Where we are staying in New York is a very busy shopping district and it's shocking to see just how much time people devote to shopping. As we leave our apartment there are continual hoardes of people psuhing past each over in a crazy kind of panic trying to get into clothes shops. Seeing people queue overnight in the cold and dark to be the first in a shop for a new range is becoming a nightly occurance.

Queuing overnight for trainers? Not for me. Beads, jewellery or books? Ok, maybe.

I have written before about my love of visiting book shops and today was a treat as I got to spend time in Barnes and Noble exploring books and magazines and trying to work out just how much they would weight if I tried to get them all in my luggage...

I treated myself to a book and a magazine but nothing worth sitting out all night for and not even anything worth pushing an old man over for. I must be looking at the wrong things.

Shopping over we headed for lunch to Rosa Mexicano. We visited here last year and loved it and the return trip proved our memories were right (we had consumed a fair bit of alcohol when we visited last year...so much so that we had no memory of the incredible wall of diving men which are pretty hard to miss...).

This time I only managed one drink here as I was saving ourselves for a treat later on: a visit to a bar which frequently tops 'best bar in the World' lists- PDT.

The bar, whose name stands for 'Please Don't Tell', is accessed in a secret way through a secret address. Ok, it's not that secret if you have access to Google so I will tell you that you begin in a hot dog shop- Crif Dogs. Then you make your way through a hidden door into a little secret bar.

As the bar is so popular you have to ring on the day to try and get a reservation and the only one we'd managed to get so far was at 12.30am tonight/tomorrow. I nabbed it just in case we couldn't get another one another day.

So, after dinner we headed back to the apartment for an early night with our alarms set for 11.30pm when we rose, got dressed, jumped in a cab, went to the hot dog shop (which was playing excellent loud and obscene rap music) and then ended up in a bar when our poor brains and bodies had no idea what time of day it was.

The drinks were good, but maybe it was the surrealness of the excursion, or our tiredness, but we had to agree that it really wasn't worth getting out of bed for. So after one drink we jumped in a cab and headed back to sleep so we could wake up tomorrow wondering if it had all been a dream.