Holy hell everyone, I am in New York, holy hell.
(actually it is Hoboken right now, but Hoboken is pretty nice anyway)
Posting this from a Starbucks on Hoboken's main street. I got into New York at about 7pm last night and caught the Manhattan Express bus to Port Authority, and from there (with the help of an entrepreneurial gentleman who made sure we got our tickets and knew where to go, for the low low price of $2 each) caught the bus out to my uncle's place in Union City, NJ. My uncle is an 80-something year-old renaissance man who produced, directed and presented television for decades, knew Frank Sinatra and Alfred Hitchcock (among others, I'm sure) and lives in an indescribably beautiful four-storey walk-up smack bang on the Hudson. Out of his back window is the stereotypical postcard view of the NY skyline. Today we drove around NJ, taking in Union City, Hoboken, Secaucus and probably a few other towns. It's kind of hard to tell when you leave one town and enter the next around here. I also had my first Wal-Mart experience. Obviously stuff like this is positively mundane for the majority of you guys, but back in Perth there is literally nothing at all like Wal-Mart. It was pretty overwhelming, and the idea that you could literally fill your entire life with things entirely from Wal-Mart, that if you chose to do so, you would never have to go anywhere else for any material possession (except for house and car, I guess) is more than a little terrifying. In fact, there is a lot about my U.S. experience so far that has been kind of terrifying, or at least awe-inspiring. In a lot of ways, America is just as alien to me as Japan.