Back to the US

It’s time for my next adventure! I am going back to the United States, to keep exploring this enormous and diverse country! Over many different travels, I’ve been slowly crossing off states from the list: as of now I’ve been to New York, D.C., Massachusetts, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, California, Nevada, and Arizona.

This time I am going to visit Richmond, Virginia, then I return to Chicago (I’ve been wanting to go back ever since I first visited as a kid), and then I’m crossing the country to see Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. It’s kind of the least efficient itinerary possible, please don’t judge me on that! But I’ve already done the big thematic chunks (the coasts, the south) so I sort of put this trip together based on where I know people and cities that I really want to visit. But for sure it’s going to be varied!

I know I’ve given this advice on this blog before, but it bears repeating: if your long-haul plane has two floors, try to get a seat on the second floor! The side rows only have two seats, and there’s extra room to the side of the window aisle, plus there’s fewer people so even if the seats themselves are the same it’s all in all a way better experience. I was lucky enough to nab one for my flight to New York, which went swimmingly except for the fact that we took off with one hour’s delay, and I had a rather tight connection at JFK. After doing the calculations I began to fear that I would miss the connection, but a very kind attendant reassured me that we would land on time despite the delay -and sure enough, we arrived just on schedule, as if nothing had ever happened, and only a few new gray hairs on my temples say otherwise!





Connections in JFK are notoriously time-consuming, but I managed to pass immigration, customs, recover my bag, drop it off again, change terminals and go through security all in less than an hour and a half, so I was able to get on a teeny tiny plane to Richmond without problems. (Unless you count the fact that the flight attendant pronounced no consonants at all so I couldn’t understand one word of anything she said!) 

Now the proper adventure can begin!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shibuya, Harajuku, Omotesando

Image
After a relatively sedate first day in Tokyo, I thought the best next step was to jump straight into the madness that is Shibuya and Harajuku. The Shibuya crossing is the first movie-checkpoint of this trip, as it featured in one of the posters for Lost in Translation . Every time the lights turn green a flood of people cross in all directions at the same time. On a Sunday morning, the atmosphere was less busy and hurried, but even in this low season the entire neighbourhood was packed. Strolling along the Shibuya area is like entering into every exaggerated Japanese metropolis scene you've ever seen in the movie. Many stores even have J-pop or commercial jingles playing *on the outside*, so you have your own soundtrack while you walk around. It's all an explosion of colour, sound and consumerism. It's an ideal place to get lost, which I did, repeatedly. Even with a map in my hand and having already established a route, orientation grows difficult if only one in eve
Keep reading

Landing in Istanbul

Image
I'm in Istanbul! One year after my Japanese oddysey I'm once again out and about, so I'm coming back to the blog to make sure you don't miss a thing! The flight from Orly to Ataturk airport, which takes three hours, went without a hitch. Things got interesting once in Turkey. When I landed I was directed to a little visa shop, where you literally just fork over 15€ to get a visa, and then I made it to Passport Control... where I found a massive queue between my passport and the border guards charged with letting me into the country. Hundreds of people, Disneyland style. As soon as I took my position the cultural differences became apparent, as queuing seemed to be largely optional -groups of ladies in their hijabs and niqabs would just merrily elbow their way straight ahead, regardless of how many people they had to trample to get to the front of the queue. It was like one of those awful nature documentaries, where these ladies were the lions and the French tourists fro
Keep reading

Topkapi Palace, the Bosphorus

Image
So I woke up today and set the clock forward one hour (again [AGAIN]). Sigh. Today the big plan was the palace of Topkapi! I couldn't have asked for a better day to spend sightseeing: gloriously sunny, but cool, and the crowds were blissfully small. When I walked in, at about ten or ten thirty, I only had to wait in line for my ticket for about ten minutes. When I walked out, at one o'clock, the queue to get in had tripled in size! Good timing! It's hard to overstate just how immense Topkapi is. Although the core of the palace was built I believe in the 15th century, a great deal of the most iconic buildings are additions and expansions from the 16th and 17th centuries. They kept adding new pavilions and annexes, to the point where it became a small city housing up to 4,000 people and covering a huge expanse of land on a hill. Topkapi is a palace built in the Eastern fashion: whereas Western palaces like Versailles are enormous buildings with gardens all around, I've no
Keep reading