city girl

so pretty quickly after arriving in new york city, i realized what a total city girl i am {NOT}.  i'm sure it would have been quite comical to see what all went down at the airport.  for some reason, drew and jenn just let me take point...not a good idea...i immediately found someone to try to tell us how to get to grand central station.  an airport employee did his best to explain to me {in sudanese-english, try understanding that when you're already out of the loop on what someone is trying to explain} that we were looking for train 7.  well, when i think of "train", i think choo-choo!  anyone else with me?  so we went round and round, him saying, "you know, train, with rails" and me saying, "not the subway?"  i wish i could have seen a video tape of this...this went on for a good five minutes until i just said, "okay, okay, just how do we get to grand central station?!"  we did finally make it, and we were in awe of how big it is.  i have seen it on so many movies, and it was really neat to see in person.

i'm pretty sure that it was a dead give-away that we were tourists by the fact that we had a huge metro subway map out in the middle of GCS just trying to figure out which trains we had to take to get to our hotel.  but we made it!  and then came the comical part of trying to get our bags in and out of the subway, and also the fact that drew had to carry our bags for a good three or four miles.  but he was a good sport and did the manly thing, and jenn and i laughed and took pictures of him doing it...

we finally made it to our hotel {which was in queens}, and were promptly told that we would not be allowed to use the hotel transporter to take us to and from the subway stop because of the fact that we had three people in one room {would have been nice if we had know that before i booked the room, seeing as how the hotel was two miles from the subway station.  welcome to new york city!}.  but our room was relatively clean and super cheap, so we took it in stride and began the first of many long walks around the city.

{the view from our hotel...in the very back, you can see the Twin Towers being rebuilt!}

all in all, it was a crazy start to our trip, but it made for some funny memories!  we were off to see the city!