Change of plans!

Well, we got up this morning at about 4 a.m. and went to the La Guardia airport in order to leave for Philadelphia and St. Maarten. But apparently rain is enough to delay our flight enough so that our flights were misconnected and we then spent an additional day in NY. This would have been fine if we hadn't been up so early for nothing and had we known this earlier we could've extended our stay the Belvedere hotel. So we opted for an airport hotel as they usually are cheaper and they let you check-in earlier.

Our new flight will leave for Charlotte (not Philadelphia anymore) about 6.30 a.m. tomorrow, hopefully anyway, and we will have about 55 minutes to the connecting flight to St. Maarten. So all fingers crossed we'll actually get some sun tomorrow!!! Of course Miika had to phone Travelocity about the changes to our hotel reservation but we will not get our money back as this was due to weather and not the airline... I'm not really happy about this although it was nice to have some more time in NYC as otherwise we wouldn't have seen this much this time.

I'll soon have to go back and sleep, again, as we have one more early flight tomorrow. We've already decided that if they tell us that we will misconnect again, we'll go to Charlotte to figure the next flight out. Oh, this wasn't the only trouble I've face... apparently Travelocity (lacking knowledge of Scandinavian symbols and how they will be marked in tickets) mispelled my last name, replacing the ä:s with ae:s instead of simply removing the dots... this confused the US Airways so much that we spent about 40 minutes figuring out whether I'm really the person or not.

This must mean that nothing else will go wrong, right? Well I really hope so as I really need a relaxing holiday now.

Today we walked around Manhattan, from 52nd st to 32nd st and we went all touristy and shopped and the M&M's World, Hersey's store, Barnes and Noble and Banana Republic. We did see Times Square with a bunch of Japanese tourists, we walked past the only skyscraper Eliel Saarinen (a Finnish architect) ever designed ( the CBS Building), Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building... we ate at Wendy's (Tomi would be soooo jealous right now) and Applebee's, had some coffee at Starbucks (decaf of course). Oh, we did go into Sachs but we really didn't fit in... Naturally we saw a bunch of other NY related stuff but I really am too tired now to even think. I might add more here.

As a side note, I haven't found the people to be so rude as I have understood.. or maybe that's only because we're from Finland and there people are surprisingly rude compared to the New Yorkers (or whatever they want to be called). One other thing I noticed is that instead of saying "ok" or "sure", they usually say "why not". And that means yes.