We’ve just spent our fourth day here with a New York state resident couple, with whom Emma corresponds with regularly. Our time here is quickly drawing to a close, and the one thing we haven’t done yet is taken in some live jazz - something we’re going to rectify today.

After eating the local stodge (you can’t seem to get anything for breakfast here without copious amounts of eggs and cheese), the four of us headed to the next block over from our hotel. There was a photo gallery run by the International Centre of Photography that I had been wanting to check out since we arrived on Monday, so I was quite looking forward to it.

Unfortunately though, it appeared that we had picked the wrong time to visit; although their website showed past some very interesting past exhibitions, what we saw was a gallery that was full of abstract and modern “pieces”, with photography being an entirely secondary medium. Emma and I have a particular distaste for modern “art”, so after only a short half-hour of desperately trying to find something of interest we wrote it off as a “huge mistake” and left.

With a lot of time to kill, we headed off to the East docks - having read that the Circle Line tour boat offered some pretty good views of the Island, we decided that it would be an interesting way to spend the bulk of the day. We opted to go for the longer (three hour) tour, which would take us around the circumference of the island, and after a much regretted visit to the snack bar (I thought NY hot dogs were supposed to be the best?) we headed off.

Two hours into our three hour tour, I was starting to get a little twitchy - the route around the island had all the really interesting landmarks right at the beginning, so along with the mc’s informative narration it was actually quite good fun. It seems that the further north you go though, the less there is to see - you can only say so much about residential areas and there was much “dead air” as our guide signed off until something interesting came into view.

By the time we made it back to shore, we were itching for a siesta so we parted company with our new traveling companions for the next few hours, until this evening when we’ve booked dinner and jazz downtown.