We slept reasonably late, which was just as well as Glen and I were woken in the middle of the night by the air conditioning knocking the painting on the wall so it made these irritating noises. Because we’d slept late, we weren’t left with much time to do anything big in Chicago. We went for breakfast at Yolk which was a good fifteen minute walk west from where we were. Then we went back to the hotel, finished packing, and jumped in a car to take us to the airport.

No trouble this time as we weren’t going through border control. Albert took us into the lounge where we sat for about fifteen minutes before heading to the gate. Because Glen and I had booked our flights separately and weren’t able to check-in online, we weren’t seated next to each other. But Glen asked the guy who was sitting next to me if he could swap. He said that was fine if it was ok with the flight attendant. Glen looked at her, she put her hands in the air and said, “I’m not getting involved,” but then praised Glen for sorting it out on his own. So we got to sit next to each other.

On the two hour flight, I tried to do the three sudoku puzzles in the inflight magazine. I got all three wrong. Three for three. The guy next to me got the first one wrong too so I didn’t feel so bad and he was struggling with the second when we landed.

We touched down in La Guardia, Albert collected his luggage from the carousel and we jumped in a taxi and headed for Time Square.

I have never seen so many people in my life. It’s worse than London (though I’m sure India or China have it even worse). The taxi crawled through streets jammed with cars and people. It didn’t help that our flight landed at 4:30pm and we got into the city at rush hour. And staying in Time Square is probably not the most sensible of ideas if you want to get a taxi there in the afternoon.

But we made it, my senses already overloaded with the sheer size of the crowd, the gaudiness of 42nd Street and Broadway, the TV screens and the commercialism. I didn’t want to be there.

We checked into the Hilton and then shortly after went through the streets to a particular camera shop so Albert could buy a camera (his was stolen off the plane when he went to Chicago the day before us). I could feel myself disappearing further and further into my shell, trying to shut out as much external stimulation as possible. But then I berated myself for being silly and tried to find the positive in all this. I struggled but at least made it through the streets and back to the hotel again in one (mental) piece.

We went for dinner at Applebee’s, which is a chain restaurant with one right next to the hotel. The food was ok, not as huge as expected, and more expensive than I would have thought too but then again, we’re in Time Square. We went back to the room for a little while, feeling pretty sleepy, before we set out to see a show by three drag queens, Willam Belli, Detox and Vicky.

The show was in a very small cabaret theatre in the basement of a restaurant. We walked past it initially. We sat down, ordered some drinks, got some food, and then started to chat to the two guys sitting next to us. We detected an Aussie accent in one of them (called Marco) and found out he was from Brisbane, has lived in NYC for 13 years and is now studying to be a doctor. I bet if Glen and I go to Antarctica or Greenland, we’d still meet an Australian medico. His boyfriend, Andrew, is from New York and is an ancient Egypt, Greek and Roman art dealer. Then the show started.

They talked, they lip-synced, they performed the songs we’ve seen on YouTube. The performance as a whole was great. I laughed a lot and had a great time. Was even tempted to stay for the midnight show but we pushed on. We went for a late night dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Ariba Ariba with Marco and Andrew and stayed our for another hour or so, talking about whatever. The evening was definitely a highlight of our time in New York so far.