New York is fantastic. I took too many pictures, I had no time to update my blog, and I now have a real hard time remembering all the cool things I did.
Again, I will follow the strategy of brief description – lots of pictures.

Friday
More downtown New York. Visited Columbia University. Licked the sleaziest barbie-doll in Toys r Us. Ice-skating in Central Park. Ate the Hot Pot left-overs. Talked about the important things in life (no, not girls) with Christophe’s father.

Saturday
Brunch at a real Chinese restaurant (a unique taste-adventure: I even had duck-tongue!) Ellis Island, statue of liberty, Wall Street. I Saw Ground Zero, which was very impressive. Shopping for clothes (I out-shopped Karen!) Dinner at Max Brenner’s Bald Man’s Chocolate Restaurant and a second dessert at Viennero. Karen almost OD’ed on the vast amounts of chocolate!

Sunday
Tasted the famous White Castle burgers, proved that they are litteraly “bite size”. Went to see the Lion King on Broadway. Had authentic Korean BBQ with cute waitresses and raw beef.

At the moment, I’m on the subway with two friends. Friend one is asleep, friend two is playing Mario Kart on my DS. Friends give each other gifts in the form of experiences. The experiences I got this week leave me with some unerasable impressions. In a way I feel a bit ashamed that the only experience I could return was myself. Still, I hope that that, together with my thankfulness, was good enough!

On Wednesday night Karen decided that I had to see more of the US than Pittsburgh, so we booked a flight to New York. It happened at 3AM, and our flight was at 6AM, so we had to forget about sleeping and rush to the airport.
We’re staying at Christophe’s place, he’s a friend of Karen doing an MBA at Rutgers. He and his father picked us up at the airport. We were completely exhausted, so I was glad that we could take a few hours of sleep before we explored the Big Apple.

New York is overwhelming. It’s population is bigger than all of The Netherlands, and it just feels incredibly crowded. We walked around in Manhattan, visiting the “flagship” stores of the big corporations like Apple, Swatch, Toys ‘R Us. I cannot express the impressiveness of this city, so I hope the pictures will speak for themselves.

Of course, last night was Thanksgiving, but being with one American, one Frenchman and one Dutch guy it seemed kinda inappropriate to roast a turkey. Since Christophe is Vietnamese and Karen is Taiwanese, they decided to introduce me to some Asian flavors, and make an Chinese Hot Pot, which is basically just boiling stuff in a pan. By the way: in order to make a really good Hot Pot, you need X-O sauce, which is really hard to find, especially when you’re two guys in a store with people that don’t really speak English, and you don’t really know what you’re looking for…

As you can see it tasted really good! We also bought some cool desserts at the Asian market, and I fell in love with a Hello Kitty cake :).

After watching a movie we went to bed early, so we could have a full day of fun today. I’ll talk about that later.

I know that it’s kind of stuck-up to put so many pictures of myself on the web, but I just don’t want to withhold you this picture of me drinking a hair-matching drink after my first salsa-lesson.

PS: I didn’t know that salsa-dancing was so much work!