New York, New York

For my part, as driver, a primary theme of this stop was parking or the lack of it thereof... We however stumbled upon how to beat the system. Free on-street parking is virtually impossible to come by - I must have spent a total of 3 hours over the past two days driving up and down streets looking for a spot. Parking garages are $29 + $8.50 (for SUVs) which with tax brings you close to $40 per 24 hours. A ticket for parking in front of a (broken) hourly meter is $35. We inadvertently went with the latter.

Aside from that - the weather was spectacular and spirits were high. We stayed at a hostel on 101st and Broadway which is actually very nice as far as hostels go. A lot of travellers from all around the world use them so there was an interesting array of people passing in the hallway. Monday evening we had dinner at a cafe down in Greenwich village. It is frequented by Israelis and one of Avi's friends was playing there. Last night we had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant just up the street. Now if only "Kenyan restaurants" existed...

We closed the day playing frisbee in Central Park alongside a troupe of actors who were practising some Shakespeare play that involved sword fighting, quarterstaff jousting and "art-thou-daft-man!!"s. Sisay was intrigued. He noted that this was not customary to parks in Addis Ababa. One of the beauties of New York is that nobody really cares what you think...

Today we head to some beach on Long Island to give Sisay his first taste of the Ocean. From there we head north to the Adirondacks for our first night of camping.