Woke up early, so phoned the Australian High Commission and was told to email them my details again, as they seem to have no record of me. Then went back to sleep for another couple of hour before getting up for a shower. Washed my hair and then had to work out how to use the hair dryer in the hotel - the plug has a separate switch on it. Once I worked that out I was fine. We then set out to find out what New Yorkers have for breakfast. We found a nice little café and had ham, 2 eggs, toast and potatoes. A decent sized plateful. The café was quite busy, the weather is less smoggy this morning but still very hot. As most places are air conditioned you forget how hot it is and then when you walk out the heat hits you like a fire.

I went to email the Australian High Commission. There is an information place in Times Square that gives you free access to the Internet. It is housed in a lovely room with marble floors and a beautiful high arched ceilings.

After that we took our first trip on the subway up to the North End of Central Park. New York's roads seem to be the busiest and noisiest that I have seen.

We went to see the Cathedral as half of it is out of excess due to a fire in 2001. It seemed a bit empty with no seats in most of the nave. There are some lovely side altars with wonderful carved altars or embroidered tapestries,but more modern art work has been placed in front of the tapestries. There is a place for both but one shouldn't block the view of the other. In the floor they have the symbols and names of other shrines and I was pleased to see they they had Durham and dear old Cuthbert.

After the Cathedral we headed to Central Park. We started at the North End which is more wild, forestry with rivers and rocks. Though the green in New York seems to have a dingy grey tinge to it. I am not sure if that is normal or just due to the current heatwave.

We set of to walk to the South End and the zoo. Central Park is huge, a lot bigger than I expected and it took us several hours, and several bottles of liquid till we eventually found the zoo, despite getting lost once. I blame Andrew, he blames me - the joys of married life. Anyway these two footsore and weary travellers finally reached their goal. This has to be the only Zoo so far where I've gone into the tropical house and not thought it's hot in here. I was somewhat disappointed as the first time we went to see the polar bears they weren't there - no bears! How will I cope?

We went to watch the sea lions been fed.

They put on a great show, jumping on and off rocks and waving their flippers at us. After that we went back to the polar bears who had returned, or at least one had. It was playing about with the toys in it's pool and looking very cute. I wanted to jump in and join it!

After that, feeling rather exhausted by the heat we headed back to the hotel for a rest. After a rest and a shower we went out in search of food. Tried to find Little Italy, but instead found Chinatown, which isn't much good as Andrew doesn't like Chinese food. Eventually we found a little Italian place. It was small and rather noisy but air conditioned.

After dinner we went back to Times Square and stopped for a drink. I tried the closest thing America has to real ale, which would be nice if it wasn't chilled.

Still no news on my ETA for Australia.

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