Tuesday 18th- Friday 21st

I am actually home now but thought I should still update what I did on the last few days in New York :)

Tuesday was fairly uneventful, it was nice to have a lie in then just potter into White Plains for the final present/myself shopping. We were supposed to be going to the Yankees game that evening, we all got dressed up in our jerseys with the little NY logo eye linered on our cheeks..but in true New York fashion the game was rained off :( Luckily for us it was rescheduled for the next day at 1pm and as we had little planned for Wednesday we could still go :) It probably turned out better for us actually as Wednesday was a beautiful sunny day (as my sunburn proved!).
The Yankees game was one of my favourite experiences from the whole trip! It took me a while to figure out what was going on, with a lot of help from our American lecturer Davis who was explaining the rules to me as it went along and looked at me with a very confused expression when I finally said "oh, so it's basically like rounders and cricket"! Anyway, the Yankees won, we all cheered and then we went and had a pretty average and overpriced meal at Dominick's (the restaurant from the Godfather movie).

Thursday was a bit of a roller-coaster day, we were all starting to get a bit sad as it was our last proper day in the city. We went to ground zero to see the 9/11 memorial, there was a question for a while as to whether they were going to rebuild on the site. I'm glad they didn't, the peace garden which is now there is beautiful and it shows that the victims of the attack have not been forgotten. The new world trade centre also stands next to the garden, which will be the tallest building in the skyline when it is complete- it has been built to show that the city can come back stronger. Seeing the thousands of names around the memorial was incredibly sad because it really gave you the scale of how many families were affected by that day, but it was also somehow impersonal, unlike meeting Ben at the fire station- which for me was the strongest experience of 9/11 we had in New York. A few of the names stopped us in our tracks because they had 'and her unborn child' following them, it's  inconceivable to think that the actions of a few people meant that those children never even got the chance to be born.

We got the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn purely to walk back over the Brooklyn Bridge because we kind of needed something to bring us back up after the experience of the memorial. The bridge was another high point of the trip for me, the views are incredible and there's just something amazing but unexplainable about the whole experience.

Thursday evening we had our posh 'Park Ave' party :) We all dressed up and the talented amongst us played piano and sang (I was not amongst them!). We kept it very American themed with a 'most likely to...' Section with categories like 'most accident prone' and 'biggest spender', I got biggest geek for my insanely nerdy film knowledge- it was a proud moment :) For most of the trip we had a secret 'Fred committee' consisting of Emily, Lauren and myself which was in charge of finding out Fred's interests so that we could get him a nice present..he was very happy with his Goldshlager, glasses and  engraved platter :) However, as I really didn't help that much with Fred I decided to organise the lecturers presents so I got a contribution from everyone and dragged Steph shopping with me! We had all decided that we needed to get Peter a bow tie as we loved his style, we wanted to get him a Union Jack one but there were none to be found! Trying to stick with the British theme we got a very nice Ben Sherman tie for Davis :) shopping for Darren was more of a treat for me than him as I found a really cool/nerdy shop with comic book stuff that I spent a good hour in, left with an X-Men pint glass for him and Avengers shot glasses for me :D

Soooo..that very briefly sums up the last few days of my trip. Friday was just a rounding off day, although some of the staff did put on a BBQ for us which was very nice of them, and we had a lovely Pagli girls dinner at the coach diner :) I had such an amazing time and met some wonderful people, luckily I will see most of them again- even our All American girl Adrianna is coming to London this summer :) Unfortunately I don't know if/when I will get to see the lovely Clarissa again, so after living with her for three weeks it was pretty hard to say goodbye!


I don't really know how to sign this off! I will always remember my time in the Big Apple and I will upload pictures to share with you soon :) Thanks for reading!