Our first day in the US of A, in New York City was to do some shopping! We found the Century 21 department store, and we found so many great things, we didn’t buy everything we wanted, because we didn’t have the room in our luggage. It was a nice offer by the sales clerks to ship the items back to New Zealand for us, but we declined. I found shopping in New York to have a ‘frantic’ quality about it, it seems like the female population of New York swarm shops, especially if there is a sale; the men just find an out-of-the-way spot where they can either watch something on there Blackberry’s or Ipods. I felt like balling up in a fetal position until the swarm headed somewhere else, but that never happened.

We both had to get back out on the street as soon as we could. We took a deep breath and a long exhale to release all that frenzied energy. Wow! New York is really a very highly charged place! We decided if we were going to survive our trip, we’d better get on the bandwagon; slow and leisure do not belong in New York.

We then headed to Wall Street and in particular, the Wall Street Bull statue. We found it in the Financial District near The Bowling Green. Supposedly, if you rub the Bull, it will bring you financial luck, we wondered why that superstition didn’t work during this economic turn down, and then we remembered that it has, at least with all the Financial companies that were bailed out by American tax payers. So, we rubbed the Bull statue. We saw many other people rubbing the Bull statue in a very inappropriate place, but after all, that place is pretty prominent and most of the people we saw that were rubbing that spot were Asian; maybe it’s a sign of virility?
It was time to head back to our hotel to drop of our many packages from shopping. We found our USA hotel online and we booked it online because the hotel gives better pricing online. After we dropped off our treasures, my boyfriend had a special goal, he wanted to eat at an American restaurant fast food chain called Taco Bell. Taco Bell serves Mexican food that’s supposed to be cheap but good. We spotted one earlier from our train window, so we headed that way. It was way further from the train station than we thought it was. But, we found it, and my husband only found the food to be okay. Well, at least he got to experience it, and now he can finally say he has eaten at a Taco Bell.