First full day in NY. Met a great bloke in my dorm: Marcus from Chile. He's a great music lover too, so we ended up spending the day together taking in the Manhattan Music landscape. Where else can you take in a concert at Carnegie Hall and listen to a great set at the Village Vanguard (jazz club)? Definitely a great city for music. Hoping to get to Lincoln Centre and Broadway too to complete the musical experience. We also caught the free Staten Island ferry to ...

Firstly, apologies for the lack of pictures. I'm having bizarre technical problems uploading them to the STA blog site. (I may need to switch to a new blog, stay tuned...)Had a great first night in SF. Dinner down on Fishermen's Wharf at Ricky's, one of the several seafood restaurants intothe precinct. Apparently no one in SF actually does the fishing anymore, but the cooking hasn't lost anything. Excellent clam chowder served by a very nice waitress :-)Since it ...

Made it safely to San Francisco, my first port of call. You don't really appreciate how huge the Pacific Ocean is until you spend 15 hours flying across it seeing nothibg but a few tiny atolls. (oh, and New Zealand, but we all know that doesn't count)I like San Francisco... I know you hear that half the cities on the planet are 'just like Melbourne' but SF really is. It's got the same cosmopolitan feel, similar ethnic minority areas (Italian, Chinese) and the s...