New York, New York

We had been dreaming of America for so long and... PUF... it arrived and was gone in the blink of an eye... but we will be back, I am sure of it.. Anyway, enough chatter... so we set off on the Continental flight; the journey was truly amazing, every passenger had an individual TV with a myriad of films to choose from in Italian... I must say the 9 hours on the plane were not felt at all... landing in New York, you could see the skyscrapers from far away... after getting through the customs formalities (a mere trifle, eh.. just a couple of hours...) we took a taxi and oooff we went, heading for the Big Apple... The closer I got to New York, the more I felt like I was inside a film... I was so used to seeing it on television that I could not tell fiction from the reality I was living...

We stayed at the Pennsylvania Hotel; excellent location, 5/10 minutes on foot from Times Square on 7th Avenue... but as for cleanliness it left a bit to be desired... but it was fine, we stayed so little in the hotel... After the obligatory visits such as: the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, and the Chrysler, we dared and did something more unusual, and so, through a tour that started from the hotel, we went to Harlem to hear the Gospel singing... my God... a fantastic emotion. On the way back from the Harlem trip by coach we had ourselves dropped off in front of the Natural History Museum and the "afternoon at the museum" began... having come out of the museum we still had a large slice of the day available, and so we made our way into Central Park...

here, after a relaxing walk among the green avenues, we hired a small boat and with it we hugged the little lake inside the park. I cannot say exactly what I felt in those moments... I was immersed in nature but, if I looked up, a few metres above me were the skyscrapers.. unbelievable... From home we had also organised a little trip to Philadelphia; my boyfriend is a Stallone fanatic and a visit to the Rocky statue certainly could not be missed, and so after 3 hours by coach here we are in Philadelphia! The city is wonderful (and not just for the presence of the Stallone statue); we did our little run up the steps of the art museum (Balboa style, of course) and after a walk in the centre and a bit of shopping we caught our coach back to New York.

The thing that struck me most in New York was certainly Ground Zero; right where the twin towers once stood they set up a kind of museum where all the photos of the missing people are hung, you can hear their voices, the phone calls they made from the plane before the collision, their belongings... I cannot say how much I cried; it was truly something without equal... We organised our movements so well that... we had a day left over, and so we used it to do something that maybe tourists do not usually do (indeed there were only us!!!) We went to Staten Island and to Historic Richmond Town... in search of the beautiful American villas... as soon as we arrived I felt like I was in one of the many R.L. Stine books I had read as a child...

these long white avenues where here and there there was not infrequently a basketball hoop used by the locals, breathtaking houses with perfect gardens without even the slightest fence... a residential area, as I was saying, we were the only tourists... I envied those who lived there, in total tranquillity and a step away from the buzz of... New York... and yes, I really do believe that after this trip I have come down with AMERICA-SICKNESS!!!