New York City!
I'm much happier now. Chris came over yesturday to see me before I went to Kalamazoo, then I went and hung out with my relatives all night and that was lots of fun. Plus, some of my relatives came back to Saginaw and will be here till Wednesday, and I'm going to visit Chris at work later...so yay.
So heres the interesting info on the trip to the Big Apple:
Day 1: We left from the chuch at like 8:30. Chris was there to say goodbye. We drove the whole day with some stops for food and potty. We stopped around 7 in a town called Susquehanna, Pensylvania. We stayed at a really nice church there, and we hung out and had fun till early in the morning.
Day 2: We got on the road again and got close to the city around noon. Trying to get over the George Washington Bridge into NYC was INSANE!! We quicky became New York like drivers and cut several people off to get into the lane we needed to be in. We got a little lost trying to get where we needed to go once in the city, but we finally got some common sense and just looked at the street numbers and stuff. We got to the Youth Hostel where we would be staying, got some lunch, and settled in. After that, we headed out to do some site-seeing. The place we were staying was about 3 blocks away from Central park, so thats where we headed. We walked quite a ways through there, and came out around 5th Avenue. We checked out all the super expensive shops, and headed for Time Square. By the time we got there it was all dark and stuff, and everything looked awesome all lit up. After that we went to the Empire State Building. There were like 8 lines you had to go through on the way up and down, but the view was worth it. The whole city was lit and and we looked at the Statue of Liberty through the binocular things. We left there just as it was closing, and we got on the subway and headed back home.
Day 3: We got up and went to the Riverside Church. The church service was two and a half hours long!! It was terrible. There was some famous preacher, but he got up there was was yelling and the sermon was like 45 minutes long...it just wasn't my kind of thing. We had some lunch at the church, then went back to the hostel. A little later we headed out again and went to Ground Zero. It wasn't at all what I expected. It was just this little section of sidewalk that overlooked the site of where the towers used to be, and there were two big pits in the ground where you could see them repairing the subway and stuff. There was also a huge poster with all the names of the people that died. The one amazing thing though was that everyone was so quiet and solumn. It was like a totally different world once you walked off the main sidewalks. Then we headed up along the river to Battery Park, which is like a corner of land from where the river runs into the bay. We staked out our spots for the fireworks and stayed there for like 5 hours for them to start. But, they were pretty cool. After that we had to try to get 25 people through the unbelievable huge crowd back onto the subway to get home. That took quite a while and the subway cars so filled to the brim!!
Day 4: It was Monday, and that meant our first day of work. We had to meet at the YSOP (Youth Services Opportunities Project) place for a long boring meeting about what we would be doing and what to expect. We split up into 4 groups, and my group when to a place called CHIPS. It was a soup kitchen. We helped make the food, prepare the trays, and clean up. We saw a cross dresser, which was an experience...then headed back to YSOP for more discussion. Then we went back to the hostel and relaxed for a while before some of us went to the Jackyll and Hyde Club. It was pretty cool. It was kind of like The Hard Rock Cafe, only decorated in a haunted house kind of theme...you know, Jackyll and Hyde. We got home pretty late and headed off to bed.
I'm going to finish writing about my trip later. I'm tired of typing and want to go find out whats going on with everybody else in the house.
I love Christopher