A-B-C-1-2-3-X-Y-Z

It's the end of my first week in New York, and right now I'm feeling a little subdued about the whole experience - largely, I expect because I've been in my room with a headache for the last few hours, and there's no sign of anything exciting happening this evening. However, the last few days have not been wholly uneventful. Friday involved a considerably long and very enjoyable lie in and much pottering around until I headed downtown to Bleecker Street for a night out with Mehreen. She decided we’d explore Alphabet City - named after Avenues A, B, C and D, the only ones in the city to have single letter names - where she had previously not been out: apparently she had "done the meat packing district to death", which sounded a bit morbid to me. Unfortunately nether of us knew the area, and after a very enjoyable dinner and stroll through Washington Square Park, we hopped in cab and got totally lost trying to locate a bar a friend had recommended. After a considerable about of walking we found the B-Bar, which turned out to more of a restaurant than a bar - but I did get the pleasure of catching a Pipettes tune, which was an unexpected and very pleasant snippet of home.

After we were kicked out for not ordering food, Mehreen dragged me onwards to Schillers, a fairly cool if unbelievably loud bar on the Lower East Side. Mehreen seemed to think it had a very authentic American feel, but the number of English accents and the Aussie behind the bar left me unconvinced - apparently the food’s very good though. A few pints later, I'm prepared to be dragged to Libation, a rather posh looking bar/club/restaurant thing. As we got in free I didn't pick up on how expensive the place was until Mehreen offered to buy me a drink in an attempt to get me talking to people - a dirty vodka martini for $15. Given where we are, I guess it still isn’t that expensive, but I am a student after all. In any case, it was easily one of the most horrible things I've tasted, and that's after being forced to down vodka, gin and gummy bears at Boat Club events. In all honesty, I only wanted the thing so I could hold a martini glass, which I thought looked so cool that I held on to it for at least 10 minutes, taking sips until my stomach could finally bear it no more. Personally, I thought the place was nothing special, but it's becoming more and more obvious to me that unless I'm in the right setting with the right people, clubs are really pretty tedious.

The following morning was another late start, with only the vaguest twinges of a hangover, and we set out to have a quick look round the Union Square market. Mehreen got bored pretty quickly, and decided to head off up to Madison Square Park in search of bargains, and I wandered round the market, packed with organic fruit and veg. Not for the first time since arriving here, I felt a little cold to the whole experience, and what really should have been and fun and useful shopping trip quickly became stressful, and I decided to leave once I'd picked up some interesting looking zucchini (courgette) bread. The feeling quickly faded as I walked home, and I managed to pick up some really useful stuff on the walk back (as well as locate an amazing discount shoe shop). As I walked in, Emilie came by and offered to take me out to a local street fair - which was mostly random food, jewellery and souvenir stalls, with some interesting stuff and lots of free samples in between. I also had my first experience with bubble tea - cold tea with balls of tapioca in it - which is seriously weird. The rest of the day was spent hanging out with a few people from the floor, and ended with a viewing of Silence of the Lambs and a two-hour Mac repair job – I’m still not sure which was scarier.

This morning I was up at the crack of dawn - well, 8am anyway - for the first National Student Exchange event - a world yacht brunch cruise. Which would probably have been pretty good if it wasn't really wet and comparatively cold this morning. I was really hoping that all the NSE students would bond and be a reasonably close group, but it turns out there are over 100 of us across the city, which really makes it hard to meet everybody. Quite a few of us from the dorms did start chatting though, so with any luck that will certainly lead to at least a few people I can pester when I'm bored. There are certainly some interesting characters, and because it's a national exchange, some of the accents I've heard are incredible. Ron in particular, who is I think is from somewhere around Kentucky and sounds exactly like Forrest Gump, kept bursting into really inappropriate songs from musicals, which was so insanely over dramatic everyone on the table was in fits of laughter half the time and deeply embarrassed the rest. The views of the city and especially the Statue of Liberty, given that it was my first viewing, were pretty impressive, but going past Ground Zero seemed to dampen everyone's mood. Ron's estimation of the trip (expressed rather loudly in front of all the staff) was that while having the piano played moderately well while you ate reasonable food on a yacht was nice, it seemed like the kind of place people went when they were trying too hard to be classy. Maybe these American kids just expect a little much of their yacht trips, but I was inclined to agree. Off the yacht and undeterred by the rain, a bunch of us trooped up to Times Square in a half arsed effort to get matinee standing tickets for Spamalot, and failed miserably. By the time we finally got back to the dorms, everyone disbanded soggy and bedraggled, and the most exciting event since has been the false fire alarm, for which no less than 5 fire engine's arrived. It's nice to know they take it seriously, but it does seem a little extreme.

As previously advertised, I've cleaned up and taken some photos of the room. They're really bad, and I might try a few in the morning, but I suspect it's more to do with the camera than anything else. So, in no particular order, my bed:

My beautiful lamp of joy plus fridge and dresser - with mouthwash and water, rather than booze bottles:
Note the stylish use of feather boas and Mucha prints... my room's dead classy:
So that's my humble abode in all it's glory. There's another fairly decent shot of the view from my window but I can only get five pictures in a post so I'll put it up next time.