4th of July weekend: New York (sponsored by Delta)

I'm looking forward to the weekend. We're spending it in New York. Work and live in the US makes you do the same many Americans do: use every long weekend and holiday. Long weekends here are much appreciated. Unlike the European standard of 25-30 vacation days a year (plus sick leave covered by your health insurance) people have usually 5-15 paid vacation days including their sick leave. So whenever there's a public holiday their company also observes they take off. Yepp, public holidays are there, but it's more like a guideline. I'm not sure if any of them is forced on the employers, at all. Like my contract says I have 10 holidays a year on top of my vacation days while a friend of mine got Christmas, Independence and Memorial Day only. Capitalism at its purest form.

And the good thing is, that many of these holidays this year are happen to be on Monday...

So I was flying a lot recently and earned gold level membership between last August and November with everyone's favorite airline, and got a bunch of miles. So we take off Friday and fly to the Big Apple for free, and there'll be still some miles left in the end on my account. According to Delta enough for a return ticket... But they never have tickets for 25,000 miles. Ever.

We'll arrive late at night on Friday and will come back Monday evening. The bad thing about going to the East Coast is that you most likely loose the whole day or you need to leave at dawn to make some use of that day because of the time difference (6-7hrs net flying time + 3 hrs time difference + to and from the airport + security + waiting + 1-2hrs delay (mandatory with most of the airlines here)), but when you're coming back you can spend a whole day there and fly back in the evening only (5-8pm) and still land before midnight. So you do get something back. Logistics.

I've been to New York only once 4 years ago for a similarly short trip. I bought my first DSLR camera on Broadway (because it was Jewish New Year and all the low price Jewish camera shops were closed) so I made pretty crappy pictures (see the one above) but hopefully during the years I developed my skills a bit and now I want to take this opportunity to do some better ones (my wife will kill me). And we will also see things I didn't see back then. I hope the weather will support us, too! I'll keep y'all posted!