SO, with our USA trip we decided to spare no expense, nothing was going to ruin this trip in anyway. No bad hostels, no getting lost, no sickness, no worries.
Ha.
Cue the Nor'Easter Storm Stella which has left 44,000 people without power, cancelled 5000 flights and generally inconvenienced tens of millions of people in the North Eastern region of America.
And incase you haven't worked it out, we are two of them.
During our first full day in Boston three questions really kept making their way to the front of my mind:
1. What exactly is a Twinkie?
2. How noticeable is my accent?
3. Is this snow really going to be that bad?
Now as you can see the Storm really wasn't a priority to me, it was just so hard to envisage. A bad storm in the UK means that some fence panels might get blown over and once every few years all the schools get shut because it snowed for 20 minutes the night before.
It began with the news channels, telling us that this storm was going to be the worst the US had seen in many years, advising people to stay indoors and be prepared to sit this one out. But you know, it's all fake news anyway so we didn't worry too much.
At one point a homeless guy told us to prepare for the snow as it was going to be a bad one. That was a little concerning, but we got approcahed by a lot of homeless people that day so thought maybe it was a coincidence.
But we felt that on the off chance that this storm might be half as bad as they said, we decided to head to a Target store and buy some food and drink to tide us over in our room until the next day.
Our storm survival kit consisted of:
2 x Bottles of Diet Dr. Pepper
2 x Bananas
1 x Box of seedless grapes
1 x Box of raspberries
2 x Pots of cereal
1 x Carton of milk
1 x Box of Mac 'N' Cheese
1 x Bag of apple slices
1 x Box of hot chocolate sachets
2 x Slices of cheesecake
Pretty much all the things Bear Grylls would recommend.
The next day we woke to the more very dramatic news reporting. Although this time it wasn't fake. This storm was actually a pretty big deal. Airports, roads and schools were shut. Stores were selling out of food as people stocked up on essentials and power cuts were becoming more and more frequent.
We resigned ourselves to staying indoors for the entire day, buoyed on by the fact that on our previous days visit to Target I had invested in a $20 Macbook to HDMI lead so that we could reap the rewards of the shining golden Utopia that is American Netflix.
5 minutes of searching proved one thing: American Netflix is nothing more than a polished turd.
80% of the programming is identical to the UK and the remaining 20% is just so painfully American: Skin Wars, 9 Months That Made You and Hostage To The Devil, to name a few.
Okay, so an all day Netflix binge was off the list. So we did what any other normal person would do in that situation; we consumed 90% of our food and drink supplies before 11am.
But we made the time fly pass by at a noticeable speed by doing a home workout, watching random episodes of TV series' hoping to get hooked on one - we didn't - and of course staring at our box of ready-to-go cheesy pasta.
What was the cheesy pasta like you may ask? Well, if you ever come to America and are craving a meal that smells like regurgitated Wotsits and tastes like underwhelming disappointment then look no further than the Kraft Mac 'N' Cheese. It was truly god awful.
In a desperate attempt to salvage the dire situation, we decided to partake in the oldest of American traditions: ordering take out pizza. Unfortunately, we also observed one of our oldest travelling traditions at this moment: that I had lost something vital - my wallet.
The next two and a half hours were spent conducting a forensic level investigation of the apartment, which included: emptying the bin three times, turfing out suitcases and scouring through every snowflake of snow on the balcony outside. By the time we finally accepted that the wallet was up and gone, the pizza place had shut. Luckily the chances of anyone else in the Boston area finding it are as slim as me finding it thanks to the 7 inches of snow that are probably covering it.
P.S for Brits, it turns out a Twinkie is a swiss roll on crack. I hate swiss rolls.
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