I arrived here in New York early this morning (after midnight) after a day of "airport sitting"
I was at the airport in Minneapolis at 10.00 to leave at 12.00 lunch time… Along with thousands of other folks I was stuck at the airport until I finally got on a plane at 7.00 pm. Floods, Hurricanes, lack of pilots and runway maintenance resulted in delays in airports all along the East coast of the US which ultimately effected us….
It was interesting though… I chatted with lots of folk, worked on my illustrations and I watched with interest as a lady fed her dog curry and rice with a spoon. It seems pooch with her pink outfit and hair clips was going on the flight with us.
It rained today, I was a bit miffed after going through the drawn out process of yesterday, still Jamie, some of his friends and I took off to explore the "other side" of NY.
With umbrella in hand and walking the streets of NY, I fought the urge to to a "singing in the rain " routine… Jamie looked sheepish… "Don’t do it" he said as he smirked… so I didn’t embarrass him, I just did a little twirl around the light pole.
We took the underground which is always a people watching experience. Now the fashion here is Rubber boots… we call them gum boots.
There are gum boots of every description… we were on Gum boot alert today. I even saw a guy in his cowboy outfit in yellow gumboots that had a leather studded strap on the ankles….
They range from $50 to $90 in price.!!! Unbelievable. Next we decided to visit China Town. and we began to see an interesting chain of events happening. I only carried my small camera and I tried to capture these antics on camera, but I wasn’t too successful.
A lady on the street came up to us and asked us and said "you want to buy a handbag." Interested we said 
"Yes" she darted off down a side street with us in
pursuit…..(needless to say I wouldn’t do this on my own) She led us to a dingy building and
we followed her up 5 flights of stairs. On the fifth landing she unlocked a big green metal door. The noise inside was deafening…. it turned out to be a sweat shop. There were piles of garments on the floor, machines roaring and faceless Asian ladies sewing up a storm. We were ushered into a back room full of handbags….poor reproductions of genuine ones.
We declined to buy and as we walked back out through the sweat shop I tried to film with my small camera, but because I couldn’t set it I didn’t get a very good video. We ran down the stairs and hit the pavement laughing. Amazed at what we had just seen.
The jewelry is very cheap, perfume a quarter of the price and I felt like I was back in Thailand as we bartered with the shop owners who spoke in very limited English.
We leave for London at 5.00 am tomorrow, the bags are packed and hopefully there will be no delays this time. It’s a 7 hour flight across the ocean.
