[...bercés par le ronron de l'air conditionné, dormir dans un hotel délaté...]

lisez moi en français !!

Hello !!

as i was telling you yesterday, on my first night in the City, i went to Times Square....



i spent some time exploring the different stores : the giant M&Ms store where you can make up your own box of M&Ms by helping yourself to a huge range of colours and flavours (did you know that americans had peanut butter M&Ms?), the huge Toys R Us where you can find any kind of toy you want (and more) ; the store is so big that they have a ferris wheel. inside.
there is also the retail store Forever 21, with its 5 floors, or the massive Hersheys store which sells my favourite kind of sweets, Reese's, and which from the outside looks like a crazy chocolate factory....

A few days later i was back in the shop, trying dark chocolate Reese's, and that was one of the best things i have ever eaten. even better that regular Reese's, and that's saying something

there are also about a million tourist shops, filled with "i love New York" stuff and Yankees caps. but since i'm not yet at the stage when i have to start thinking to the presents i'll bring back, i only bought a dozen of postcards (still un-written and stacked at the bottom of my backpack i'm afraid).
in the end, just for stereotypes' sake, i ended up pushing the door of a 

Ah, Starbucks. it's more than a chain of coffee shops, it's basically a religion. you can't stay in the US and not end up at some point drinking coffee out of one of those white cups, your fingers safe from the heat thanks to one of those iconic sleeves with their green logo.
i thus walked back up Times Square, blowing on my Tall Non-fat Mochaccino.

after wandering around in the neighbourin streets, i went back to the YMCA
and celebrated my arrival to the states with a pint of a flavour inavailable in France of my favourite brand of ice cream : Red Velvet Cake, by Ben & Jerry's.

 yummy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

the next morning, i seized the opportunity of living right in the center of New York for a few days to go run in Central Park....

Have you ever heard someone saying that Central Park is huge ? well, that's no understatement, this park is just massive

one of the great things about Central Park is that there is a road that runs around the whole park, and that road has a bike track and a runners track. which is easily explained by the fact that there are a lot of runners. clearly i wasn't the only one to be ready to get up at 6am to go for a run.
i would do the whole loop in an hour, which means it was around 10 km.


at 8 the training started and, if our instructors were really good, the classes in themselves were not only super duper boring , but also entirely useless. such as "how to change a diaper" when my kids are 5 and 13, or "don't leave kids in the car inattended".

 you  know how we were all from various countries, right ? well actully, half the AuPair were german, and they were inbearable , constantly giggling, going out to buy food in the middle of a class, constantly playing with their phones, and hell be damned with whatever the teacher was saying....we kind of wanted to punch some of them

so here we go, in the end my 4 days stay were all basically the same everyday : from 6 à 7 : footing in central park, from 8 to 6pm, classes, all night long : wandering around in  New York.

except for the evening when i went to see my fisrt broadway show. but that is a whole another story....

PS : the title comes from  "New York avec toi", fromTéléphone. and it's kind of a good descriiton of New York [...lulled to sleep by the buzzing of the air conditionning, speeping in a crappy motel..]. indeed, our motel could be called "crappy", but especially the air conditioning bit is true. it's everywhere, all the time. americans are obsesed by air conditioning, and you have to wear a jumper inside, it's so cold, while it's actually quite hot outside. crazy americans !