Well.... I arrived yesterday... And at first I thought the blog post would be as short and simple as that, but oh how I was wrong... It ACTUALLY turned out to be one of the worst holiday...days of all time... Well certainly from my life...
So we woke up at 5:30AM GMT (needlessly early really), and set off in our cars to the car park. Some minor issues there, before we went off to the airport. As I had persisted in spite of my dad's perilous worry; the queues were pretty minimal, and despite passports not being accepted at first (again, only minor issues really) we ended up getting through relatively easy; went through the duty free, bought myself some CK aftershave, and sat down for a nice morning cuppa in Costa coffee. It's all good right?...
So away we went, stepped on the plane, awaiting 7 hours of sheer boredom, made ever so slightly better by the introduction of so called "entertainment" on the screens provided. Now of course, this is all well and good, but when the only two watchable programmes available are The Big Bang Theory, and Two and a Half Men, with four episodes a piece on there, you quickly find that there's not a lot else able to fill the remaining 4 hours of torture, but sleep... That, I attempted, but with some 130 year old dear sat in front of me, insisting that the only way to sit on her seat, is to have it laying as far back as possible, to the extent where her head was essentially in my lap, like a necrophilic Santa; you can quickly understand why sleeping was hardly a priority... Instead, I decided to dedicate what time I had remaining to the only playable game of the 26 on selection; the Atari classic Centipede. To my disappointment however, this flight version wasn't a thing like the original. After perhaps 15 levels, difficulty refused to increase; all that happened was that more and more and more waves of the damned insect creatures of burden, would spawn and die before levelling up. I beat the all-time high score by level 21, and by level 30, I'd reached a state of semi-comatosis...
Well to cut a long and tedious story short, we turned up at NYC on 2:00pm EST (7:00 GMT for those of you who can't be bothered to look up timezones), grabbed a taxi, who was INSISTENT that the quickest route to Central Manhattan is by going around the ENTIRE city of New York... Let's just say he didn't get tipped particularly well...
So we got into the hotel at 3; rested, went out to dinner at 6, and so begun the trauma, in what was initially intended to be a pleasant, light-hearted meal in the shrimp-based diner so called Bubba Gump... Now I've never taken the opportunity to watch the film, but from the restaurant's outrageously excessive Forrest décor, and the waiter(who for the record was one of the most flamboyantly homosexual individuals I have ever seen in my life)'s urge to give us "a little Forrest quiz!" (to which, quite awkwardly, none of the Kempton family; in spite of our acclaimed cinematographic prowess, knew ANY answers to, by the way); I gathered this restaurant may have had a slight link with Forrest Gump... Now after the awkward silent response to the three (apparently beginner) questions (I mean seriously, how is ANYONE meant to know that the guy loved "Jenny"???... Before yesterday, I knew that he had a slight inclination on running, but that was about it...), the man decided to leave us alone, and as if by evil spite-filled curse, immediately a certain member of our table decided to faint...
I mean it wasn't a particularly hot or humid day, but they plain out KOd... Not good... So one of the Bubba faithful called an ambulance, whilst half of our table tried to wake them up, and the other half ran out to get help of some sort... Within 5 minutes, we had 4 policemen, 5 firemen, and 3 paramedics (because apparently Americans can't understand that perhaps it might be better to have more medics than fire crew, when someone needs medical help), all around our table, with the tables around us just sat, jaws gaping (not because they were shocked by what's happening - it just proved to be the most effective shrimp-eating technique) and the little gay man had returned to do a jig of panicked exasperation...
Well I know what you're wondering; "Are you ever gonna finish", and in a Hoffstadteresque response, I say "yes they're fine now, thanks for asking..." I'm currently walking down to pick up a ferry past the statue of the ol' green woman with a torch... (cue colourblind KKK joke, which I chose to rid, in case some angry Murricans were reading this) the next day, and our group is whole, and healthy... That being said; staying in a foreign hospital A&E waiting room for about 5 hours, last night, wasn't exactly the ideal arrival present....
On the plus side; Mets tonight!!!
Thanks,
Kempo.
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