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My flight from Montreal to New York-La Guardia was scheduled for 9AM. Air Canada's planes are falling apart, so we left at 10:20AM... But the good news is that I had a dream experience with American customs and immigration. I thanked the INS guy for being a thousand times nicer than the guy in Chicago. The Montreal guy dead-panned, "And I'm not that nice."

The landing flight path had us fly south over Manhattan, doing a 180 just beyond the southern tip, then flying north to land, but with some distance that allowed us a spectacular view of the island. I was excited seeing all the skyscrapers, but at this point it still felt like I was watching a movie. At Geoffrey's suggestion, I had arranged a hire car to take me from La Guardia to Manhattan. Not quite the town car I was expecting, I did get to travel in a Madonna-esque people mover that zipped through the holiday traffic (I arrived on July 4).

I know it's cliche to say that New York looked like a movie, on the street level, but that is precisely what it was like. From the yellow cabs, to the looming presence of the Met Life tower, the steaming sewers, and the hundreds of people everywhere, everything looked just like it does in a movie.

I am staying in the Colonial House Inn, a little gay-run B&B hotel in Chelsea. The owner is about a thousand years old, and financed the famous Paradise Garage disco in the late 70s. Accommodation in New York is outrageously expensive, and this is the least expensive nice place (read: clean, simple, no cockroaches) that I could find. I'm still paying USD$100 per night. And that's for a shared bathroom (with two other rooms). My bedroom does have a sink, and was recently renovated, but it is barely bigger than a double bed, making the small Japanese business hotels seem unbelievably spacious in comparison.

On my first afternoon I walked from Chelsea down to Greenwich Village, which is perhaps 15 blocks. There is a fantastic street-by-street guide on the internet called New York Songlines. As it's just HTML pages, I downloaded the site to my PDA and have been consulting it on my travels in NY so far. The great thing about this guide is that it will identify important historical and present sites, organised by street name and number for easy reference. So on Monday I wandered down 7th Avenue looking up street numbers as I passed them. It's fantastic. Did you know that Glenn Close's apartment building in Fatal Attraction was also used in The Hours? I have photos now. I also found the block of apartments bordered by Christopher and W 10th Streets that is the real address, and the purported basis, for the events in Hitchcock's Rear Window. And in the Village, I also found a couple of sites that were used in William Friedkin's Cruising.

A I write, it's Friday, and I have heaps more to write about the days since Monday, but have to rush off now to do the Grand Central Terminal tour. It'll be interesting to see how security has been ramped up since my last visit on Wednesday, with what happened yesterday in London.