I've generously titled this 'New York Part II' as if Part I wasn't 9 years ago. But fortunately on my first trip, I did all the Statue of Liberty-esque things, so this post will be more niche.

I decided, on somewhat of a whim, to visit my friend Liz for a few days. The trip started with maximum stress in the city-sized JFK airport. Liz had told me to get an Uber to hers for convenience. When I went to the Uber section, a man told me to get on a shuttle. Flustered, I decided to wait until I was 10 minutes into the 20 minute shuttle journey to ask Liz if this was expected. Her alarmed response did little to reassure me but I didn't have much choice now. The shuttle left me in a remote carpark with nothing around except bits of motorway. All you could order here was an Uber. And my phone didn't work. Eventually, seeing I was publicly in tears, a nice man came over, tethered my phone to his, and got me my Uber. I wept more tears, but these were of the joy variety. He made a hasty exit, politely refusing my offer of some of my crumpled bag of Trail Mix that I'd bought in the airport.

I'd forgotten that I'm now sturdily into my 30s when I suggested we see a Broadway show the evening I arrived. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware the show would start at 1am UK time and I'd have been travelling all day. I got to Liz's at roughly midnight my time, introduced myself to Alison - her cat, and Mo - her boyfriend (Mo was friendlier, though I'm assured anything less than outright hostility from Alison is a good sign) and then we got on a train to Broadway to see Illinoise. Now, I fear I didn't give Illinoise my full and undivided attention because half an hour in I thought I was going to dramatically die from exhaustion and have to be stretchered out of the theatre. But it was still a great show, with a full live band. It was sort of like a ballet, but more fun (apologies to Sam who has brought me to two ballets and I've done nothing but complain).

Liz wasn't keen on my jetlagged early start time the next day (I woke up at 5am) so I went for a wander by myself for the morning (not at 5am). Liz had kindly created an itinerary based on an overwhelming list of activities I'd sent her and she tactfully suggested I might do a few on my own while I wait for normal people to wake up. I decided to go New York's oldest magic shop. I love the grid street system. It's so easy. I found the location in record time. Except there was no magic shop. There was a Levi shop, as seen on streetview next to the Magic Shop on the map. I checked Reddit to see if anyone said it was gone but people had visited in the last month. I walked up and down the street 3 times, and walked around the other side to see if there was any other entrance. The only possibility was a non descript door that looked like it maybe led to flats or offices. But it was in the right place. So with zero survival instincts, I went in. A man asked what I was looking for, and told me to go to Floor 6. 50% sure I was about to meet my death, but not wanting to seem rude, I did as he said. It left me in a slightly corporate Alice in Wonderland-esque hallway, which I followed around a few turns and eventually did, indeed, find the magic shop. The owner and I chatted for a while, he did some tricks for me, and I left.

I met Liz at the Ghostbusters Fire Station. We also went to a tiny shipping container-sized museum that I saw on Travel Man but the main highlight in this particular cluster was The Mysterious Bookshop. A bookshop dedicated entirely to mysteries. Essentially, my dream. They publish little mystery novellas by famous writers and I bought an R.L. Stein one. It was a fun, weird little story called The Sequel and now I want to go back and read some Goosebumps books.

I demanded Liz bring me to the Seaglass Carousel because she'd said it's kind of quirky and pretty and I was never going to turn that down. So in the sweltering heatwave, we trekked down to The Battery park and it was an unmitigated delight. We glided around on fibreglass sea creatures, mostly in the company of children, who ruin everything.

That night, she brought me to an Indian hiphop silent disco in the Lincoln Centre. At this point, I was surviving on a sort of manic adrenaline but it was enormous fun. It was, however, 30 degrees at 11pm (New York time, at this point I'd lost all sense of time) so by the time it was over we all looked like we'd taken a collective shower.

The Ripped Bodice is a famous romance bookshop in Brooklyn. I have very strong opinions on the romance genre and its general perception as being a bit fluffy and 'lesser' than other genres. So this was excellent. I met a girl outside who had travelled from LA just to go to this bookshop. That's a level of intensity I admire. I told her I'd travelled from Scotland for it, just to one-up her. It's beautiful inside though the one thing lacking is that they don't sell Virtual Strangers by Sam Canning.

The last thing we did was go to the transit museum. I'd got it into my head that I wanted to do this, ever since Liz's brother went to visit her and put about 60 photos up on his Instagram of the transit museum. We got to sit on all sorts of trams, which was fun, until I then had to sit on 2 hours worth of trams going back to JFK that night.