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It's 5.35am and I am in my hotel room on the 19th floor of The Sheraton Tirbeca struggling to get on New York time while Michael happily snoozes away beside me.  We cannot believe we're finally here!  We got a fantastic view of Manhattan when we were flying into Newark Airport and I teared up a little at the sight of the Statue of Liberty, waving her wee torch at us in the "awk hiya, Rachel and Michael! Welcome to New York" way that she does.  Everything went so smoothly to get here and settled. We took a yellow cab (squee!) from the airport straight to our hotel and were checked in within minutes.  19 floors up we have a view over all of SoHo and Chinatown, but a short elevator ride up to the 21st floor allows us access to the "Club Lounge" which has that gorgeous roof terrace facing the Empire State Building that we had first planned to have our ceremony.  It would actually still be pretty awesome to have it there - but Brooklyn will be better...

The Club Lounge is great - we can head in there to relax, watch TV, use the computers, and work away at the bar, Starbucks coffee bar and food that's laid out all day everyday for us very special Club Lounge members.  Can't wait to head up there for breakfast when daylight finally breaks!  We arrived at 2pm which was really confusing - time travel is hard on the head - but we settled into our room and made it Home for the next 7 days.  We brought Christmas Deocrations and put them up, though we have one "Merry Christmas" banner that just will not play ball and keeps falling down so it's already been thrown out... but the fairy lights all look great.

Last night we went to the hotel bar for a couple drinks to toast our arrival and then decided to take a walk to check out our surroundings and scope out a place to eat.  We ended up strolling down to Chinatown which was such an amazing sight.  Totally unexpectedly, they have many outdoors street markets selling some of the biggest and freshest fresh fruit, vegetables and fish products I'd ever seen.  We stumbled across a little Chinese Restaurant on the corner of a random backstreet and ended up having a really yummy 3 course meal.  The barman made me a Manhattan cocktail while we waited and for dinner we had Dim Sum, Hot and Sour Soup and some of the most epic Spicy Crispy Beef we'd ever had.  True to New York, the portions were killer and even we couldn't finish it all and to our pride we ate our entire meal with chopsticks.  How cultured are we, huh?

We stopped at a local Walgreen's for supplies we'd forgotten (toothpaste!) and then we dandered back to the hotel for showers and bed as we were knackered after our small adventure and time started to catch up on us.  I think we were in bed for 10pm but it felt like 3am.  Our alarms are set for 7am as we've a big day planned tomorrow that starts with a trip to the City Clerks Office to get our marriage license!  Then we're going to visit the World Trade Centre and hop over the Brooklyn Bridge to see where we're getting married.  Michael, as a first time visiter to a city like New York, is completely overwhelmed.  Hopefully this morning he'll be feeling a bit better and less anxious - most of this City isn't for the faint hearted, but as soon as we visit some more recognisable places he'll feel much better :)