being, for some reason, free.

There's not much to see on Staten Island, so we took the next ferry back.

In order to go across the country on Amtrak trains, as is the plan, we require a national rail pass, and the next thing we did was go to get them. Colin had been led to understand that you could get these from the World Trade Centre, so this was our next stop.

What the original purpose of this building was, I failed to ascertain. It's a bit like a shopping centre (sorry, mall) and a bit like a hotel, and a bit like all kinds of other things. We couldn't find anything to do with Amtrak, so we went in a shop selling perfume and asked. The woman there didn't think you could buy Amtrak tickets in the building - she went on Amtrak all the time, she said. If you could get tickets there she wouldn't have to keep going to their HQ. We could try down that way, she said.

We tried down that way, and sure enough there was the Amtrak desk. We got our passes and booked on a train to Niagara Falls tomorrow, and trains from there to Philadelphia on Saturday. Are you British? she asked us. We replied in the affirmative. Would you have gone to Diana's funeral if you were in the country? Did you like her? The natural answer to that one was that I didn't know her, but I took that to be fairly obvious, so just mumbled something about being able to take her or, on the other hand, leave her. Then we went to tell the first woman (the one that sold perfume) that she didn't have to go to the Amtrak headquarters any more. As it happened she wasn't selling perfume at that time, being as she was on her lunch break in the cafe next door. So round we popped with the good news, and got chatting. Like everyone else we've met (including the raving madman), she seemed genuinely interested in our travel plans. It seems odd that in a country where half the residents would shoot you as soon as look at you, the other half treat you like an old friend on sight. Neither of these extremes exists to the same extent in Britain. Possibly the larger the percentage of a population that stabs passers-by on a regular basis, the friendlier everyone else, in order to maintain something resembling civilisation, or, to look at it another way, possibly not.

But back to the perfume woman. Were you upset about Princess Di? she asked.

The fact is, I'm not, particularly. But you can hardly just say, No, not really. So I just gabbled for a bit about, well, no, I mean yes, it was terrible, of course, but I mean, no, well, I think a lot of people were very, weren't they, yes, anyway, must be off, bye.

We went to the Empire State Building next. Big place that. We didn't think you could just go to the top on your own initiative, as it were, and we hadn't planned to bother if you had to pay, but there didn't seem anything to stop us going up for free, so we thought we'd have a go.

Six lifts took us to floor 79, but it wouldn't let us go any higher from there, so we took a seventh lift down a couple of floors, and got on lift number eight to see if we could reach floor 80 from there. But someone else got in with us, pressed another button, and the next thing we knew we were back on the ground floor.

Our plan foiled, we asked a man, and were told we had to buy a ticket. By now we wanted to go up, so we bought a ticket, and were taken higher than floor 80, but still not quite to the top. You had to queue for that, and the view couldn't have been that much better.

Things are never like they are on the telly. Usually it's because the TV people take dramatic license, but one thing about New York they couldn't possibly depict on Friends is the smell. It's very distinctive. Whenever I stick my head in a tip behind a butcher's shop that's been closed down for selling bad meat, I'll remember this place.

Another thing that's different to on TV is the people. Some of them are ugly. All tourists, no doubt.

I went to buy a salad from the cafe here at the youth hostel at around five, and the man said, not until the barbecue at six. How you barbecue salad I don't know, but it's twenty past now (good lord, I've been writing for an hour), so I might wander down and take a look.

We're going to Central Park this evening.

Same day

New York

2050hrs

By the time we got to Central Park, it was getting dark, so we didn't go far into it, we just sat on a bench and had some tea, which we'd bought on the way from a grocery shop. We went in a couple, they're very odd. We had to leave the bag of stuff we bought in the first shop with some kind of doorman in the second shop and pick it up at the end, and you have to pay a bottle deposit on anything in bottles. Our bags were packed by some kid, who we were probably supposed to tip, but we didn't. They both fell far short of the standards of Tesco or Sainsbury, but they were only little shops so it's probably not a fair comparison. Even so, they were more like something I'd expect to find in some impoverished Eastern country than the home of the brave and the land of the free, unless that should be the other way around.

The raving madman's just come in. He seems very quiet so far, but I have confidence that he'll soon be reminding us why this is the city that doesn't sleep.

That's all for now. Tomorrow, Niagara Falls.

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