Thursday, November 6, 2014

Blog 2 - NatWest: "The Helpful Bank"

So on Friday, I met Daisy for a boozy brunch.  I had Eggs Benedict (with ham, bacon, spinach, potatoes and vegetables!) and a couple of Mimosas. Nick went off on his own to explore the rest of Central Park.  Now, those of you who are familiar with our previous travelling adventures will know what a bad idea it usually is to let Nick go off on his own, with no way of contacting me to let me know he’s either:
  1. Lost
  2. Feels like going for a longer explore so will be late
  3. Is actually lost, but pretends he isn’t by saying he feels like going for a longer explore so will be late.
Well, in this case he was just plain lost.  However, he only kept us waiting in the cold in the middle of the park for a mere half an hour, so we couldn’t get too angry. 
Then it was off to New Jersey with Daisy and our pirate costumes.  All shall become clear, don’t worry.  We got off the train at Hoboken rather than Newport and walked the rest of the way, so that we could see the beautiful views of Manhattan across the water at night. 

Once we got to Daisy’s apartment, we changed into our pirate costumes and Daisy got dressed up as a minion, and went upstairs to a different apartment to have pre-lash drinks with lots of Daisy’s Mountbatten friends.  We played a brilliant game called Cards of Humanity.  If you have not heard of this, then please look it up/buy it because it is seriously a lot of fun.  Then it was back on the train to NYC to get to the venue for the Halloween party we were attending. 


Once we arrived at the venue, which was basically a huge warehouse – it had a kind of Subdub feel to it (Leeds people will know what I’m talking about), we were pretty annoyed to find that we were going to have to join the mother of all queues to get in.  However, Daisy went and spoke to the security and told them how great we were and that we had VIP tickets etc, so we straight in we went!  After a couple of hours of partying it was 3am and we decided to call it a night.
On Saturday, Daisy’s sister and auntie arrived from England so our host was occupied all day.  This and the fact that the weather was awful, meant that we had a pretty valid excuse to just sleep off our hangovers for most of the day.  Now, last night Nick had attempted to use two ATM machines and was denied cash both times.  We figured out that stupid Natwest must have put a block on his account as transactions were showing up in USA rather than in England.  This would be all well and good had Nick not been into stupid Natwest before we left the UK, to explain that we were going to be travelling around various countries for the next 6 months, to avoid this from happening!  So, Nick phoned up stupid Natwest, the “helpful” bank, and they took off the block on his account. However they were unable to say whether or not this problem would continue to happen in every new country we visit.  So that’s just great! 
Sunday was our last day in New York, so we got the subway into Manhattan and tried to go back to that delicious salad place, Cosi, but alas it was closed on Sundays :-(  We found a kind of deli place instead which was ok, but definitely no Cosi.  After lunch we met up with Daisy and her family and went up the Empire State Building VIP style – this meant no queuing! Thanks Daisy!




Afterwards we said goodbye to Daisy (sob) and went to the restaurant in Macy’s for dinner to cheer ourselves up.  We then went to check out Times Square, which we both agreed looks a lot better in the films than in real life.  Nick bought six deep fried Oreos from a street vendor for his pudding.  He claims he tried to buy one but apparently they only sold them in batches of six.  Then it was back on the subway to the hotel to pack and get an early night ready to leave at 5.45am for La Guardia airport and our journey to San Salvador. 

Finally, I'll leave you with this picture of a man with a giant tennis racket.  
I know it looks like he's about to hit the woman with it, but they were actually having quite a pleasant conversation.


Nick's tales of San Salvador to follow in the next few days :-)

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