Biting the Big Apple

Puerto Rico

2011-12-05T19:37:00.004-05:00

My friend CS and I decided to go on one last quick escape to the sun before Winter really sets in the City.

A few months ago, I had hoped to go to Patagonia at this time of the year to do some glacier trekking but with my green card in progress, I realized that it was going to be difficult for me to know when I would be able to leave the US without setting the process back a few months. We racked our brains trying to think of places we still wanted to visit in the US and while we came up with a few, none of them got us really excited until we both realized that Puerto Rico is a US territory.

With a great mix of beaches, rain forest and city, it was the perfect choice for us.

We started by spending a couple of days in Vieques, a tiny island just off the mainland which is reached by a small plane. I love flying and even more so in propeller planes where they have to weight you, as well as your luggage, and you are sitting literally next to the pilot.

Vieques was beautiful and quiet. We hired a jeep and after a rather hairy bit of off-road driving, we were rewarded by reaching its most eastern beach, the deserted and stunning Playa Plata. Without a doubt, the most beautiful beach I have ever seen.

Always up for adventure, we signed up to go night kayaking in the bioluminescent bay.

It's difficult to explain the experience and I couldn't take any pictures but imagine kayaking in complete darkness, bar from the eery light of the millions of stars, on perfectly still water. Unique organisms live in the bay and essentially light up a bright, fluorescent green when disturbed, say by the paddles or a fish swimming.

The effect is almost supernatural and incredibly impressive. You can even scoop water in your hands and see the the tiny green lights ripple off your skin as you let the water out.

Swimming once used to be allowed in the bay but has been forbidden since earlier this year following a shark attack. I must admit that the protection of a flimsy plastic kayak alone didn't seem much to me but I managed to put my fears aside during this incredible experience.

We then spent a couple of days in Old San Juan, a stunning walled City and UNESCO protected site with its multicolored architecture and latin atmosphere. Everywhere the friendliness of people stunned us (perhaps we really are jaded New Yorkers after all) and the food was amazing.

We ended our trip in the heart of the mountains and forest, in Casa Grande, a remote tree-house type hotel, with no cell phone reception. We did drive around and visited one of Puerto Rico's famous caves but really spent most of the time completely relaxing and reading books (I am hooked on "The Hunger Games"!).

While the cold has yet to descend on New York, I now feel fully prepared for it - armed with a tan, fully rested but also knowing that I will be off again in a couple of weeks time to spend Christmas with my family back in France. I. Can't. Wait.

Crash Course City

2011-11-25T14:06:00.001-05:00

I am always honored when approached by an individual or a company asking for my thoughts on relocating to New York.

It has been one of the most life-forming experience of my life and I am always happy to share my perspective - as I did in this interview with Crash Course City.

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Meet Stephanie, a marketing director from France, who relocated from London to New York in 2007.

Why did you move to your new city?
I was working for a major financial services company in London when a promotion opportunity came up in their New York head offices and I jumped at the chance!

I fell head over heels in love with NYC after my first visit in 1999 and it had been a dream of mine ever since to live here one day.

What do you like best about living in New York?

Convenience is the first thing that comes to mind. I realized early on that I could happily live my life without going further than five blocks either way of my apartment, if I chose to do so. Everything is at your finger tips here.

The relentless energy of the City is also a big pull. There is always something to do – museum exhibits, festivals, fairs, concerts, operas, plays, outdoor movies, courses, sailing, kayaking, cycling… the list is endless.

What was the easiest part of your relocation?

I would say the actual relocation itself – my company organized and paid for my move and professional packers took care of everything. Therefore this was by far the easiest move I have done in my life from a logistics perspective.

What was the hardest part of your relocation?

Realizing upon my arrival that I only knew two people in the city, and not very well. I went from having a large circle of friends in London to having to build new friendships from scratch.

New York is a transient City with many people relocating here from various parts of the country and the world, so making friends is not hard but it definitely takes time of course.

I am happy to say four years on, I now have an extended but close circle of friends that I can honestly call family.

How would you describe your relocation experience?
For the first couple of years, it was definitely a mixture of ups and downs as I adjusted to the crazy pace of the city. I made new friends but also “lost” some who moved away and I faced cultural challenges in my professional and personal life.

But, I also consider these two years to be the most formative of my life and wouldn’t change them for the world.

I see my relocation as a success – I am very happy in New York, more in love with it than ever and still constantly trying to make the most of the amazing opportunity I was given.

Can you share 3 tips for someone making the same move?

In order to speed up the “making friends” process, try to find people in your current circle of friends who may have friends already based here.
Get to know your way around the city as soon as possible. The grid system makes it easy to navigate and I would suggest that you go exploring with a map at first and eventually you will be able to walk around all the neighbourhoods without it. New York can feel intimidating at first so knowing your way around can make it feel less so.
When the city feels too noisy, too fast, too hot, too cold, and it will, – don’t hesitate to go away for a weekend. Explore upstate New York for a bit of countryside relief; catch some rays in Florida in the depth of winter, cool off on one of the many beaches in the summer.

Most New Yorkers have a love/hate relationship with their City. As a newcomer, don’t be surprised if after the heady first month or so, you start to notice the grimier aspects of it, perhaps start to feel homesick and regret your decision to move. A quick escape from New York is the best way to come back and enjoy it even more.

But I definitely recommend sticking with it and developing strategies to deal with some of its more challenging aspects. The reward at the end - which is to live in perhaps the most exciting city in the world - is more than worth it.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T13:47:00.000-05:00

As I have said every single year since I have been here, Thanksgiving is by far my favorite American holiday.

I love that it is all about good food, good wine and family. Or as in my case, my adopted family of friends.

Each year, the cast of characters changes slightly as some friends have left New York while new ones have arrived. But every time, I can't help but feeling very thankful indeed to be surrounded by amazing friends.

This year was no different. CS & PF hosted dinner at their place, a wonderful apartment on the ground floor of a walkup, in a quiet street in our Upper West Side neighborhood. To say that the food was sublime is an understatement - they made the most delicious turkey with all the trimmings and DF & JW brought homemade green bean casserole and roasted veggies. I made Oreo truffles and brought a selection of cheese.

We spent the entire afternoon eating, drinking and chatting. Heaven.

Fall

2011-11-19T19:24:00.002-05:00

Nothing I can say describes the incredible beauty of Fall in the City better than this picture taken in my neighborhood ...

Ella Lounge

2011-10-12T17:00:00.002-04:00

Comedy clubs have always made me nervous.

I always fear that somehow I'm going to be singled out from the crowd and made fun of, or worse be pulled onto the stage!

But I was going through a bit of a tough time and so when my friend CP, who I hadn't seen in a while, invited me to a comedy show at Ella Lounge, I decided to ignore my fears and just go.

Ella is actually your run-of-the-mill lounge in the East Village but on Tuesday nights, Seth Herzog (who is currently the warm-up act on the Jimmy Fallon show) hosts his own comedy night in the dimly lit basement, which sits probably no more than 20 people although that night a good 60 of us crammed into the small space.

While Seth is the main act (and regularly brings his mum on stage for added comedy value), he also invites a great mix of established and new comedians to perform. And, as CP had told me, sometimes brings one of his celebrity friends as MCs.

I must admit that when Justin Long turned out to be the MC that night, I was more than a little excited. The club is so small that he was just a few feet away from us and he was just as charming, down to earth and damn right adorable as his on-screen persona.

With a cover charge of just $5, celebrity MC or not, it is more than worth it and a great way to spend a winter's Tuesday night!

Thank You

2011-10-05T17:31:00.005-04:00

RIP Steve Jobs.

My Macbook, iPod, iPhone and iPad have all made my life easier and dare I say, better.

Thank you.

Flower district

2011-09-08T16:40:00.011-04:00

To say that one can never fully know all of what New York has to offer is an understatement.

Just when I felt I had almost gotten there, it managed to surprise me and bring me back to reality - there are still so many things I have yet to experience here. And long may it be this way!

My sister and I stumbled upon the Flower District in Chelsea on our way to brunch with friends. It is located on just one block of 28th Street, between 6th & 7th. But in that small stretch of pavement, you feel transported to another universe - one filled with flowers, shrubs and even palm trees as all the flower shops display their wares right there on the street.

I have no idea why they are all concentrated on this particular block - some of them have clearly been there for a long time. Laurie & I loved the feeling of being in a open-air greenhouse, almost forgetting the noise and bustle of the City, while we strolled in a forest of green.

US Open

2011-09-08T16:30:00.005-04:00

Going to the US Open has long been on my list of things to do in New York.

With the Boy being borderline obsessed with the sport (and practicing it himself), I finally got to tick it off the bucket list.

We took a day off to see some of the pre-tournament qualifying games and also got some tickets to the men's quarter finals which we took my sister to.

Going to Flushing Meadows is a bit of a trek (for a Manhattanite at least) but well worth it. If you don't mind huge crowds, the atmosphere is electric and for me, catching a glimpse of the glittering Empire State Building in the distance while in the Arthur Ashe stadium, made it an unmissable New York experience.

Montreal

2011-09-05T16:11:00.000-04:00

My sister is visiting me for a couple of weeks again - an annual tradition that I hope never dies.

In between making the most out of New York and enjoying a few new experiences (more on that in later posts), we escaped for a few days to Montreal.

I fell in love with the place. It's the perfect mix of small town atmosphere - easily negotiable on foot or bike, with small cobbled streets and tiny cafes - but with big city amenities such as wonderful restaurants and world class museums. It also manages to strike an intriguing balance between European and American sensibilities - one that actually works.

In fact, I loved that people there switched mid-sentence from French to English and back again, without an ounce of self-consciousness. Very much like me when I talk to my sister (who speaks both languages too) and so I finally felt like I wasn't such an oddity after all!

As a quick jaunt from New York (less than 2 hours by plane), I can't recommend it highly enough.

Irene

2011-08-29T18:44:00.009-04:00

I didn't take the threats of Hurricane Irene seriously at all until Saturday morning. The Boy had stayed over and it was my turn to go and get us coffee from Starbucks.

I walked to my local one to find that it was closed. Undeterred, I walked to the next one to find it shut too. As far as I am concerned, no Starbucks means "the end of the world as I know it" ... hence when I started to panic.

I went home, empty handed, to find the Boy ready to leave my place as the MTA was about to shut down all public transport and his brother had to be evacuated from Long Island and stay with him in the Bronx.

We both set off on our own grocery missions. Me to Gristedes for ham, bread, cans of tuna and inexplicably (although it seemed like a good idea at the time) a jar of artichoke hearts. Him to Fairway for his favorite roast chicken and a baguette (who's the French one in this relationship?!). I also made a pit stop at the liquor store which had the longest queue of all. I felt an extra pang of love for my fellow New Yorkers then - we may have been facing an indefinite blackout but none of us were prepared to do it sober and conscious :)

After the Boy left, I met with a bunch of my friends for a boozy brunch that lasted until the evening, while the rain poured outside. CS and I had already agreed that she would stay with me for the weekend so we went home and pooled our "groceries" together which by this point included what I had bought earlier and her snazzy selection of cheese and biscuits, as well as no less than six bottles of wine between the two of us.

We woke up the next day hungover but surprised to find a clear sky and a gentle breeze sweeping the Upper West Side. We managed to find the only bar/restaurant open that day in our neighborhood and met some more friends for yet another long brunch with bottomless Mimosas.

Many areas of New York State were badly affected by the storm and I hope that everything will be repaired soon. But I can't help but being amused by the reaction of people in the City. I have since read that during this whole experience, Whole Foods had sold out of organic hummus first or other "luxury" products, before any of the other life saving things people might need. Manhattanites (me included) can be so out of touch with reality sometimes!

The Boy

2011-08-03T20:18:00.008-04:00

By now, you must have noticed how much I have mentioned the Boy in my posts as we have been spending so much time together.

While I initially called this whole thing "The Great Dating Experiment", I no longer feel (and have not for a while now) that it is an experiment at all. It did start out as a concerted effort to let someone in, even just a little bit. It was about me trying to trust a man for a change after being hurt so badly a couple of years ago. It was about giving a chance to someone lovely, very interesting, available and who seemed to want to get to know me. And I guess it was also about giving myself a chance to be happy.

But we are past that point. The Boy simply has never let me down, a fact that continues to surprise and amaze me. Of course, we have only been together for three months, it is still very early days and neither of us knows where it's heading but we are enjoying the present. But it feels real.

After 5 years of being "technically" single but tangled up in dysfunctional trysts, I didn't think I was actually capable of being in a normal, straight forward relationship again. With all the good things and not so good things that come with it.

I promise that I will never become a smug "coupled up" person. I have too much life experience to ever take it for granted or expect that it will last forever. I also would never jeopardize the wonderful friendships I have here. My priority is to ensure that I spend as much time as I always have done with my adopted family, the dear friends who are the bedrock of my life, while still nurturing my burgeoning relationship with the Boy. Of course something had to give and so between my friends, the Boy and the gym, I'm afraid the gym had to go! Tough choice but someone had to make it ;-)

Right now I just feel incredibly lucky that I am able to balance everything and get the best of both worlds. To have met someone who likes adventures (cultural, intellectual, physical) as much as I do, someone who is not threatened by my ambition or thirst for life, who does not want to change my life but adds to it, is a wonderful icing on top of what was a pretty tasty cake in the first place!

But (and there is always a "but" in this crazy City) nothing is ever as straight forward as it seems. I remember writing a while ago that everyone here is slightly damaged and it remains a true statement - between his emotional baggage and mine, things are not always easy. But it's worth it. And regardless of what happens, I hope I will never regret trying.

Sporty Sunday

2011-07-18T18:30:00.003-04:00

In keeping with my role as official Social Director to my group of friends, I bought tickets for a kayaking excursion on the Delaware river, followed by a wine tour, a little while ago through one of the many deals site I subscribe to. I figured that one can't really go wrong with kayaking and wine tasting in the same day and managed to rope in the Boy along with my friends CT and PF in to do it with me.

We all turned up at 11am in Hells Kitchen on Sunday, where the pick up point was, ready for action. I had bought 2 separate pairs of tickets but quickly realized that things might not quite go according to plan when the organizers said they only had me down for 1 pair.

Regardless, the four of us got on the bus, along with around 40 other people. After we were told that the bus journey would take 2.5 hours and that they would probably not get us back into the City until 10pm (at which point I regretted being there in the first place!), the organizers approached us and said that unfortunately they couldn't accommodate the extra two people they hadn't accounted for. As CT & PF left the bus, the Boy and I looked at each other and both realized that we didn't want to be there unless they were ... and followed them out.

A little disappointed that we didn't go on our planned adventure (but secretly pleased that we wouldn't have to suffer through 5 hours of a coach journey in total), we quickly hatched another plan.

We hired bikes from a spot just beside the Intrepid and set off north, cycling along the wonderfully appointed bike path all the way to the George Washington bridge at the most northern point of the island.

I couldn't recommend this ride more. While it feels very busy until you hit the mid-90s, after that point the bike path is pretty much clear and the scenery is wonderful. As you cycle past 110th street, the surroundings are much more wild and less city-like and we felt like we were truly out of the City. Entire families were out having elaborate and festive barbecues, the heady smell of grilled meat tantalizing our taste buds as we whizzed past them.

We sat for a while in a shaded area once we reached the bridge, admiring the City skyline in the distance on one side and the majestic bridge on the other.

After cycling back down to our neighborhood, there was no better way to end such a great day than with a couple of drinks at the Boat Basin while watching the final of the Women's Football World Cup.

Governors Island

2011-07-11T19:31:00.003-04:00

Governors Island is a just tiny patch of land located between the most southern tip of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but in the Summer it becomes a hive of activity.

The island was mostly used for military purposes in the 18th and 19th centuries - and still houses many former barracks - but it was fully converted into a public park in 2010.

Bike paths have been built and it hosts a myriad of food events, concerts and exhibits throughout the Summer - you can see the full schedule here. Free ferries leave for the island every hour during the week and every 30 minutes at the weekends and it takes less than 10 minutes to get there.

I first went there for Meatopia last year and returned last Sunday when the Boy and I went to a BBQ, Blues and Beer festival there for the afternoon. You can't really go wrong with these three things put together and we spent hours nibbling on pulled pork, mini burgers and hot dogs while chilling out and enjoying the laid back atmosphere.

I highly recommend visiting Governors Island as a cheap and very easy way to get that "out of the City" feeling if only for a day!

Welcome

2011-07-10T21:28:00.003-04:00

I organized a little Welcome Party for my friend JW last night, who just arrived from London on a 6-month global rotation program that our company facilitates. Needless to say that he is beyond excited at the opportunity to live here and all our mutual friends and I are determined to help him make the most of the experience.

For his first big night out in the City, I wanted him to experience quintessential New York. I wanted us to go a place where he will not be able to take his eyes away from the view and pinch himself that he is here, that it is real. And what is better than cocktails at Ink48 with its sweeping panorama of the Midtown skyscrapers to send a tingle of excitement down your spine.

While much fun was had by our raucous group of ten people, the evening was a little bittersweet as well however. As JW arrives, my close friends ES and KM are gearing up to leave the City later this summer (one back to London, the other to DC) further illustrating the transient nature of this place.

I am used to this, having already "lost" a few friends who after 2, 4 or 10 years felt burnt out and needed a slower pace of life. But for every person that left, someone else arrived. Ah, the great revolving doors of New York City ...

July 4th Weekend

2011-07-08T19:40:00.000-04:00

I spent the holiday weekend in the Hamptons and I feel that the girls and I have settled into a soothing and deliciously predictable routine out there.

As usual, we enjoyed ES's beautiful house, frolicked in the pool, sunbathed and indulged in far too many BBC cocktails at Cyril's.

I have finally come to terms with my love/hate relationship with the Hamptons. There are too many things I love about it to stop me from going back a few times this summer - namely the beauty of the surroundings, the quietness and the feeling that we are a million miles away for the bustling City.

What I hadn't planned on was a spectacular ending to such a great weekend. As we were riding the train back to the City early in the afternoon on July 4th, one of the girls said that she was going to watch the fireworks later that night on one of her friends' boat and invited us to join them. While we were all beyond exhausted, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

We arrived at Penn Station at 5.30 p.m. and by 6.30 p.m., we were boarding the 28 foot boat, laden with nibbles we got from Whole Foods on the way and wine.

The boat traffic on the Hudson was unbelievable and we even witnessed a couple of minor accidents but the view you get from the middle of the river is absolutely breathtaking. It is by far the best view point, especially since you can also admire the distinctive Manhattan skyline so well at the same time.

I had to pinch myself more than once that I was really living this ... that I was really lucky enough to experience this ... that I was there. If this doesn't further cement my passionate love affair with New York, I don't know what does.

Blue Note

2011-06-28T21:08:00.007-04:00

My favourite jazz vocalist of all times, little Jimmy Scott, performed at the Blue Note Jazz Club in the West Village last week and I got tickets for me and the Boy as soon as I learnt about it.

Jimmy Scott has an incredibly unique voice and a lovely personality - the kind that makes you want to hug him and never let go. But at 86 years old, he performs less than a handful of times a year unfortunately.

I first saw him in London and since I have moved to New York, I have made a point of seeing him every single time he has come to the City (only once a year) - twice at the Dizzy's Club in Columbus Circle and once at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival.

I had never been to Blue Note before and must admit that I was a little disappointed. The club clearly needs a make-over. What I like about jazz clubs is that they are usually small, intimate and frankly quite romantic with plenty of dark nooks that couples can snuggle into while enjoying the performance. But Blue Note (while being small), did not feel intimate at all and the fact that most tables are communal was neither romantic or practical. It also felt like a bit of a tourist trap, which I guess is to be expected as it is probably the most famous jazz joint in the City.

If I was to recommend some good jazz venues, I would go with Dizzy's (for the panorama alone), as well as Smoke, a tiny brick-walled club on 105th and Broadway.

But regardless of the venue, Jimmy delivered an amazing, emotional and almost heart-breaking (as he now so frail) performance that had me close to tears. I will continue to see him every year, for as long as he can perform - he is now in a wheelchair, so I'm afraid it may not be that much longer unfortunately.

And the Boy passed a big test by enjoying it as much a I did!

Perfect Weekend

2011-06-26T22:42:00.005-04:00

The weekend I just had made me realize even more that leaving New York, if I ever had to do so, would be the hardest thing in the world.

I met up with my friend JC and his crew for brunch at Da Silvano in the West Village on Saturday. It's a famous Italian institution and fantastic for people watching, especially when one of the people we spotted was (the frankly stunning) Tyson Beckford!

He was parking his Ducati motorbike when I recognized him and let out an excited squeal. The other girls and I then went onto full swooning mode and KO and DT, being much braver than I am, got their picture taken with him. We spent hours basking in the sun there, getting slowly tipsy from the huge bottle of Rose we had ordered and sharing piles of delicious food.

In the evening, and after some much needed down time at home to recover from the day drinking, I met my girls ES and CS at Ink48, the rooftop bar of the namesake hotel in Hell's Kitchen. It affords one of the most stunning views of the Midtown skyscraper jungle I have ever seen. We drank a couple of Mojitos while updating each other on boy-related news and I truly felt like I was living in an episode of Sex and The City. Even more so as I hopped into a cab at the end of the night to go and meet the Boy.

"The Great Dating Experiment" is going very well and the Boy and I spent all of Sunday together as well. Enjoying an alfresco brunch at my old favourite Ocean Grill. Spending a few hours at the Natural History Museum and getting spooked (as always!) by the whale and giant squid exhibit. Grabbing a coffee at Joe's, a lovely neighborhood joint that makes one of the best coffees in the City before going back to mine to snuggle down and watch a few episodes of "America - The story of us", a great multi-part documentary spanning 400 years of American history he thought I might enjoy (and I did).

A picture perfect weekend in every single way. And I wouldn't trade that for the world. I am exactly where I should be right now.

"New" York

2011-06-19T13:02:00.003-04:00

I am dating someone. As in "hanging out, going to the movies, holding hands while walking down the street" kind of dating. Normal dating I guess. But for me an incredibly foreign concept in New York where the relationships I've had here have been (by choice) either fleeting or very complicated.

I am calling it "The Great Dating Experiment" - I have no idea how long it will last before my commitment phobia kicks in but I am enjoying the ride for now. Besides, he's single, smart, nice and very laid back - key attributes I have never found bundled up into one man in this City before (the single part is usually missing)!

One of the good things about "The Great Dating Experiment" is that I am going to completely new places that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered. While I enjoy being the social organizer in my group of friends, there is something wonderful about being taken somewhere you haven't chosen.

Yesterday, we walked almost the entire length of Manhattan, grabbing lunch in Chelsea, exploring the newly opened extension of the High Line and drinking a beer at the food trucks spot that has opened underneath it. We then made a quick pit stop at the public basketball court on West 4th to watch guys play a game of 21 (he already knows that basketball is the way to my heart!).

Afterwards, he took me to Fat Black Pussycat in the West Village. The outside appearance of the bar would have normally guaranteed that I wouldn't go in but I was surprised to find, as he guided me towards the back of the bar, a really cool swanky lounge with a rather gothic decor playing the kind of tunes that had us hitting Shazam on our Iphones constantly.

From there, we walked to the Lower East Side and he took me to Karma, a hookah bar in the East Village. While I like to think that I have done a lot of things in my life, smoking hookah has never been one of them. While the place is dark, a little rough around the edges and the service pretty appalling, I loved it because it was so different and the great hip hop anthems loudly blasting also helped.

I feel almost like I am re-discovering New York through the eyes of someone else.

Even after four years here, the City is still full of surprises waiting to be experienced. And I am more open to them than I have been in a long time. Dating included.

Hey Sailor!

2011-06-15T11:59:00.004-04:00

When the girls and I signed up for an intensive 2-day sailing course with the Manhattan Sailing Club, we knew full well that it was not going to be the usual sailing we all have done in the past in various parts of the world - comfortably sitting on the deck, donning swimsuits and clutching a glass of something bubbly and cold. But we were not prepared by how much hard work and how technical sailing is.

We were brought crashing down to reality on the evening of the induction, when one of the instructors proceeded to talk for over an hour about the rules of sailing, the multitude of obscure names that seem to have been given to every single parts of a boat and the different sailing strategies. It was pretty hard for us to hide the look of bewilderment and slight terror from our faces as we realized that we had far more to learn in just 2 days that we had ever anticipated.

But we still all turned up at the Marina at 9am sharp on Saturday and met our instructor Graham who turned out to be a very laid back British guy. We walked over to the boat each clutching a Starbucks cup to wake our sleepy minds, not really realizing that even getting onto the boat requires two free hands as an amused Graham pointed out to us.

The weather was not great - drizzly and grey - but because the water was relatively calm, we each leant to tack and jibe for about 4 hours, as well as putting up the sails and trimming them. After lunch and about an hour into sailing, the weather took a turn for the worse and a spectacular storm hit us. Graham had to take over navigation as torrential rain poured down on us and the increasingly big waves and the wildly changing winds made it impossible for us learners to control. We heard a voice on the radio screaming that we had to head back now and so we motored back as fast as possible ... arriving back at the dock completely soaking wet, shivering and frankly quite freaked out. Talk about a first sailing experience! Even Graham seemed a little shaken! We all went home and crashed into bed early, completely exhausted.

Our second day was thankfully much less eventful and more relaxing while still being hard work. Sailing on the Hudson is the equivalent of riding a bike on a busy motor-way as we had to navigate through the ferries, cruise ships and tankers much larger than us.

I can't recommend it highly enough though. It's a brilliant but tiring and surprisingly physical experience, with the Manhattan skyline as the most stunning background.

And according to the diplomas we were given for passing the course at the end of the weekend, we should now be all addressed as "Hey Sailor!" :)

Willie Wall

2011-06-11T18:22:00.001-04:00

The girls and I are doing an intensive 2 day sailing course this weekend with the Manhattan Sailing Club, located in the North Cove Marina just outside where I work in the World Financial Center.

The induction took place last night at the The Honorable William Hall Clubhouse and Bar (aka Willie Wall), a floating barge anchored in the middle of the Hudson, near Ellis Island.

This place is one of New York's best kept secret. You don't actually have to be a member of the sailing club to get in. In the summer, specially chartered boats depart the Marina every half an hour from 5.30pm and the fee for non-members is just $10.

It is more than worth it for the incredible views of the Manhattan skyline it affords, as well as the being the perfect vantage point to watch all the sailboats racing each other.

The atmosphere gets pretty lively at the bar, with a lot of Caribbean style music playing. Only limited snacks are available (but they have a liquor license) so my advice is to pack up some yummy food in a hamper and head over there on a hot summer's night to watch the sun set over the City with a glass of chilled Prosecco in hand.

Simply heaven.

Scavenger Hunt

2011-06-04T19:47:00.007-04:00

The much anticipated arrival of warm weather to the City also marks the return of my social organizer status amongst my friends.

At this time of the year, I scour the web in search of fun and different things to do in the City, and with the rise of deals sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, the task has never been easier.

That is how I found out about an organized Scavenger Hunt taking place in Central Park today. I had little idea of what it actually involved but it sounded like something a bit more active than just lying in Sheep Meadows with a picnic.

I roped in the girls and we met up with a much larger group of people than I had anticipated at Cleopatra's Needle, behind the Metropolitan Museum. We had two and a half hours to answer 100 questions and fulfill tasks that had us walking all around the park.

I must admit that we decided pretty early on not to take this seriously unlike a few people who clearly mistook the event for an episode of "The Amazing Race", donning full work out gear and frantically jogging to each location ... much to our amusement. About half way through it, hunger got the better of us and we gave up on the hunt to have a late lunch at Bar Boulud, opposite the Lincoln Center.

But even though we didn't fully take part, we still learnt some fun facts and discovered little spots of the park that we previously hadn't been to, including some perfectly secluded picnic locations in the Ramble.

Next weekend, we are taking a 2-days sailing course with the Manhattan Sailing School - can't wait!

Belvedere Castle

The Public Theater

Hamptons Weekend

2011-06-01T22:42:00.003-04:00

I know I said I didn't particularly like the Hamptons when I went last year. Or at least "the scene" that comes with it, which thankfully is easy to avoid.

But let's face it - with my friend ES having free run of her family's five bedroom house in Amagansett for the summer, it's an incredibly easy way for us to escape the City for a few days to a place that scenically appears to be a thousand miles away, which is why a group of six of us happily made the trip there for Memorial Day weekend.

CS and I took the train there for the first time and it was an experience in itself. While Penn Station was as busy as usual, the real zoo started when we stopped at Jamaica to take the connecting train to the Hamptons.
Before we realized what was happening, hundreds of people were elbowing their way onto the train while CS and I watched in stupor. This resulted in us not getting a seat and instead spending most of the journey uncomfortably sitting on the stairs.
With magazines and books to kill time, we got to Amagansett in just over two hours. But next time, we will be more ruthless in our determination to find seats, as well as bring snacks and wine as everyone else in the carriage seemed to have done. I would still recommend taking the train over driving there, which in traffic takes at least 4 hours.

Amagansett is probably one of the quieter Hamptons and the scenery is in fact reminiscent of a perfectly English countryside hamlet with a quaint feel, lush green lawns, old trees and colonial houses - some of them of manor/castle proportions of course. With the added benefit of sandy white long beaches being minutes walk away.

The "scene" I dislike so much is really only found in a few hot spots, namely Cyril's, the Talkhouse and the Surf Lodge. If you want to see a lot of trust funds kids, investment bankers guys, and the girls that usually seek them out - then these are the places you should go to. Although I must also say that the atmosphere is always fairly laid back - it is the beach after all - and the Surf Lodge is particularly stunning.

We did go to Cyril's one night, of course. It's hard to understand why this small roadside outdoor bar draws the in-crowd of the Hamptons in such numbers but I can only imagine that they come for the same thing we do - the irresistible, "dessert in a plastic glass", that is the BBC cocktail. Banana Baileys Colada. Surely it must be the only reason why, when the place is at its busiest, people (including us) are happy to be in standing room only at the back bar, right next to the portaloos and the dumpsters! But the BBC really is to die for, and particularly good (and lethal) with a Rum floater on top - three of them should be your limit unless you want to forget small insignificant details like what your name is and where you are staying.

The rest of our time was spent having yummy breakfasts at the Farmers Market, lounging by the pool at the house, grilling the most amazing turkey burgers on the BBQ, having oysters and steamed lobster at Botswick's, doing a spot of shopping in East Hampton and just generally completely relaxing away from the hustle and bustle of the City and enjoying spending time together.

I can't think of anything better than that and will be doing much more of it over the summer!

The Rapture

2011-05-24T22:04:00.018-04:00

Over the past couple of weeks in the US, the media has been full of talks of "The Rapture", otherwise known as the "End of the World" as predicted to happen by some crazy preacher in California on Saturday May 21st at 6pm.

Some poor soul even spent his life savings buying up billboards in the City to alert us all NYC dwellers of the terrible tragedy ahead. I remember the day they arrived in Times Square as I was there by chance for an appointment in the middle of a Friday afternoon and was taken aback by a convoy of enormous signs going past me announcing that Judgement Day was upon us. Funnily enough, when I mentioned it to my parents in France, they had heard nothing about it so I guess that the "End of the World" news never reaching our folks across the Atlantic was at least consistent with countless movie scenarios where we are always the last one to know :-)

FM was in town that weekend and our friends and I were certainly not going to let a small thing like that get in the way of all the fun we had planned. Anyway, according to the "prophecy", only the chosen ones would be taken to heaven that day, leaving the rest of the world to deal with the aftermath of a giant earthquake and we were all certain that we have been far too naughty in our lives to "deserve" being sent to heaven first ... if ever!

The fun started on Friday night when we went to Pio Pio in Hell's Kitchen to celebrate FM's birthday. What looks like the entrance of a hotel at first glance is actually a Peruvian restaurant spread over two floors, the lower ground one being a large space very modernly decorated. Little did I know that Peruvian cuisine is famed for its ceviches (which I love) and roast chicken (which was amazing). I was concerned our party of 15 was going to be too raucous but it was not the case - Pio Pio is an ideal restaurant for large gatherings and there were at least another 3 birthday parties going on at the same time as ours.

After going bar crawling until the early hours of the morning, it's a small miracle that some of our group made the trek over to Brooklyn for a celebratory "End of the World" BBQ at LJ's by early afternoon the next day. While gorging on homemade hamburgers, yummy side dishes and plenty of wine, someone had the genius idea that we should fashion ourselves some foil hats to ward off Judgement Day. The amount of creativity displayed by all was breathtaking especially as some unusual materials were used in the process (including an inflated condom and some ornamental fruits!?).

As the weather was clement that day at last, we hung out outside on LJ's street most of the afternoon wearing our hats of course and certainly attracted a lot of attention from the neighbours, much to our (and their) delight and amusement.

At 5.59pm precisely, we took a group picture of us wearing said hats on a bench in the small park right outside LJ's house. At 6pm, we took a picture of just the hats left on the bench, while all loudly cheering and laughing to the point of tears in the background.

I don't normally like making fun of people, especially such a small minority whose beliefs, while clearly quite misguided, bring at least some meaning to their own lives. I can't help but feeling a bit sorry for the thousands or even perhaps millions who were actually preparing themselves for the "End of the World". What are they going to do now?

But while I don't understand them, I must say that for me: I never thought I would enjoy the end of the world quite so much ... Bring on October!

Oh and it turns out that we were not the only one who had the idea of setting up our own Rapture pictures.

Pre-Rapture

Raptured!

Love & Hate

2011-05-13T15:16:00.002-04:00

I really like this post from The Frenemy. I think it really reflects the love/hate relationship that most New Yorkers have with the City.

You can go and read it on her blog here or read below.

When you move to a city, you become meaner.

You are harder. Less optimistic. Tough. Do not make eye contact with anybody in the subway. Read the book you’re kind of halfway through, listen to the terrible music you hope you’re not playing loud enough to hear. Pretend you’re the kind of person whose feet doesn’t move when the train makes a turn. Don’t look up, just push and shove and move. In the city, you are the most important person you know. Dislike and accept that. Walk that way, walk so fast and eye roll when somebody slow is walking up the stairs as you are trying to switch trains. People will ask you for money on trains, drunk people will piss on themselves, babies will cry and you just have to pretend they are not there. It’s a subway. You don’t know anybody.

Strut down the street briskly when you are only getting a bagel, a slice of pizza, or a gin drink that will take the edge off of being alone all the time.

Dress like an idiot. When you end up in the suburbs or you end up home you think ‘why the fuck am I wearing so much black and where did these accessories come from?’ Take a long shower, eat your first big meal without alcohol in years, and try not to brush anything and everything off your shoulder. Find yourself afraid of trees.

Still, in a city filled with so many people, you must not acknowledge them. This becomes somewhat difficult because there are so many interesting and attractive things, most of them wearing plaid or shorts. Grumble while eating a falafel or some kind of street cart food. When somebody talks to you at a bar, coyly laugh when they are a part of the city you just don’t venture to. Know a lot of people, just barely.

Be afraid of ‘nice guys’ because you are no longer nice. Be afraid of things that last longer than two months. Get nervous whenever you enter some part of the town that ‘that guy you hung out with’ lives. The city is big, but it is small. Never see anybody again, except some kid you went to high school with. They have a new haircut and you kind of brag about your life because you are nervous. Send e-mails to people telling you how excited you are to be in the city. Be terrified of your bank account as you furiously eat money with no utensils. Bury your head in your hands when nobody is looking. Think about how stupid you were in college, abandon those dreams and make new ones. Find fog really romantic. Find employment really romantic. Drink on Tuesday nights. Meet people on those Tuesday nights that you high-five but never get their number. Make friends and never keep them. Take personal days in the tiny kitchen that is filled with jarred spices, condiments, and a bag of chips. Learn about sushi. Have a small circle you already knew before you moved here, the kinds of people you always complain about your love life to. Hold onto and love those people fiercely. Find friends of friends you think are cute, get annoyed that you meet people this way like in high school. Have numbers in your phone that you don’t need. Preface those numbers with ‘that night at (bar).’ Find it impossible to meet anybody until you do.

Roll around with that person in a small room in your overpriced apartment. Feel like this is an accomplishment until you feel restless. Feel like being restless is a thing you should feel. Try to fix it by getting a pet. Dance in a stupid club and tell everybody the next day you can’t believe you danced. Have ‘spots’ you think are ‘the usual’ except the bartenders never remember you. Fall in love with a new kind of ethnic food and fall more in love with brunch than you thought possible. Make connections with dogs on the street. Spend too much time contemplating life on long concrete walks. See the sunrise more than you should. Barely see anybody you like during the day. Get annoyed at couples grocery shopping and miss making out in your basement. Forget to buy paper towels and use napkins to clean the table. Take cabs at 3am. Pretend to clean your apartment, pretend you are going to eventually do laundry.

Meet nice people somewhere you didn’t expect. Have a conversation with somebody you never thought you would meet. Talk to somebody out of the blue. Enjoy these moments of fate immensely. Have more faith in humanity than you did when you lived wherever you came from.

Come home late smelling like smoke. Wonder how that happened, but really you know exactly how that happened. Promise you won’t spend too much money, expect free drinks but really only get shitty weather. Send texts to everybody you miss who is not in town because you are nostalgic for everything. Be single, ‘kind of single’, and ‘sort of single’ for months. Find somebody you like enough to watch movies with. Send bills in late. Revel in the fact that this is what youth is. Barely eat fresh vegetables anymore. Loathe the summer because it is too hot and miss it when it is gone. Get to know yourself and be surprised by it. You’d never bite your nails, you think, until you bite your nails. Forget all the great reasons why you moved here, fall in love with the reasons you didn’t think- cool breezes, car honkings, and knowing how to get places. Revel in being alone, revel in learning a city. Hate every job you have. Hate every bar you go to. Love both of these. Love everything. Have really, really good days. Stare at the city like ‘I got this.’ Swear you will eventually leave.

Then you stare at the skyline. Hate it. Be satisfied.

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My account of my own love/hate relationship with New York back in 2008 still rings true sometimes today ...

Spring

2011-05-01T17:37:00.017-04:00

Spring has finally, finally sprung in the City! I realized it this morning when I woke up to the sounds of the first street fair of the year occupying parts of Broadway, just outside my windows.

It then only seemed natural that we should have our first picnic in Central Park today, along with half of New York's population of course.

Revival?

2011-04-11T20:54:00.024-04:00

This winter has been particularly tough on me.

While I didn't entirely go into complete shut down mode (I just can't), every outings required a lot of preparation and willpower in order to face sub-zero celsius temperatures, gail force winds and/or mounds of snow for 5 excruciatingly long months.

I still managed to experience new places around the City.

Most notable amongst them were the amazing food at ABC Kitchen. The cozy atmosphere at Smith & Mills in Tribeca - an old coach-house converted into a diminutive bar. The Ace Hotel bar which is great for pre-dinner drinks and impromptu silly picture-taking sessions in their retro photo booths before grabbing dinner at the Breslin. Oh and of course the live jazz brunch at Fig & Olive in the Meat Packing district.

I also went to a lot of Knicks games and wildly cheered for my beloved boys through the course of them securing a spot in the play-offs for the first time in 7 years. My obsession with the game is now at an all time high and shows no sign of abating. I even paid a lot a money to see them play the Lakers at MSG and even though I was supporting my home team, I literally swooned at how amazing and talented Kobe Bryant is.

I even took a trip out of the island (as I lovingly, yet ironically, call Manhattan) that didn't involve flying when ES, CS, SM and I rented a car and drove up to the Hudson valley for a spot of wine tasting at the Brotherhood Winery, which I highly recommend for the rather eccentric but endearing tour guide, rather than the wine as such.

But regardless of the above, it took no less than 4 trips to sunnier climes in as many months to help me stay somewhat sane - a record, even for me!

I first went to Phoenix AZ for work at the end of January where I was stranded for an extra couple of days because of the crazy snow storms in NYC at the time ... days I of course spent by the pool while working on my laptop.

Followed shortly by a weekend in Miami in February for LJ's annual birthday celebrations where I once again reveled yet laughed at the parallel universe that South Beach is - I still maintain that it is like walking into a "Pimps & Hos" party at any time of the day or night.

In March, the girls and I went to Barbados for 5 days to live it up Caribbean style - it made for an unforgettable trip and tales far too outlandish to publicly share. I have pretty much been planning my permanent move over there since I got back - something to do with compulsory day time Rum Punch consumption and perhaps also because someone made me appreciate jet skiing more than I ever did before :)

Concluding with my latest escape this past weekend to Treasure Island in Florida to stay with my dear friend FM who lives there. I only booked the flight the week before, on a whim, after spending yet another night at home with my portable heater aimed directly at me in order to stay warm (for context - I have to have an additional heating source because the central heating in my apartment is not enough to keep it above 18C in winter!).

I only spent 48 short hours there but it was worth it. Lying on the beach. Listening to the gentle sounds of waves crashing. Alfresco brunches. Alfresco dinners. Catching up with FM and putting the world to right until the early hours of the morning while sipping wine on her outdoor patio and petting her beautiful Dalmatian dog Bridie.

My next trip, in a week and a half, is not an escape to sunnier climes (although the weather will be pretty nice there by then) but more of an emotional recharge - I am going to my parents for a week to catch up with my family and finally get to meet my adorable niece who was born in January but that I have only seen on Skype. My brother, despite being the youngest one, is the most settled and mature and is now the proud father of a gorgeous baby girl. I thought that I would be fairly blase about the whole thing (as did all my friends and family who know I am not a "baby person") but it turns out that when the brother you utterly adore has an offspring, you fall head over heels in love with his baby too! I really can't wait until the moment I hold her into my arms and see my beloved brother in her, although my entire family tells me that she has my eyes which will no doubt freak me out. And then I want to get 8 hours full sleep for a week. I still have my priorities straight!

The quote that "New York is a great city to live in if you can afford to get out of it" has never felt more true to me until this particularly long and dreary winter, which still feels like it will never end. I know full well how incredibly fortunate I am to be able to travel as much as I do - a luxury that is not available to everyone although my inaptitude for financial planning and desire to live in the present are entirely to blame for it!

But upon my return from France, when the weather should have definitely turned to Spring here too, I should be back to my usual self and hopefully have more to share on this great City than my constant need to escape it!

Hibernation

2011-02-10T21:35:00.002-05:00

My recent lack of posts is due to the obligatory phenomenon of hibernation that all mammals in New York City experience at this time of the year.

Quite simply, I have felt too cold, too tired and too damn depressed to do anything worth writing about.

Instead I leave you with a couple of pictures from this past weekend when I was in South Beach Miami - the land of sun, sea and sand. An annual and now ritual escape without which I could not even make it through the winter alive.

My next escape from this cold hell is Barbados in less than a month's time. I am counting the days, while struggling to wake up and function as a normal human being every morning.

I don't remember ever being so prone to SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) before - I didn't even know what SAD was before I experienced my first winter in New York! Yet I can't quite decide if it's because London doesn't have such distinctive seasons or if it is due to knowing that, while I am trying to cope with a long period of miserable cold weather, a heavenly beach and warm climates are less 3 hours away from me in Florida - so close, yet so far from every day life.

Regardless of the reason or answer, everyone I know here suffers from this "disorder" to various degrees and I can now understand why Groundhog's day is such a big deal and gets massive TV coverage here. If a cute furry animal is telling us that Spring is coming early this year, we all really want to believe it is true and it gives us hope to function one day at a time until it becomes reality.

Fun Facts

2011-01-20T22:20:00.018-05:00

In Treasure Island, FLA

I'm having a crazy busy time at work right now so blogging is taking a backseat. But we have a team building session next week and I've been asked to give some fun facts about myself which I thought were actually quite fun (usually they are not!) and thought I would share them.

Name two things you consider yourself to be very good at:

I am an expert at making the most elaborate, comprehensive lists (anything from routine to-dos, to packing for a trip, New Years resolution, books I want to read, films I want to watch, recipes I want to try, restaurants I've been to and want to go to, lists I have yet to write, etc.) yet I am also a master of procrastination.

Who was your favorite musical performer or group when you were in High School?

Michael Jackson - I was a huge fan of his between the age of 12 and 16 and credit him for my early grasp of the English language as I learned (and translated) the lyrics of all of his songs.

Which is the best vacation you ever had?

My last vacation is always the best one.

What crazy activity would you like to try someday?

A zero gravity simulated space flight. I'm a closeted science geek and have always been fascinated by space travel and astronomy (I'm currently reading 'How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming" by Mike Brown - brilliant!) . As I don't think I will ever be able to afford a space flight (when it becomes available), a ride in an airplane for trainee astronauts/adrenaline junkies simulating zero gravity by dropping abruptly would be the next best thing.

Have you ever met a celebrity? If so, who and how?

Gordon Ramsay - who winked, smiled and said hello to me in the street in London. I was as shocked as I was charmed.

Name one thing that not many people know about you:

I want to get a small aircraft pilot license. It's a huge time and money commitment but I wanted to be a pilot when I was a child and love nothing more than being up in the air so it's the one thing I hope to tick off my bucket list one day.

If you could smash one thing and one thing only, what would you smash?

My TV but only during the last presidential elections political debates. Nothing has ever made me want to be violent more than watching and unfortunately hearing Sarah Palin.

What is the name of the best movie you have ever seen?

The Dead Poets Society. It affected me so much when I first saw it aged 14 that I then vowed never to watch it again as it will never be as good as the first time or more poignant as it was to me as a young teenager.

Central Park Snow

2011-01-07T21:17:00.007-05:00

Winter can be a rather depressing time in New York - while the sun is usually blazing high in the sky, it is also incredibly cold, windy, snowy ... and overwhelmingly slushy.

Streets become impossible to cross as the snow melts and gutter drains block up almost immediately - creating huge, dirty and surprisingly deep puddles.

Navigating your way around the City (even to the next block) involves awkward contortionist moves in order to avoid getting cold and wet feet/calves. Unless you have finally forsaken looking cute to instead be practical, as I have, and got yourself a pair of these amazing lifesavers.

But it is also the time when Central Park is at its most stunning and untouched. When you can walk around it for a couple of hours (as I did today with a friend), clutching a hot Starbucks coffee to keep yourself warm, pausing every so often to admire the dramatically bare trees, the snow covered fields, the iced-over lakes with the ever present backdrop of the City buildings glittering gently in the surreal pink and orange hues of the early sunset light.

It makes the discomforts of winter all worthwhile. A hundred times over.

Farewell 2010!

2011-01-03T18:25:00.008-05:00

I always feel a little introspective as one year ends and another begins - as I'm sure we all do.

I can't believe I have been here for nearly 4 years already. It went so quickly yet feels like a lifetime. Not only because I can't imagine living anywhere else but in New York now but also because I have grown up so much in my time here.

It certainly wasn't an easy journey - moving by myself to the most exciting but also intimidating City in the world, falling in love when I least expected it only to have my heart broken almost beyond repair, powering through career and cultural challenges, forging new friendships, becoming fiercely independent, traveling more than ever before. And amidst all of that - countless fun nights out, entertainingly passing flings, girlie get-togethers and sharing my new home with friends and family who visited ... I wouldn't change any of it, not even the really hard parts, but in hindsight 2010 was my best year in New York yet - the one when I finally felt settled, happy, secure and had the energy and the right state of mind to really make the most of this incredible City and enjoy it thoroughly.

So these are some of my favourite memories of 2010 but most importantly - here's to 2011!

Stranded

2010-12-23T07:36:00.000-05:00

France and my family home have never felt so far away than this week.

Like thousands of other people, my travel plans were severely hindered this past weekend - and unfortunately still are.

Unusually heavy snow flurries hit most parts of Britain and closed down airports. I always fly via London and therefore my flight on Saturday night was canceled but I managed to rebook for the following night on a 1am red-eye.

I made it to London by Monday lunch time, expecting to grab my connecting flight to Lyon that evening. Except that it was canceled too and no-one could tell us when we could expect to fly to our final destination. In fact now, 3 days later, British Airways still has no information about alternative flights on their site and their phone lines are dead. I luckily have a lot of friends in London and therefore have spent the last few days warmly ensconced with one of them, but thousands were left stranded in the airports for days with nowhere to go.

On Tuesday, I spent hours on the Internet and on the phone trying to find a way, any way, to get to my parents in time for Christmas. The Eurostar was fully booked and barely functioning. I even considered taking a 2 day journey consisting of taking 3 trains and a ferry to get there but even availability for that was scarce. At the height of my despair, I called my parents and burst into tears of frustration and sadness that I may not make it at all. I know I am a grown woman but I have never spent a single Christmas without my family and the prospect of that happening left me devastated.

I guess these kind of things make you realize what's important and when I miraculously found an Easyjet flight leaving Gatwick at 7am on Dec 24th, I booked it straight away, ignoring the cost.

So now, unless the snow situation gets much worse, I should be able to at least spend 3 days with my family before returning to London to spend New Year's Eve with friends as was originally planned. I can't wait.

Let's Go Knicks!

2010-12-17T11:09:00.001-05:00

I have written before about my rather surprising love of watching the New York Knicks play at Madison Square Garden. What started as just another item I felt I had to tick off my list of things to do in New York has now evolved into a full blown passion. As my friends and family know, I can be very "all or nothing" and in this instance, I am very much "all' but even they are surprised as I am the most unlikely basketball fan one can imagine.

After taking many different friends to games with me, who all enjoyed it thoroughly but not quite to the feverish extent I do, I'm so happy that the last friend I took with me, LE, has fallen as hard for the game and the atmosphere as I have and we've been to 2 games together already with many more to come I'm sure.

Watching a live game is almost like a workout for me. It's so intense, fast, unpredictable and suspenseful that my heart races throughout and the constant adrenaline rush makes me dizzy and giddy at the same time. I jump, scream, swear, clap, cheer and usually lose my voice by the end of it. The beauty of the whole thing is that I only have a fairly rudimentary understanding of the game but that's enough - unlike other American sports like baseball or football, no advanced knowledge is required to enjoy it.

There is something incredibly exhilarating and intoxicating about chanting along with 10,000 or so other Knicks supporters for a common outcome: victory. I have tried to capture a little of the atmosphere with this video taken on my iPhone but I must admit that it doesn't quite do it - not only does it not show how well you can see game but I also find it very difficult to stand still when cheering which makes recording quite challenging!

I must say that this year is definitely a more fulfilling one to be a Knicks fan because the team is playing very well. Last year, they only won 1 the 7 games I saw. This year, they've won all 5 games I've been to so far. Amare Stoudemire, their new star player and team captain, even broke a historical Knicks record last week by scoring over 30 points at each of the last 8 games the team played and seeing him do amazing dunks (all 6"10 of him seemingly effortlessly hanging from the basket) is an incredible sight.

It is one of things I will miss the most if I ever leave New York for new adventures and the experience I most wholeheartedly recommend to anyone visiting the City between the otherwise dreary months of November and April.

Santa Con

2010-12-15T08:44:00.001-05:00

Photo by Jake McGraw @ Flickr (C)

As I popped out for coffee and to run some errands on Saturday, I was surprised to share the elevator in my apartment building with a girl scantily dressed as an elf. I have noticed New Yorkers' fondness for dressing up before but at 11am in the morning, this seemed a little odd.

Later that evening, on my way to some friends' holiday party, I noticed quite a few people dressed as Santa, some of them in advanced stages of inebriation (read "passed out on the pavement") even though it was barely 8.30pm.

Just when I thought this City had gone completely Christmas mad this year, it finally dawned on me the next day that it must have been SantaCon! And indeed it was.

SantaCon is, according to their website, a "non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and non-sensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason". Which from what I can tell is just a brilliant excuse for a lot of people to dress up, get drunk during the day and loudly spread some holiday cheer. If you happen to be near one of their meeting points in the City for the day, I hear it can be quite a sight as the picture shows!

My hatred of crowds means that I will never partake but it is one of those rather random New York traditions that you never hear about until you live here.

Cupcake Craze

2010-12-09T19:38:00.003-05:00

Photo by jammieanne @ Flickr (C)

Today I am delighted to be bringing you a guest post about the best cupcakes in New York from Charlotte, a writer for Simonseeks.com.

This is rather handy as, while I have on occasion enjoyed them, I am not a huge fan myself (too sweet for me!) and therefore wouldn't be able to provide any guidance on this hot topic!

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These beautifully crafted small cakes adorned with icing of every colour and flavour you could imagine, once associated with children, are now big business, a fashion statement in their own right the cupcake is now glamorous, fun and here are some of the best places in New York City to pick up one of these delicious treats.

Magnolia Bakery
No list of the top places to grab a cupcake in New York would be complete without the Magnolia Bakery. Opening its doors for the first time in 1996 on a quiet corner in Greenwich Village, Magnolia Bakery was designed to make visitors feel as though they were stepping back in time whilst enjoying the best in traditional American desserts. The brand has developed and there are now six stores, four of which are in New York, one in California and one as far afield as Dubai! Fans of the hit TV show Sex and the City will recognise the Magnolia Bakery as where Carrie and Miranda devour delicious looking pink frosted cupcakes in one of the episodes. Magnolia bakery is a tourist attraction in its own right, it’s even a stop on the Sex and the City tours that run all year round, be prepared to queue if you visit, sometimes around the block but the experience is worth it once inside – particularly for a Sex and the City fan like me!

Sweet Revenge
Sweet Revenge situated in the West Village offers an artisan twist to cupcakes, the eatery is open every day and becomes an excellent place to be in the evening as it stays open till late. This is largely due to the fact that Sweet Revenges unique feature is that it sells alcohol, the menu teams the perfect cupcake with the perfect drink for you so you don’t have to worry that your chosen combination won’t taste right! They offer the finest in beers, wine and cocktails to accompany your delicious cupcake and for those who don’t have a sweet tooth they even offer a savoury cake option. If I were to go it would have to be a Crimson and Cream cupcake and a Raspberry Bellini for me, I’m booking a table already!

Sugar Sweet Sunshine
Situated on Rivington Street, Sugar Sweet Sunshine aims to offer its visitors a warm and comfortable vibe with a 60s and 70s vibe thrown in. The atmosphere here is relaxed, the decor of mismatched chairs and tables make it feel as though you are in someone’s living room rather than a coffee shop. The owners operate an open door policy, visitors are made to feel more like guests than customers and all can see into the kitchen to watch the sweet treats being made. The delicious offerings at Sugar Sweet Sunshine include the cupcake named after its birthplace Sunshine which is a yellow cake with vanilla butter-cream icing and a Sassy Red Velvet, red velvet cake with chocolate almond butter-cream. The overall aim of this coffee shop is that its customers leave feeling happy, a reason enough to pay them a visit.

Crumbs Bake Shop
Crumbs Bake Shop first opened in New York’s refined Upper East Side in 2003 with the promise of offering elegant comfort food. They offer over 50 varieties of cupcakes, all baked fresh daily with a cupcake of the week being unveiled every Monday, they are renowned for the large size of the cakes and deliver all over the USA. They even offer a college care pack, so if your loved ones are in college in The States you can show them your thinking of them with the cakes being delivered to their door. Crumbs focuses a great deal of its energies into donating to charity, so although the guilt of the amount of calories you’ve just eaten can’t be taken away knowing that $1 from every cupcake purchased goes to the Breast Cancer Coalition makes you feel better about ordering that second cake!

Cupcake Stop
Cupcake stop is the place where New Yorkers go to enjoy their cupcakes and avoid the crowds of tourists at the better known cupcake shops across the city. As Cupcake Stop in no ordinary coffee shop, instead it is a fully mobile truck, rather like an ice cream van, the Cupcake Stops several trucks travel around New York stopping in some of Manhattans prime locations to serve delicious freshly made cupcakes to the passersby. All of the cakes are baked the night before in a commercial kitchen, making over 40 flavours, with any leftovers at the end of the day being donated to the less fortunate at the City Harvest. This relative newcomer, only being established in 2009 offers a unique mobile cupcake service and is perfect for those you want a quick sweet treat to go minus the long queues and waiting times.

If you are looking to visit New York and sample the cupcakes on offer, you might want to also look at the top rated recommended New York hotels on Simonseeks, where you can find inspirational travel guides and expert advice.

Winter Survival

2010-12-07T21:34:00.009-05:00

Photo by Robert Harding (C)

As I prepare myself to face my fourth winter in the City while seemingly dishing out advice on how to survive it to a number of friends for whom it will be the first, I thought I would share my own little survival guide to New York's coldest and most challenging season.

1- Forsake fashion and style. Completely. I remember being puzzled by seeing the normally fashion-conscious New York women donning these awful and unflattering padded down coats that make you look like you are wearing a duvet. But I barely made it past a month into my first winter before reluctantly buying one myself and I haven't looked back since. I still hate it of course but, more than a necessity, it is a life saver - keeping you toasty warm and insulated when you have to brave the elements. The same goes for rain boots (indispensable when crossing the streets through the huge puddles of melted snow) and ear-muffs (although I have yet to cross the line on the latter).
2 - Prepare a long list of movies you've always wanted to see but never had time to - you will be literally hibernating, whether you like it or not. The arctic temperatures will compromise your social life quite dramatically.
3 - Having said that, unlike most European cities, a snow storm doesn’t stop the subway from running like clockwork here and taxis will still be fairly abundant even in the worst of blizzards, so you can still go out. At this time of the year, only the coziest of restaurants and bars appeal to me and I shun anywhere that is minimalist looking - my perennial favourites (Marc Forgione, Boqueria, Tolani, Hi Life and Landmark in the Time Warner Center) will get even more visits than usual. I'm on the hunt for a place with an open fireplace and comfy sofas (probably pining for a British pub) and will let you know if I find one.
4 - While this is not the most practical advice, you should in general avoid finding yourself on large avenues, especially near the river - the bitterly cold winds get channeled into them and make walking, let alone standing, intolerable for more than a few minutes.
5 - Make the most of snow days. Ahead of a storm, companies here will usually send out an email to their staff advising them to work from home. Not that commuting to work will be impossible (see point 3), but more because the possibility of an employee slipping on pavements is a lawsuit reality. I love it because it very much feels like an unexpected day off school - I usually stay in my pajamas all day and occasionally look out of my living room windows to see Broadway covered in white powder.
6 - Go to Central Park. It’s not only hauntingly beautiful under a white blanket of fresh and fluffy snow but it’s also very entertaining to see entire families sledging down the hills and a few brave souls actually cross-country skiing around it. The sight of the latter never ceases to amuse me as it is the antithesis of what one would expect to see in a city setting.
7 - When all the above fails - escape! My yearly January jaunts to Miami are no coincidence. South Beach is really only $250 and 3 hours away from this frigid cold hell so you can lie on the beach for just a weekend to get your much needed vitamin D injection, while getting ready to face yet another month or so of New York winter with some sense of perspective that summer (and getting your life back) is only around the corner!

Thanksgiving Extravanganza

2010-11-29T23:35:00.002-05:00

The significance of Thanksgiving didn't really hit me until my second year here.

It is now my favourite American holiday and is for me a celebration of love for my adopted family: the dear friends I have made along the way here without whom I wouldn't have enjoyed, and wouldn't continue to enjoy, my time in New York.

This year's Thanksgiving weekend was probably the best one for me so far. On TG day itself (Thursday), I joined LJ to go and share a lavish breakfast at BG and LE's place in Battery Park. After hours of fun with them and plenty of Mimosas, it is a small miracle that I made it to my friend's KM by 4pm for a full traditional TG dinner cooked by her lovely parents, along with our friend CS. I somehow managed to have two servings of the delicious turkey, along with all the sides (green bean casserole, stuffing, mash potatoes amongst others) ... and dessert!

Although I was clearly busy and doing double duty on Thanksgiving day, I really wanted to throw my own dinner party as well and invited a bunch of friends to mine on Saturday, thinking (quite rightly) that at least we'd all have Friday to rest and fast.

Eight of my close friends could make it and thankfully they all volunteered to bring a dish which left me in charge of just cooking a couple of roast chickens and providing the venue in the form of my apartment - a lot less stressful than cooking an entire feast for 9 by myself! My guests included all my friends from TG breakfast and dinner of course, as well as a few more friends who were otherwise engaged with out-of-town family gatherings on the day itself.

Hosting house parties in New York apartments is something of a logistical nightmare due to size constraints (especially with such tiny kitchens) and something most people (including me) normally shy away from. But I am fortunate to have a good sized apartment and while we were definitely cozy, it was still comfortable. Somehow all of our disparate dishes made a beautiful meal together. We drank more wine than could possibly be imagined. And we danced and laughed late into the night.

If Thanksgiving is about being thankful, then I feel that I have my fair share to be thankful for with my friends alone ...

Florida Detour

2010-11-22T20:50:00.004-05:00

I went on a bit of cross-country jaunt across the US last week. I was attending a work-related conference in Phoenix Arizona for the first part of the week but instead of flying straight back to NYC on Thursday (as was originally planned), I made a "small detour" (2 flights and 6 hours later) to Treasure Island for the weekend, a small beach community 45 minutes away from Tampa airport on the West coast of Florida.

My lovely friend FM moved there from New York about 6 months ago (I have document her endlessly fun goodbye parties before) and although I had promised to visit her, last weekend was the only conceivable time I could do it and also happened to be the one when our mutual and much, much beloved friends LJ and NS were visiting her, promising it to be a very merry time indeed.

I must first say that I didn't see much of Phoenix, a city that I expected very little of because it is new and has spread at an incredible pace in the past 50 years or so to become a very large and quite soulless suburban landscape (or so I have been told). The conference was in Scottsdale, an upper middle class neighbourhood in town (seemingly strewn with shopping malls) and most of my time was confined within the four walls of our rather luxurious hotel. We did however get time one day to drive the 2.5 hours it takes to get to the beautiful Sedona valley and its amazing red mountains towering high over the otherwise desert landscape.

But back to the fun Florida part. I didn't expect Treasure Island to be quite so beautiful but rows upon rows of pastel colored houses and the clear blue sea and powder white sand reminded me very much of being in the Keys. TI is primarily a retirement community but it somehow added to its charm. It's very laid back and the night scene, if you are a young and single, is non-existent. Which is probably why I liked it so much.

We spent our days on a motor boat rented from "Frenchy's" (the irony of that did not go unnoticed and was the butt of many jokes), roaming the open sea and adjacent canals, spotting dolphins, with music blaring out of our iPod speakers (the highly danceable Florida's "Club can't handle me" was our theme tune for the weekend - I still can't get it out of my head!) and drinking from mini-Chardonnay bottles (right in front of the sticker on the boat saying "Don't drink & drive" of course). The other part was spent lazily lying on the beach while a sand castle building competition was going on much to our amusement, or cooking a lavish and calorie-ladden breakfast for each other.

FM's gorgeous house was the perfect base for us, minutes away from beach, coffee (I learned to love 7/11's) and the infamous Captain Kosmako's restaurant/club. We ventured there on Saturday night and it was actually like stepping back into the 70s, from the decor, to the ambiance, the food and the clientele. But we loved everything about it - especially the fact that we were the youngest patrons by about 30 years! We danced the night away with these amazing, full of life, retirees. My family gatherings in France always include many generations and so I know how to dance (but probably quite atrociously) to most things. A skill that came in rather handy that night as LJ and I twirled around the dance floor and salsa danced without a care in the world.

The weekend I just had may seem like one in many - it is and that is very much a key component to my happiness. I love New York dearly and feel like I have mastered it as much as one really can - which is not very much. But nothing makes me happier than going away from it and coming back. I realize very much that my time here, and this moment in time in my life, is precious and probably counted. Surely no one can be afforded such unbridled fun for very long! So I want to carry on making the most of it, for as long as I possibly can ...

Tolani

2010-11-12T23:47:00.000-05:00

I'm a creature of habit and although I love going to new places, when I am feeling even just a little tired or lazy, I lose my sense of adventure and love nothing more than going back to my favourite haunts.

Tonight was one of those nights when after a long and stressful week at work, I was meant to meet up with a couple of girlfriends for drinks and nibbles Uptown and suggested we go to High Life, a comfy and well tried/tested place for us. But KM wanted to try something new and a quick search on nymag.com prompted us to give Cava, a wine bar on 80th & Amsterdam, a try. When we got there we found out it was closed for a private party but another drinking establishment caught our eyes pretty much immediately with the words "wine restaurant" prominently displayed on the awning. You can't really go wrong with these two words combined together.

So that's how we ended up stumbling completely by chance upon Tolani - the aforementioned wine restaurant - which only opened barely a month ago. And boy were we not disappointed. Beautiful setting in a very New York wine bar kind of way - cozy and warm with exposed brick walls and rustic wood details, candle lights dancing throughout the dining room, cool music but not too loud, plush and comfy leather seats at the bar and an enticing and eclectic menu with a paired down but carefully edited wine list. It was love at first sight (or sip I guess) and we knew straight away that we would be back, over and over again. We shared a bread basket, cold meats and cheeses and I also had a great zucchini and white anchovies salad - but next time, when I am hungrier, I will give the amazing sounding peri peri grilled shrimps on a bed of saffron rice a try, which is pretty much all my favourite things ever, combined into one dish.

The service was discreet but attentive and friendly and the South African manager giving us an extra glass of wine (we were on our 3rd bottle by then so I guess he knew we were going to be good customers!) and a complimentary "out of this world, better than sex" bread and butter pudding type dessert sealed the deal.

Go. Now.

Limelight Marketplace

2010-11-08T20:14:00.001-05:00

The Limelight Marketplace, a converted 19th century Episcopalian Church in Chelsea on 20th & 6th, opened up a few months ago - interestingly it had also been a trendy but drug filled nightclub throughout the 80s and 90s . I didn't get a chance to check it out until last weekend however when the massive queues to get into Eataly, where we had intended to go, put me and my lovely friend SM (visiting from London) off and we headed there instead.

I didn't know exactly what to expect but it was a much posher affair that I had envisioned. A very modern space, with glossy white surfaces and strategically placed mirrors throughout was created while respecting the building's architectural integrity. There is certainly no mistaking that you are in fact in a church.

The maze of tiny shops sell an eclectic mix of gourmet food items (including delicious ice creams and a small but perfectly formed selection of cheeses), high end gadgets, arts and crafts, and upscale furniture amongst many other treasures.

A few restaurants will soon open as well, including a cozy wine bar on the top floor affording a great view of the shopping arcade below and the much anticipated Manhattan outpost of Grimaldi's, the famous Brooklyn pizza joint.

I know where I will be doing my Christmas shopping from this year!

Insider Sources

2010-10-30T13:41:00.002-04:00

As I have mentioned before, I make it a bit of my own personal mission to keep up to date with events happening around the City all year round. This has not gone unnoticed by my friends of course, who seem to view me as a bit of a resource when it comes to finding things to see and do.

This would not be the case if I was not an avid reader of various websites, blogs and newsletters dedicated to New York and I thought it might be useful to share some of the ones I check out most often.

I have been a subscriber of the New York Magazine even since I moved here and find both the paper and online version to be very useful on a weekly basis. I also trust their restaurant reviews more than any other publication and when I am about to try a new restaurant, I always check if it’s a critic’s pick as I know I will not be disappointed. What I love is that they don’t just rate fancy restaurants. My local jewish deli and much beloved institution, Barney Greengrass, is also a pick.

I also love the nycgo website, which while being a great resource for tourists, also contains interesting content about little known spots and events.

In terms of newsletters, I read Daily Candy, Thrillist (although it is geared more towards a male audience), Blackboard Eats (for restaurant deals), Citysearch as well as all the NY Mag's newsletters (Vulture, Fashion, Grub Street).

Some of my favourite New York blogs are Scouting NY (written by a professional film location scout), New York Portraits (daily photos of the City), NewYorkology (packed with events listings) and My Upper West (for obvious reasons). Some expat blogs are also great - My New York Dish for example being one of them.

For more general news, I have already documented my frustration with US TV news channels and gave up watching them a long time ago, when I realized that I didn’t really care about how your shower curtain might be giving you cancer and couldn’t take one more ad for personal injury lawyers.

I’ve also come across a few cool iPhone apps that make navigating your way in the City a little easier. Sit or Squat is a brilliant one overlaying public toilets on Google maps. The Starbucks app is a lifesaver for the caffeine addicted. The new Central Park app pinpoints areas of interest you may have otherwise missed, along with their history. And CityMint uses GPS location services to deliver food to you, wherever you are - say in the middle of the park for example!

Lastly, while it offers little value in terms of things happening in the City, I adore Overheard in New York because it gives an hilarious and sometimes concerning glimpse into the crazy, lusty and manic urban jungle that is New York City.

Identity

2010-10-28T23:21:00.002-04:00

I surprised myself in the past month or so by feeling what I can only guess is the tiniest (but disturbing for me) tinge of national identity.

I first noticed it when I read about the US government blanket advisory against traveling to Europe a couple of weeks ago and was outraged by what I considered to be a fear mongering exercise and overly simplistic view of an entire continent.

But I felt it even more sharply last night, during the weekly Evolutionary Psychology class that I am taking at NYU this fall (my idea of intellectual distraction - I know I’m weird!). Our lecturer, a deeply academic Harvard professor, was explaining how the advent of agriculture and the manipulation of nature as a consequence will probably be seen in years to come as the biggest mistake we ever made as a species. The point (which I agree with) is that we learned to manufacture food that is lower in nutrients but more calorific which drove higher birth rates but disrupted our original metabolism for the worst, creating a more sedentary lifestyle where fast food is king and exercise is shunned - in stark comparison to our athletic, lean and healthy hunter/gatherer ancestors (but who couldn’t reproduce as fast we could and therefore in a true manifest of Darwin’s theory lost the survival reproductive battle). But she used as an illustration a Mac Donald’s ad that apparently ran in “Europe” depicting a baby seemingly suckling on a bun. She made much fuss of the fact that this ad would have never run in the US but that European audiences are different and would not only see the humor in it but also be somehow more enticed to buy MC burgers because of it.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and felt miffed that she would not only come to such a sweeping conclusion, but also that Europe (a continent comprising 50 countries and speaking no less than 230 different languages) was in her eyes, and many other Americans, seen as just one undifferentiated and dumb unit.

I have never felt particularly strongly one way or the other about the fact that I am French - although I readily admit to being appalled about the current government in power and the particularly argumentative yet pointless (i.e strikes) nature of my native country. It just happens to be the place where I was born and spent the first 19 years of my life. I consider some of my most formative years to have been spent abroad and therefore always thought of myself as a bit of a citizen of the world - happily and openly taking bits and pieces of cultural traits and behaviours from wherever I live. When I introduce myself I rarely mention that I am French (or at least not at first), particularly in the US where most people don’t detect the French intonations in my otherwise quite British sounding accent.

But I object to that fact that Europe can be seen and characterized as a seamless entity because in my experience it is anything but. We have hundreds of years of history and countless bloody wars that shaped very distinctive countries, with different languages, cultures and ideologies. I don’t think that any of them are right or wrong - they are just wonderfully different and diverse and that’s what makes the world a more interesting place.

But hearing such generalizations about an entire continent awakens in me a sense of national identity I never really felt before. It makes me want to proclaim that I am French, not in the sense that I am proud of it, but in the sense that we are all different and that the sooner we accept and embrace our differences - while finding common ground (there is plenty!) - the sooner we will all learn to live in this world together happily.

Because what I felt is so uncharacteristic for me (a serial expat and the least French person one might meet) it also made me wonder if “national identity” as a wider, almost philosophical, matter is perhaps also an integral part of the psychological toolkit we unconsciously evolved over millions of years - a sense of belonging that transcends ages/places and somehow grounds us to a certain place, even though we don’t live (and have no intention to ever live) in that place again.

As an expat, no matter how open and embracing you are of your adopted country, can you or should you ever forget where you come from? And what is the right balance between embracing your new country but drawing on your cultural heritage, however patchy it may be?

Ecuador Memories

2010-10-24T10:03:00.008-04:00

Before our trip to Ecuador, in a rather idle yet morbid moment, I actually made a list of all the things that could kill or harm us there based on the reading I had done. A bad case of altitude sickness, an earth quake, a volcanic eruption, yellow fever, malaria, piranhas, caymans, tarantulas, anacondas, poisonous frogs, pirates, sinking, political unrest ... The list seemed a lot more exhaustive and all together more concerning than my previous adventures.

I’m glad to report that we are home safe and sound but after a trip as unbelievable as we had, an exhausting total of 9 flights within 10 days and more up close and personal wildlife encounters I had ever imagined, I’m not sure we will ever be the same again.

Our journey started in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, nestled in the impressive Andes Cordillera. At an altitude of 2,800m (which we never quite got used to) the dull headache and shortness of breath we constantly felt there made it a more tiring experience than we had anticipated. But Quito’s dramatic mountain landscape, along with its amazing old colonial style Spanish architecture made it all worthwhile. From the myriad of intricately ornamented churches dotted everywhere to the majestic plazas, it’s easy to see why the Old Town is a UNESCO protected site.

While exploring Quito (and going to a windy view point 4,100m high) was great, we couldn’t wait to get to our first adventure in the jungle of the Oriente region of Ecuador. A short plane ride took us to the edge of the rain forest in the bustling market town of Coca. We felt the change in climate immediately, the heat and humidity hitting us as soon as we stepped off the aircraft.

We were met by our guide Luis and embarked on a 2.5 hours motorized canoe ride, dropping off local Amazon community members who hitched a ride with us at seemingly random spots along the wide Napo river. To realize the remoteness of where they live was frightening but little did we know at the time that we were heading to an even more secluded place ourselves.

Upon disembarking at a make shift jetty and after I was literally devoured by bugs the second I set foot on land (I felt the painful stings before even noticing the countless insects that were nibbling on my shoulder/arms and only then proceeded to douse myself in DEET), we had to take a 30 minute trek through the jungle to get to the edge of a lake. A couple of men then rowed us in a traditional (and very unstable) hollowed tree trunk pirogue to La Selva Lodge, on the far side of said lake.

There started probably the most intense day and a half of my life. Within that time, we woke up each day at 5am. Took 2 long treks through the jungle and encountered countless spiders, lizards, monkeys and brightly coloured poisonous frogs. Went up 40 meters to the top of the Canopy tower to catch the sunrise over the immense expanse of the forest and watch the feeding rituals of numerous birds, including the gorgeous toucans. Faced our deepest fears by swimming in the lake inhabited by piranhas, anacondas and caymans (our guide challenged us to do it while assuring us it was “safe”). Enjoyed the most stunning sunset I have ever witnessed (so unbelievable in fact that it brought tears to my eyes) reflecting on the perfectly still mirror-like surface of the lake while taking an early evening canoe ride. And later that night, took another canoe ride in completely darkness, armed only with a powerful torch to catch a glimpse of the nocturnal animals and the cutest baby cayman.

I have been to a rain forest before (in Costa Rica) but not nothing as dense, wild and remote as the Amazon jungle. Nothing beats walking a trail cut with a machete, your hands firmly clasped to your chest (you should never touch anything for fear it might bite you!), religiously following the naturalist as his trained eyes spot the tiniest creatures otherwise so well camouflaged.

I don’t consider myself to be a spiritual person but I never felt more in tune and in awe of nature than on this part of the trip. I surprisingly loved the remoteness of it all - no cell phone or internet reception, with only the incessant (and sometimes alarming - howler monkeys sound like horror movies monsters!) sounds of the jungle surrounding us day and night.

All too soon, we had to leave our little jungle paradise and head back to Quito to continue on to the Galapagos islands. I must admit that while going back to a city with lots of people and honking cars was a shock, I relished being able to sleep without being concerned about critters getting in my bed at night. The cabin next to us found a tarantula on their porch on the second night and that was pretty much the end of my “Jane of the Jungle” fantasy!

We made it to San Cristobal island in the Galapagos after a couple of delayed flights and met our guide, Tatiana, and the rest of the group on The Odyssey, a gorgeous ship and our home for the next 4 days. There were 14 of us in total, 6 of them being backpackers traveling through South America, which kept our group young and lively.

Within an hour of landing, we had been given a short briefing, chosen our wetsuits and snorkeling gear and been taken to shore to snorkel off a local beach. As we approached, we spotted the first of many sea lions basking in the sun. We had been warned that the sea was cold (no more than 18C) but with the excitement of it all, I hardly felt it and dove in only to find myself swimming with a sea lion and a giant turtle almost immediately. I was so shocked and exhilarated by the surprise encounter that I stopped breathing for a few moments.

The Galapagos archipelago consists of a dozen or so of barren volcanic islands with little vegetation and dramatic rocky cliffs that huge waves crash into noisily.
The wildlife is so abundant and you have to watch your step for fear of hurting anything! Animals are mostly unconcerned by us, barely acknowledging our presence. As relatively new visitors to their territory, they do not see us as predators. It is really one of the only places on earth where one can stand so close to them and observe them in their natural habitat from the endemic blue footed boobies birds, majestic albatross, sally lightfoot crabs in their dazzling red coats, to iguanas and of course sea lions. It was like being inside a National Geographic documentary.

The days were roughly divided into 3 parts. Early morning land based hiking on one of the islands from 8am to 11am. Lunch at 12pm followed by a couple of hours of relaxation (i.e drinking tons of the very strong but deliciously smooth Ecuadorian coffee). From 2pm onwards, we’d start the sea based activities with deep sea or beach snorkeling to partake in our daily swimming with the sea lions, turtles, myriads of fish and the occasional sting rays.

We didn’t realize quite how much snorkeling would be involved. Especially “extreme snorkeling” as we all came to call it. On the 3rd day, we dove 3 times and each time came out of the sea having lost all sensations in our fingers and toes, our lips blue and teeth shattering. I must admit that we questioned our sanity for doing this (and paying for it) more than once! The ship’s crew certainly seemed to find it a highly amusing spectacle. But there was no way that any of us were going to miss any snorkeling opportunities and what was essentially like swimming in a huge aquarium - despite one of them involving being dropped at a 30 meters deep point at 8am and snorkel in strong currents along the cliffs to get an unparalleled glimpse of maritime feeding time and playing hide and seek with 4 young sea lions.

Most of the sailing was done at night, which considering how rough the sea got was a blessing as we could take sea-sickness medication and more or less sleep through it. The second night in particular was very, very choppy and the slightly over-friendly Captain (4 weeks into an 8 weeks stint at sea made his zeal a little more understandable!) took us to the Bridge although getting there via the narrow passageway, with only a handrail between us and the huge waves was terrifying! Sailing in such conditions requires a lot of concentration and the First Mate and him alternated 2 hour shifts each throughout the night.

We also made a stop at Post Office Bay on Floreana island. We expected something resembling a post office but were surprised to find instead an old barrel amongst piles of driftwood. Legend has it that sailors back in the 1700s left letters to their loved ones in the barrel for other passing sailors to post/hand deliver when returning home. The tradition continues and we all left postcards for our respective families around the world and in turn took postcards from other travellers to post on our return. I can’t wait to see how long it will take for my parents to receive theirs!

Our trip ended back in Quito where we made an obligatory stop at the Equator line. It was fun taking pictures of ourselves straddling both hemispheres and the small Inti-Nan museum was particularly interesting as we took part in various experiments showing the effect of zero gravity on the line. From watching water go down a drain without spinning, to quite easily balancing an egg on top of a nail and walking with our eyes closed and arms outstretched on the line, feeling ourselves very destabilized by the opposite pull of the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Coming back from such a diverse, intense, adrenaline-filled adventure is always hard and I returned to New York with a serious case of holiday blues and a bad cold. But all the pictures and memories will hopefully keep me going through the inevitably cold New York winter.

Out-Of-Towners

2010-10-21T21:07:00.002-04:00

I have come to realise that there are a few little details that betray someone as an out-of-towner or as a recent implant to the City. Some of these traits are cute and some of them are damn right annoying - but of course I myself exhibited most of them in my first few months in New York too.

It is therefore without prejudice or snobbery that I can say you are not a New Yorker yet when:

Upon exiting a subway station, you stop and stand at the top of the stairs and look confused. The chances are that a New Yorker might be confused too as it is almost impossible (despite the signage, which I believe to be a fallacy) to know which way is north or south unless you've been there before. .. but New Yorkers don't block the exit for everyone else in the process. They just start walking in a random direction and work it out from there.

You insist in paying cash in restaurants. I can't think of a single good reason why this makes sense and I also find it a little annoying as it means having to work out the tip in advance for the person(s) paying in cash, rather than just conveniently calculating it from the tax on the credit card receipt.

When asked for an address, you say "2350 Broadway" or "1330 6th Avenue", which means absolutely nothing to anyone. New Yorkers never, ever, use street addresses and always reference the cross streets and avenues to direct people.

You walk at a normal pace, or even worse, stroll along the streets instead of the competitive speed walking that New Yorkers practice on a daily basis. I have to admit that it is a particular pet peeve of mine as, despite my rather short stature, I can walk faster than most grown men I know.

You don't let women go before you through open doors and in elevators. This rather old-fashioned form of chivalry seems to have been imprinted for life in the psyche of New York men and while I am all for equal rights, it is rather endearing.

You suffer a mild panic attack when your New Yorker friend crosses the street just as the red hand flashes and sometimes even forcibly try to stop them. The flashing hand means you get at least another 30 seconds to cross the street before getting run over. If it takes you anything over that time to cross the street, then it is the City's own natural selection of the fittest process as far as I'm concerned!

You think that brunch is a meal that takes places sometime after breakfast and before lunch, around 11.30am. Which couldn't be more wrong - New Yorkers will never be caught dead having brunch earlier than 1.30pm or 2pm.

You genuinely hold hope that you are going to find a public toilet anytime now when roaming around town. As far as I'm aware, they are simply nonexistent in the City apart from the extremely clean and pleasant one at Bryant Park. But then that's what Starbucks is for.

Ecuador Scare

2010-10-04T19:17:00.017-04:00

I have been cursing my previously documented love of adventure a little more than usual in the past few days ...

Together with my lovely friends GP and CS, I have been planning a 10 day trip to Ecuador for the past couple of months. We were set on going somewhere in South America and had originally envisioned going to Peru and climbing Machu Picchu. But upon reading that it had become a bit of a tourist circus, we started reading up about other surrounding countries. Ecuador stood out pretty much immediately - it's the smallest country in SA, which makes it easier to travel around, and yet one of the most diverse in terms of landscape, culture and wild life. It's also meant to be one of the safest and when you are traveling with two other girls, that makes a big difference.

Our itinerary was soon decided. We will fly into the capital - Quito - this Saturday and spend a couple of days there exploring the old town (a UNESCO protected site) as well as go to the Equator line of course. From there, we will board a small plane taking us to the edge of the Amazonian rain forest, followed by a 2 hour canoe ride to our lodge, deep in the jungle. After about 3 days of facing all imaginable killer insects, arachnids and reptiles known to man (and perhaps doing a spot of Piranha fishing), we will make our way back to Quito to catch another flight to the Galapagos Islands where we will embark on a 4 day boat trip with 13 other passengers and a naturalist guiding us through their incredible wild life. Bearing in mind my keen interest in Evolutionary Biology (I have, over the years, read as much Darwin, Dawkings and Pinker as possible for one who actually works in an unrelated field), the Galapagos have been what I thought was an unattainable fantasy for me for many years. Needless to say that because of all the above and the eye-watering cost of it all, I anticipated this to be a trip of a lifetime.

But the dream was almost shattered last Thursday. I got an email from both GP (Italian but based in London) and CS (British who still reads the BBC website religiously) about some trouble happening in Ecuador. It turns out that there was a military coup of some sort and the President was taken hostage. Fights ensued that lead to 5 people being killed and hundreds injured. The airport was closed, many European governments issued a "no travel warning" and the country declared a state of emergency for 7 days.

What troubles me the most about it all is that I would have never heard about it had it not been for them. In fact, when I came in to work the next day and mentioned it to my colleagues and then to my friends later that night, not one of them had heard the news either. It is simply because it was not covered (and still isn't) in the US media.

I realized a while ago but US news outlets are rather selective about what International events they cover. If it is anything controversial/salacious or could directly affect the safety of Americans (on their own soil or in war areas), it will be covered at length (understandably). But everything else seems to be simply ignored. For example, I remember vividly the lack of coverage of the sweeping forest fires that devastated huge parts of Australia last year (a country nearly the size of the USA).

I have been checking the US government travel advisory website for days now and found no mention of any unrest in Ecuador. Instead, I was surprised to read a post advising American citizens not to travel to Europe. They seem to forget that Europe is a continent made up of 50 official countries (or 27 if you chose to count only the ones in the European Union). It is in a way as ludicrous as advising against travel to North America because there's a potential threat in New York, which must sadly happen more times than we'd like to think.

I know this will sound like I am bashing America and that's not really my intention. There are many, many things I love about this wonderful country or I would not live there. But the fact that I have only been able to get updates on the Ecuador situation from British, French and Australian news sites, has been rather frustrating for me and, I have to admit, kind of embarrassing.

Thankfully, things seem to have quieten down there and the President is back in power and looks to have the support of his people - whether that's right or wrong is another issue. Our travel agents and airline's advice today is to go ahead with our trip. Traveling to South America always means a certain amount of political volatility, which I guess we should have anticipated.

We have all managed to alleviate our respective parents fears and now all the travel shots and our preparations do not seem in vain anymore. But it is of course with some remaining nervousness, and clearly a bit of pent-up frustration, that I look forward to finally going on this rather incredible trip!

Lost In Translation

2010-10-02T13:49:00.004-04:00

I went to Japan exactly a year ago but forgot to post about some of my experiences there.

Japan has long been on my travel wish-list and I was starting to wonder when I was going to make it there until my friend GP told me that she was stopping there for a week on her way back from London to Melbourne and asked if I wanted to come. We met in Tokyo and stayed there for a day before moving on to Kyoto for 2 days and then back to Tokyo for the remainder of the time.

I was fully expecting to suffer from horrendous jet lag and was unfortunately right. After a 14 hour flight and a 9 hour time difference, I got to our first hotel, the B Akasaka in the district of the same name, early in the evening and barely able to remember my own name. G and I managed to squeeze in a quick sushi dinner locally before collapsing into bed at around 9pm. I woke up at 4am the next day and was unable to get back to sleep. So it is in a rather time-zone confused daze but with barely contained excitement that we ventured into the heart of the city the next morning ... except there is no heart to it. Tokyo doesn't really have a center as such - it is instead a fascinating patchwork of neighbourhoods, each with their own distinctive personality.

I have to admit that I was a little underwhelmed in our first few hours. We walked from Akasaka to the Imperial Palace only to realise that it couldn't be seen as it is a closely guarded fortress and only the surrounding gardens can be glimpsed at. From there, we walked to Ginza, the high end shopping district (although we had no intention of shopping) and we were surprised by the nearly deserted long avenues. With the tall buildings and Western designer stores, we could have been in any other large urban cities in the world and I started to fear that perhaps the Tokyo of my fantasies did not exist.

Thankfully we started to walk away from Ginza and into some of the small adjacent streets and the feeling subsided as we were surrounded by signs in Japanese characters, older low-rise buildings and houses. I started to really fall in love with Tokyo at lunch time as we followed a group of locals ducking under a piece of fabric hung over a door that lead to a steep and narrow staircase, with only a heady smell betraying the fact that it was a restaurant. We gestured to the host that we wanted to have lunch and were lead to a communal rectangular table in the tiny but beautifully decorated dining room. From the pictures on the menu, we worked out that the restaurant's speciality was Ramen (we soon realized that restaurants in Japan tend to specialize in just one type of food, mastering it perfectly as a result) and ordered the pork version. It was honestly the best ramen I ever had in my entire life and I knew then that this country was going to be heaven for a foodie like me.

G and I had both been warned against taking the subway but adventurous as we are, we decided to try it in order to get to Akusaka. While it is a first glance a complete maze of lines, colours and japanese characters, once you spend some time trying to work it out, it is actually quite straight forward, extremely reliable, clean and punctual and frankly the best way to get around Tokyo, which is a deceptively large city.

Despite having been almost entirely destroyed during WWII (as was much of Tokyo actually), Akusaka is considered to be one of the last few areas of the city that is representative of a more modest, old-style Tokyo and used to be the red light district for a long time. And this is where my love of Tokyo was cemented as we weaved through crowds of people shopping at small market stalls on the way to the Senso-Ji shrine, overwhelmed by the bright colors of the multitude of trinkets they sold (from sushi candy to plastic cats) and the weird and wonderful food items we had never seen before. We meandered through all the tiny side streets, engulfed by the smoke and delicious smell that came from make-shift restaurants crammed next to one another, usually consisting of nothing more than a hob, a busy cook and a small table on the pavement packed with locals eating and drinking in between puffing on their cigarette.

The next day, we made our way to Kyoto on the bullet train despite our confusion over the difference between express, rapid and super express trains (as it turns out rapid is faster than express!). We had opted to stay in a Ryokan there, which is a traditional Japanese guest house. Ours, the Motonago, was located in the picturesque, cobbled and narrow streets of the historical Gion district, steps away from the Maryana gardens and its multitude myriad of temples and shrines.

Ryokans are like doll houses in the sense that everything is small and close to the ground. At 5ft3, I am not exactly tall but even I felt like a big, clumsy thing is such tiny quarters. Our room consisted of a corridor with hidden wardrobes and a central open space covered in tatami mats with a low table in the centre, a mirror (mysteriously covered at all times with an ornate cloth) and a small raised area decorated with a minimalist flower arrangement (which we were told was a sacred shrine, prompting me to quickly remove the handbag I had conveniently put there!).

While we had already guessed at the importance of etiquette in Japan, it truly came to life there in a ritual and almost spiritual way. Shoes had to be removed at the entrance of the Ryokan and slippers were provided to us, as well as a light cotton kimono to relax in when we were in the house. A chambermaid served us elaborate, multi-course breakfasts and dinners in our room with a sense of decorum and precision in the placement of the various dishes on the table that made us feel … unsophisticated. In fact, the feeling of us unwittingly being rude and unrefined foreigners is one that persisted throughout our trip – in a country so steeped in tradition and ritual, it is impossible to know which unwritten rule one might be breaking at any given time. Although none of our Japanese hosts made us feel that way, I am sure it is due to their extreme politeness and that they would never have wanted to make us feel awkward by pointing out our mistakes.

One of the best things about staying in a Ryokan for me was most definitely having a Japanese bath. I've never been a bath person (I get bored far too quickly to stay in one for more than a few minutes) so entered the bathroom with some skepticism at first. I was faced with a row of low stools each facing a mirror and equipped with a shower hose and a deep bath on the other. Having thankfully read up about it before, I knew that I had to shower before dipping myself in the bath as everyone shares the same. Showering sitting down while avoiding looking at with my naked-self was not particularly relaxing and afterwards I forced myself into what I knew would be a very hot bath … and into pure 43C heaven. Instantly, my sore muscles melted and all the tension disappeared. I never managed to stay in the bath for more than 10 minutes as the intense heat made my heart race a little too scarily but it was the most unbelievable experience.

We had such an amazing trip in a country that is incredibly different to any other in the world that it is very hard to summarize or describe all of it in an accurate manner.

There are so many more things I could write about without doing them any justice. Visiting the Tsukiji fish market at 5am when trading is at its peak and trying to avoid being run over by the myriad of motorised vehicles that erratically transport the merchandise. Noticing Japanese men's fondness for Louis Vuitton "man bags". Arriving at restaurants at 8pm to find rows of business men drunkenly slumped on their yakitori, only waking up to do another shot of Sake. Finding vending machines at every street corner, selling everything from water, to coffee, candy and cigarettes. The toilets of course - a mind-boggling experience at first but it's funny how easy it is to get used to heated toilet seats. And the always funny and sometimes puzzling deformation of the English language we encountered everywhere - "well come", "there is a difference, please note one's feet" ...

Wonderfully lost in translation indeed ...

Beautification

2010-09-30T22:01:00.001-04:00

One of the things that you quickly notice when moving to New York is that all the women are immaculately groomed.

Perfectly manicured nails/toes and impeccably arched eye-brows are the norm, rather than the exception.

In fact, I am convinced that there are more nail parlors and waxing salons in the City than Starbucks stores - and that’s saying something!

The “beauty” of them is that they are cheap. Whereas in London a manicure is a rare luxury costing north of $80, in New York you can walk away from any corner street nail salon with a perfect one for $15 at most, including tip.

I didn’t give into the wonders of this ritual until quite a few months of living here. But a friend of mine suggested a girlie trip to our local salon once and I have never looked back since. The whole experience, even in what might look like a slightly run-down place, is pure heaven and I like the ritual as much as the end result.

You first walk in and say what you’d like done to any of the ladies, who are usually busily attending to other customers. The wait is either nonexistent or very brief and you are told to choose from the vast array of nail polishes they have available on a high shelf (you can also bring your own).

Upon sitting down at a small (but perfectly constructed for the purpose) table, your manicurist will carefully remove any previous polish, soak each of your hands in a warm soapy solution, apply a mysterious serum, push back and/or cut your cuticles as needed and proceed to cut or trim your nails to your desired shape. She will then apply a moisturising lotion (which has been warmed up in a special cabinet) to your hands and massage it only to then wipe it off afterwards with an even hotter towel - the most heavenly part of the ritual for me . After this, you will be asked to pay - this used to surprise me until I realised that you can’t reach into your purse with a fresh manicure.

The polish application part can then commence with an undercoat, two coats of your chosen polish and finally a top coat being applied, after which you are taken to a drying station and given a brief (but wonderful) back rub while you wait. You will be left with nails more unbelievably perfect and polished than you could ever have imagined and thereby catch yourself admiring them at any given opportunity - like when you are grabbing on a subway pole while commuting, writing notes at work or even pointing at random things. It’s weird I know, but girls will understand me on this one.

The whole process takes at least 45 minutes from start to finish and is therefore not something you can do if you are in a hurry. You have to build it into your schedule as I do now on a bi-weekly basis, usually on a Saturday morning after the gym but before brunch.

I have come to consider it the best “me” time I can get. The only time when I am not checking my emails or talking on the phone. When I can truly feel disconnected from the rest of the world as I watch in absolute awe the expert skills of the manicurist tending to my nails, each coat of polish seemingly soothing my otherwise hectic mind.

I don’t even have to talk as chit-chat is not really encouraged in such places. I have seen many women yapping on their phones while getting their nails done but I consider it to be rude to the manicurist and I prefer to sit there in silence, occasionally smiling and telling them what a wonderful job they are doing. I do however remember a conversion with a girl who was giving me a pedicure once and told me that in her country looking at feet, let alone touching them, was forbidden and that she cried the first time she had to do it. This only made me more respectful (and guilty) of the work they do so skillfully and perhaps unwillingly do to make ends meet. I always tip generously to make up for it - my lowly contribution to a strange system, I realise.

I have yet to indulge in eye-brow threading - a practice that still instill incredible fear in me, not lessened by the fact that every eye-bow threading shops in the City advertise their services by playing a constant loop video of said procedure in their store window for every passers-by to see. They make it look painless and almost pleasurable. I don’t believe them.

One thing at the time ...

The Campbell Apartment

2010-09-28T17:34:00.002-04:00

A couple of my oldest friends are making great progress in launching their business into the US market which is not only great news for them, but also for me as it means they have to make frequent business trips to New York as a result.

This gives us the opportunity to leisurely catch up over several evenings, rather than the usual crazy schedule I have when I visit London as I always try to fit it seeing as many friends as possible.

So when my friend SM spent a week here for meetings after attending South By South West in Austin a few months ago that's exactly what we did. We pretty much spent every evenings together and SM gamely followed me on a tour of some of my favourite New York haunts, from live Jazz at The Garage to expensive but exquisite sushi at Gari's, all the way to late night drinks at Hi-Life. But we also went to a place that had long been on my list to try - The Campbell Apartment in Grand Central.

Drinking in a train station may sound far from glamorous but Grand Central is probably the most beautiful, serene and grandiose station in the world and I love having fiery Bloody Marys at Cipriani on the raised concourse while watching the world go by. But this time, I wanted to try something different and SM and I made our way (with some difficulty as it is hard to find the entrance) to the Campbell Apartment instead.

The strict dress-code (no jeans or t-shirts) ensures that this grandiose drinking den is fairly clear of tourists. The "apartment" was the former office of rail road executive John W Campbell who had it built in 1923 to resemble a 13th Century Florentine palace. It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness but entering this space is like stepping back in time, complete with an atmosphere of quiet and old-world luxury. One almost feels in a museum and we almost reluctantly raised voices above whispering level when asking the hostess for a table. Their cocktails are also to die-for.

SM is coming back to New York in a few weeks time and has already requested that we go back. I shall gladly oblige of course.

Oyster Fest

2010-09-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

Lots of people. Lots of oysters. Lots of margeritas. But nothing can beat a slice of pizza to finish a day that lasted well into the night!

Armageddon

2010-09-21T22:08:00.000-04:00

The weather here can be so extreme that it always brings the word "Armageddon" to my mind because sometimes it is so bad, that it can feel just like the end of the world. This kind of weather is largely unknown to us Europeans, apart from (thankfully) rare spectacular floodings.

As most of you will know, that was the case last Thursday when severe storms hit the City and violent winds tore through parts of Brooklyn, uprooting numerous trees and damaging properties and people in its wake.

I was at a work happy hour when it started. The skies turned black and the gusts of winds and pouring rain - even while in the safety of a bar - were very scary. My friend LJ sent me the above picture of his street near Park Slope that he took on his iPhone.

The storm finished almost as quickly as it started. The New York Times has some haunting pictures of its aftermath here.

Pomander Walk

2010-09-21T14:09:00.002-04:00

I spend a good amount of my time trying to find out about little known New York spots so when I stumbled across a mention of Pomander Walk in my Upper West Side neighbourhood, I had to go and check it out myself.

Pomander Walk consists of a dozen or so Tudor houses, squeezed in between rows of perfectly modern and much taller buildings on 96th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue. I have since learned that it was created in 1921 by an entrepreneur who originally intended to build a hotel on the site but was unable to secure adequate funding. These English style houses were built instead and have been a residential haven ever since. The name originates from an old London street and a stage play.

While it is not possible to walk through its iron gates (unless you know someone who lives there), peering through them is like taking a charming, almost whimsical, and certainly completely unexpected step back in time.

San Diego Fun

2010-09-18T17:25:00.000-04:00

I was in San Diego with LJ (a.k.a my gay best friend) for a few days. We've been going together for the past 3 years as we attend the same annual Media conference there in beautiful Coronado Bay.

We've always managed to make a fun trip out of it and this year was no different.

We visited the fantastic and famous San Diego zoo and saw everything from Pandas to black Panthers and Flamingos.

We did silly things with inflatable ponies and took pictures of it (most 5 year-olds have a more sophisticated sense of humour than we do!).

We experienced the tremors of an earth quake in the middle of the night.

And we even cycled to Mexico - granted, the border is only about 8 miles from where we were staying but I certainly never thought I would ever be able to say that I actually cycled there!

To Do

2010-09-09T16:53:00.002-04:00

I love everything about making lists - writing them, adding to them, crossing items off them ...

I always keep a list of clothes & shoes I want to buy, household chores, work tasks and projects, packing lists, movies to see, music to download, books to read, restaurants/bars I want to try as well as the ones I have been to ... but perhaps the most fun of all my lists is the never ending, always growing, one of things I still want to see and experience in New York.

So I thought I would share just a couple of my “To Do’s” in the City coming up in the next month or so.

Queues waiting for Eataly to open last week!

Graze around Eataly
The latest Mario Batali venture is a huge Italian market/restaurant/grocery store opposite Madison Square Park near the Flatiron called "Eataly".

I actually popped in there with my brother and sister last week but I think the beautifully designed and wonderfully stocked space requires a more thorough exploration. As it is, I got an enticing sneak peek at their extensive range of cheese, wine, fresh pasta, vegetables, meat and fish.

And as there is nothing I love more than a platter of cheese and cold meats washed down with an excellent red wine (which is what is served at various high chairs & tables dotted throughout), this is at the very top of my list!

Stone Street by Katz & The City(c)

Go to the Stone Street Oyster Festival
I used to be very sceptikal about oysters and frankly quite grossed out. While it is customary to eat them every Christmas in France, I was never one to partake.

But in NYC, oysters are bountiful, delicious, cheap and served pretty much everywhere - so when I moved here and started meeting my friends for Happy Hour drinks after work, I saw them sharing huge platters of the things ... and I really felt like I should give them another try and now I love them!

This annual festival takes place on September 25th this year in cute and cobbled Stone Street (one of the oldest streets in the City, in the heart of the Financial District) and the restaurants and bars lining it will be hosting tasting sessions, but also serve lots of beer and feature live music acts. I believe that another festival will also simultaneously be held at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central.

Photo Alexandre Rizos (c)

Watch the Bryant Park Petanque Tournament
What can I say? I am still French after all! Petanque is a very old and traditional game played most prevalently in the South of France.

I (like every other French child I would assume) grew up playing it and while I don't normally seek out French activities around the City, there cannot be a Petanque tournament in Bryant Park without me at least seeing it briefly!

This particular tournament will be taking place on September 28th & 29th but I understand that there are some throughout the year, as well as free lessons available, weather permitting - you can find more details here.

Memories

2010-09-05T19:36:00.000-04:00

After being away from home for almost 15 years now, you'd think that saying goodbye to my family would get easier. It doesn't. And waving my sister and brother farewell this time around was no different. I miss them more than words can express.

But we will always have the memories - walking for hours up and down Manhattan (and even Brooklyn!), sharing new experiences together, laughing and talking late into the night while sipping delicious cocktails.

Below are just some of my favourite shots we took during their stay.

Cycling in Central Park

Walking in the Meatpacking District

Near Gramercy Park

On the High Line

High Line

View from my living room window

Classic NYC

Charlie Parker Jazz Festival @ Tompkins Square Park

Rowing on the Lake

Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge

Perfect Weekend

2010-09-02T10:37:00.000-04:00

I have just had the most perfect, quintessential New York weekend and I don't think that there is a single thing I would want to change about it.

Starting with the cast of characters. My sister had been with me for just over a week when my brother skyped us to say that he had booked a last minute flight arriving in NYC on Friday night. He hadn't planned on joining us so this was a fantastic surprise and being able to spend so much quality sibling time together is a rare and wonderful luxury.

The setting was of course the City itself in all its glorious late summer beauty, the soaring temperatures made enjoyable by a complete lack of humidity in the air, and clear blue skies that made the perfect frame to every pictures we took.

We loaded up on various combinations of bagels, lox and eggs at Barney Greengrass, one of the oldest Jewish deli in the City and much beloved institution that happens to be just one block away from my apartment, as mentioned before.

We leisurely strolled all around the Lower East Side, Nolita, Soho and the West Village. We dipped our toes in the Washington Square fountain while watching the break dancers performing breathtaking stunts and watched a special screening of Woody Allen's classic "Manhattan" in Central Park while sharing a lovely picnic on the lawn.

We took my favourite boat trip around the City on the NYHRC yacht, complete with buffet lunch and bar. Unbeknown to me, the route changed slightly this year and afforded us better views of Governors and Roosevelt islands, the latter in particular (which used to house a psychiatric hospital and is pretty much in ruins bar a couple of apartment buildings) offering a stark contrast to the modern buildings behind it.

Amazingly my favourite Jazz vocalist of all times, Jimmy Scott (who at 85 years old only performs once a year), happened to be playing at the Charlie Parker Jazz festival in Tompkins Square Park on Sunday and we were lucky enough to listen to his incredible, emotional and "back of the neck hair-raising" renditions of a his classics.

We wondered around Chelsea market and all its small specialist food vendors and boutiques after buying one of the best coffees in the City at 9th Street Expresso.

We strolled the length of the High Line which I love because people tend to go high above ground to get a view of the City so the High Line (at just a few storeys high) offers a completely different perspective of it.

And finally, we completed our long weekend with a round of shooting golf balls as hard as we could at the Chelsea Piers driving range - a first for me and a highly recommended experience because it's not only a great stress buster but the views across the Hudson and onto New Jersey are pretty spectacular!

About me - Part 3

2010-09-01T15:11:00.005-04:00

With my baby brother

Here is the third (and final) installment of my interview with Amelie from The Heimweh Safari.

As before, you can read it below here or on her blog.

------------------------------

Here’s the third and last part of my conversation with Stephanie (read part 1 and 2 and go to her fabulous blog) where she talks about what she likes about NYC in general and— attention, all uptown expats!—in particular. On top of that, she lets us know where she finds good bread and cheese and gives some good advice for the NYC-newbie.

What do you love most about NYC? Name three reasons why living in NYC is better than living in Europe.

Convenience – I can’t think of any city in Europe that is truly as “open 24/7” as New York is. From supermarkets, to restaurants and bars. This is truly the city that never sleeps.
Weather – perhaps this is more in comparison to London/Paris than other more southern European cities, but you can’t beat New York’s weather. The winters may be bitterly cold but they are short – temperatures don’t usually become bone-chilling until early January and by March, a light coat/jacket can be worn again. Summers are hot and long, the heat normally lasting well into October, to leave in its place the most glorious autumn I have ever experienced with its mild temperatures and constant bright sunshine.
Energy – I have often tried (and failed) to describe the energy of New York both in my blog and also to people who haven’t been here before. In the end, it can only be understood when experienced firsthand. But what I know for sure is that I have never felt quite this level of raw, almost frantic, restless energy in any other cities I have visited in the world.

Name your three top favorite places in NYC.
It’s so hard to choose just three but if I have to be ruthless, I would go with:

Grand Central station – my long-standing favourite building in the City, which still sends shivers down my spine whenever I enter the main concourse.
Central Park – not very imaginative but I am pretty sure it would make every New Yorker’s top 3 list. It’s just so diverse - from the densely populated southern part with the zoo and Sheep Meadows in particular attracting the largest crowds, to the quieter areas around the Harlem Meer and the botanical gardens, I love it all. My favorite way to explore it is by bicycle and I am lucky enough to live just a few minutes away from the reservoir so I can get my nature fix easily by just walking around.
The area around the National History Museum – not only do I love the museum itself, but at the weekends there are some cool artisan market stalls lining Columbus, as well as an antique fair on the corner of 77th. The block is also packed with boutiques stocking small designers, my favorite sushi restaurant (Sushi of Gari) is on 78th and there is also a Pinkberry. What’s not to love!?

How do you deal with the city's crazy price level? Where do you find your best bargains?
Compared to London, I don’t find New York expensive at all to be honest and I am a terribly bad bargain hunter, so not the best person to provide insights on this.

Where do you find decent bread in this city? And affordable cheese?
Great question to ask a French person! Whenever my family visits, we embark on an endless and by now ritual quest to find an authentic baguette. We have deemed the ones from Balthazar bakery, Dean & Deluca and Whole Foods to be poor imitations, and found the ones we picked up in the delis in my Upper West Side neighborhood to be either too soggy or too hard. In the end, we found a decent version at the Food Emporium, so I would recommend that.

Good cheese however is much easier to find and Fairway, Zabars and Dean & Deluca have pretty good selections of French and Italian cheeses although I am not sure they would necessarily count as affordable. I have been told that Murray’s Cheese Shop in the West Village is amazing but have yet to check it out for myself.

Do you have important advice for the NYC-newbie?
Enjoy it! Learn to take the rough with the smooth as there will be plenty of both. New York is not the easiest place to live in at first and making friends as soon as possible is crucial. The first couple of years can feel like a roller-coaster ride, but it is always exhilarating and remember: when you make it here, you really can make it anywhere. ;-)

Atlantic Tunnel Tour

2010-08-27T09:02:00.002-04:00

Waiting to go down the manhole!

My love of adventure has often landed me in scary and/or uncomfortable situations. I've been lucky enough to have climbed Kilimanjaro, hiked to the top of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, zip lined in Costa Rica, skydived in the Mojave desert, taken a balloon flight in the Yangshuo mountains of China and a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon, stroked cheetahs in Kenya and held a tarantula in the palms of my hands at the London Zoo ... Hell, I've even tried dating in New York City! So it's fair to say that I am a bit of an adrenaline junkie.

When I heard about the Atlantic tunnel tour in Brooklyn I in no way expected an adventure of the scale of the ones above, but I must admit that it did get my heart racing a little more than anticipated.

The half-mile long abandoned tunnel was discovered by a guy called Bob Diamond in the early eighties and is the oldest subway tunnel in the World - it was built in 1844 using very rudimentary tools. Bob has since been leading hour-long tours taking curious New Yorkers to the depths of the tunnel while explaining its construction, as well as some of the political context and business practices of the time.

I have been shopping the idea of doing this to a lot of my friends for the past few months but to no avail - they all exclaimed that I was insane and that they had no intention of accompanying me into a dark, dank and probably rat infested space. Thankfully my sister is staying with me for a couple of weeks at the moment and, as crazy seems to run in the family, she was up for it.

Tunnel entrance

When we are arrived at the meeting point, on the corner of Court Street and Atlantic Avenue, we were surprised by the sight of sixty or so people patiently lining up to go down a ladder through a manhole in the middle of the avenue one by one. We had expected perhaps only another handful of people to be there with us but we gamely joined the back of the queue and proceeded to wait for almost an hour before being able to get down ourselves. Most of that wait had to be done in the pouring rain, which made me reconsider more than once whether I really wanted to do this!

But we persisted and when it came to our turn, we awkwardly stepped down the ladder and into the wet and dark hole. My heart started to race immediately as we landed in a narrow and low corridor that lead to some steps and the start of the tunnel. It took a while for our eyes to adjust to the obscurity and we took cautious steps towards the guide and the rest of the visitors, illuminating our path as best as we could with the pocket flashlight we had brought.

We didn’t stay for the whole tour - not that we were scared as such but being there was very eerie and somehow we just couldn’t get into the talk that Bob was delivering. Not that it wasn’t engaging but I guess that not being able to “see” him made it harder for us to concentrate. A few other people were making their way out about 30 minutes in and we followed them shortly after.

In the tunnel

The funniest part of the whole adventure was perhaps when I came out of the manhole and almost caused a car crash. As I emerged from the tarmac, a passing car saw me and the woman driving screamed in shock and braked abruptly. The cars behind her beeped loudly and narrowly avoided piling into her! I guess my advice to Bob and his crew would be for one of them to stay at the entrance/exit and escort people out so as to not freak out passersby and motorists!

About me - Part 2

2010-08-25T12:11:00.002-04:00

Cycling in France

Here is the second part of the interview that the lovely Amelie from The Heimweh Safari did with me. As before, you can read it here below or over on her blog.

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I introduced you to Stephanie last week. Again, I want to praise her blog Biting the Big Apple and herself. I didn’t attribute points last week. That’s a default. Finding Stephanie in the internet, reading her blog and getting in touch with her has helped me a great deal.

It gave me the perspective that liking New York might just be a matter of time. That New York might be a city that kicks everybody’s ass at first, in some way or another, (although nobody admits it) and that it’s not just me. Reading Stephanie’s blog is therefore worth more than anything else so far on my Heimweh safari: 8 points.

In the second part of my conversation with her you can read about her first experiences in New York: “American hair”, a broken heart and finally feeling at home.

What was your most mundane and unexpected problem at the beginning (f.ex. laundry, food, etc.). How did you solve it?

Not so much problems as rather interesting discoveries, which were, in no particular order:

Realizing that there are no washing machines fitted in any Manhattan apartment. Quickly followed by the realization that dry cleaners here can do your laundry for $8 a pound and thereby making me the happiest girl on earth (I hate laundry).

Making myself understood! NYC being probably one of the most multi-cultural cities on earth, you’d imagine that people would be pretty used to accents. But not so in my experience and I’ve had some funny moments at the salad bar counter of delis, trying to say “tomayto” instead of “tomahto” so they would get my order right! And to this day, nine times out of ten, the staff in Starbucks hears “two” coffees when I ask for a “tall” coffee.

Getting used to the fact that everything is larger here: paper towels, bags of crisps, chocolate bars … Everything seems to be super-sized! Even hair apparently as whenever I visit my local hairdresser, I always seem leave with what I now call “American hair” – just that bit bouncier and bigger than you would get anywhere else!

Getting used to the subway was quite a challenge at first as I found it to be really unintuitive. I, of course, got the hang of it eventually and I am now even used to the fact that it is completely unpredictable at the weekends as express trains become locals and sometimes vice-versa!

In one of your posts you write, “Despite our enduring love affair, New York has kicked me pretty hard to the ground a couple of times very early on and taught me tough lessons…” What are you referring to?
You end the very same sentence by, “… some of which I only very recently finally absorbed and accepted.” How? What helped you—in the beginning and over time? Again, in the same post you write that New York has actually become home for you.
What gives you that feeling?

I’m afraid that I was referring to a good old-fashioned heartbreak! I alluded at one point on my blog that I was infatuated with a New York man who was as complicated, gorgeous and fast-paced as the City itself. Unfortunately for me, I met said man a mere two weeks after moving to NYC and I came to see my feelings for him as interchangeable with my feelings about living in the City itself, the peaks and (mainly) troths of one directly affecting the other.

I struggled for a very, very long time to come to terms with the fact that while we would never be in a normal relationship together, it didn’t mean that my time in New York had been a failure or should be marred by what was a pretty painful experience for me.

So I guess that the feeling of New York being a happy home for me took longer than it perhaps should have done – it kind of creeped in on me as my heart slowly mended and when I finally managed to completely disassociate the City from the man!

Many expats try to recreate their countries of origin in some way. Do you? If so, how?

I wouldn’t say that I have tried to recreate my country in NYC, maybe because while I am French, I feel very close to British culture and therefore I am not sure which of the two countries I would want to try to recreate here.

Top NYC Events

2010-08-24T13:54:00.000-04:00

Japanese Street Fair - 5th Avenue

I was asked by Expat Arrivals (a great website dedicated to providing valuable local information to expats) to write a piece about key events in New York City throughout the year.

You can read it on Expat Arrivals or below. The list is nowhere near exhaustive of course but I had to start somewhere!
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New York is known the world over as the city that never sleeps. Though for many, the city’s borderline manic activity can actually be felt as much during the day as it can at night. In the summer season in particular, the energy is almost palpable, seemingly bouncing off gleaming buildings and steaming hot asphalt.

There is simply always something to do here; either an old favourite pastime that you’ve neglected for a while or an entirely new pursuit. As for picking just a few events, certainly a difficult task, but here’s is a list of tried and tested annual events, as well as some still on the to-do list.

New York Restaurant week - February & July
Some of the city’s most famous and most exclusive restaurants participate in New York’s bi-annual Restaurant Week. Eateries featured in this culinary dream period offer a prix-fixe lunch and/or dinner for $24 and $35 respectively. So this is your chance to sample some of the best kitchens in the city at the best of bargain prices, from Daniel Boulud’s modern French cuisine at DBGB to old school New York charm with an Eastern European twist at the Russian Tea Room.

St. Patrick’s Day Parade - March 17th
The Irish heritage in the New York area is omnipresent and St. Patrick’s Day is the event of the year to witness in all its intoxicating glory. On the day itself, there is a parade, complete with costumes and marching bands, that slowly snakes up 5th Avenue and is tons of fun to watch. A lesser known fact however is that Hoboken (just across the Hudson in New Jersey) hosts a veritable Irish extravaganza the weekend before St. Patrick Day. People start pouring into the small town from 9am onwards as pubs open especially early for the occasion and everything pretty much turns green (drinks, people, streets, clothes). Needless to say, most revelers start drinking early in the day, so things do get a little messy!

Street Festivals - April onwards
One of city’s most charming cultural gems is the appearance of random street festivals that pop up all over town on the weekends as soon as the weather starts to perk up, usually from April onwards. While there’s no official, comprehensive guide of when and where they are scheduled to happen, the chances are that if you are visiting NYC during that time, you are highly likely to stumble upon one. Sometimes they have a theme but most often they don’t - what they always have though are food stands (Thai, Japanese, Greek), Tarot cards readers and lots of useless but charming knick knacks.

Rooftop drinking - May onwards
Technically speaking, this is not an event at all of course; though with the start of the outdoor drinking season, it’s certainly a momentous occasion. In a place filled with skyscrapers, it is easy to see why looking out over the sweeping cityscape while sipping on a gorgeous cocktail is a New Yorker’s favourite past time. Some of the best rooftops are the Metropolitan Museum rooftop, 230 & 5th and the lesser known Bookmarks in the Library Hotel and newcomer Ink 48's Press Lounge.

Gay Pride Parade - June
Gay Pride is a huge event in the city and is usually made to last for the entire week with a number of smaller events all leading to the main parade on a Saturday. As Gay Pride originally started in NYC, there is certainly something special about this particular event. The celebration has its roots in 1970, and is an occasion to mark the one year anniversary of the Stonewall Inn incident. The event is incredibly diverse; with every single ethnic origin, gender and age being represented.

Outdoor Movies & Concerts - All Summer long
The list of these is almost endless - from River Flicks on the Hudson, to the Bryant Park Monday night movies and the Rooftop Films Summer series, there is really something for everyone.
Outdoor concerts in the city are also quite ubiquitous with the most notable being the New York Philharmonic concerts in Central Park, the Tompkins Square Park Charlie Parker Jazz Festival and the P.S.I Warm UP series.
Be it a music or cinema event (or ideally both!), one thing is for sure - there is nothing quite as magical as having the glittering city as the backdrop to your evening.

San Genaro Festival - September
San Genaro is a week long festival that takes place in Little Italy every year. It is actually a religious occasion and a statue of San Genaro (the Patron Saint of Naples) is carried through the cobbled streets by burly men, followed by a large procession of people. The atmosphere is electric with music, freak shows (!), street food vendors loudly selling their wares (you must try a sweet, cream-filled, cannelloni) and huge crowds slowly meandering through it all, usually clutching a cocktail in a giant, brightly colored plastic glass!

NBA Basketball Season - October to April
There are many sporting events in New York, the most popular being the baseball season (with the old rivalry between the Yankees and the Mets), as well as the US Open. NBA basketball season is also not to be missed; running from October to April with New York Knicks games being played at Madison Square Garden.
Despite the Knicks’ poor performance of the past few years, they have ardent fans and the atmosphere at the games is amazing - the combination of the venue, the fun musical and dance interludes, the constant chanting of the fans and the fast pace of the match make this a must-do experience in the city.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade - November
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is a well known event, and even preparations can be captivating to watch. On the night prior to the parade, the famous huge balloons depicting animals or cartoon characters are being inflated somewhere on the Upper West Side, usually near the National History Museum on Central Park West. It’s a great spectacle to see after a dinner out with friends - when hopefully a couple of glasses of wine will have warmed you up enough to brave the chilly temperatures and chance of snow.

Hamptons Weekend

2010-08-23T15:35:00.000-04:00

I took my very first trip to the Hamptons last weekend. One of my friend's family has a 5 bedroom house in Amagansett so a group of six of us (including the adorable dog Baxter) headed off on the BQE and along the Long Island strip on Thursday night to beat the weekender traffic.

I knew exactly what I wouldn’t like about the Hamptons which is essentially a gated paradise for rich people to play together. It is the least multi-cultural and diverse place one can imagine and I had never seen so many men wearing pink pants and polo shirts with an upturned collar before. It was ridiculous.

However, if you stay out of “the scene”, the Hamptons are very beautiful and a lot more laid back than I anticipated. Every morning we would take the short drive to the Amagansett Farmers Market to get a big cup of coffee and one of their fabulous brioche buns with egg and cheese to be leisurely savoured at one of the tables in the shaded garden. We would also get fresh salad ingredients, bread and cheese for our lunch back at the house later and the rest of the day would be spent either in the gorgeous swimming pool or at the beach.

We would get itchy feet at around 5pm and get ready to go out. The first stop of the night was always Cyril’s, a tiny roadside outdoor bar packed full of people wanting to see and be seen. For us however, the main attraction of Cyril’s stemmed from the large, strong and frankly yummy cocktails they create. The B.B.C (Banana Baileys Colada) in particular is worth the trip alone and with a rum floater on top, we would all be tipsy enough to engage in some serious car karaoke after just one on our way to dinner! Luckily for us, the one man in our party was happy to be our designated driver for the entire weekend - yes, he’s a keeper!

My favourite evening was on Friday night, when after our usual pit stop at Cyril’s, we headed to The Lobster Deck in Montauk. There we had what was probably was one of the best lobsters I’ve ever had while watching the sun set slowly over a completely calm sea and the pink, orange and yellow tones of the skies only seemed to accentuate the bright red shell of the lobster.

Spending weekends at the Hamptons is most definitely a New York rite of passage. Many people buy into share houses for the entire summer (at often exorbitant costs) and so it is a little like the entire crowd you would normally find on an average Saturday night in the Meat Packing district magically teletransported themselves there to form a weird but wonderful "Manhattan on Sea" ...

Forgotten New York

2010-08-20T09:58:00.002-04:00

Photo by Angel Franco (c)

Through the always excellent New York Portraits, I found a link to the New York Times Lens blog and an interview of freelance photographer Angel Franco who followed police patrols in the Bronx between 1979 and 1984 and took chilling pictures of what he witnessed.

New York then was nothing like New York now as it was at the height of the drug plague and the streets were extremely unsafe. The photos tell just that and it’s hard to even recognize our City in those scary shots that sometimes look like they were taken in a war zone.

America had trouble believing the pictures when they were first published as the country was prosperous at the time and the violence and despair you can feel in the photos were at odds with the national mood.

You can have a look for yourself here.

About me!

2010-08-17T12:00:00.003-04:00

Mum & I in Soho

When I started this blog, soon after moving to New York 3 years ago, it was at the suggestion of a couple of my London friends who thought it would be cool if I documented my adventures in a new country and a new city. I used it as a sort of log of my observations, a personal record of my time here, and at times I must admit as a form of therapy too.

I only shared my blog address with a small selection of friends and never thought that anyone else but them would ever read it. But it turns out that other people do too and the chances are that if you are reading these lines now, you are one of them. A fact that I find surprising, flattering but a little daunting too.

Amelie is one of these readers and contacted me a few months ago. We exchanged a few emails back and forth, finding common grounds in our Expat status. Her blog, The Heimweh Safari, is great. Having moved here from Austria to study and struggling with feelings of homesickness, she started a rating system awarding points to the City for cool experiences or new discoveries, a bit like a treasure hunt.

Amelie’s blog contains a couple of interviews of other expats and their experiences of settling here and making it home. I was honoured when she asked me to take part as well.

You can read Part 1 of our 3-parts interview below here and on The Heimweh Safari.
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How to become a happy New Yorker
A success story, Part 1

Stephanie is my guiding light. Apart from that, she’s French—yet British in her heart—and she moved to New York three and a half years ago. I discovered her blog a while ago (check it out it’s great!) and on that blog I found something that made me want to meet her urgently. In a post she wrote about how New York gave her a hard time at the beginning, yet how much it has become her home by now. Well, I thought, that sounds comforting to a homesick European like me. I need to talk to this girl.

I sent her some questions and got an amazing, very long e-mail back. Too long to be posted in one go. Therefore, we decided to make it a series. In sequel 1, read about Stephanie’s moving to New York.

When did you come to NYC and why?
I landed in freezing cold and snowy New York on March 3rd 2007. I had been working for a major American financial services company in London for a couple of years and got promoted to a great job in our NYC head offices, heading up online marketing in their Digital Group.

Did you come alone? Did you have friends in the city?
I came by myself which was actually a huge deal for me. A year prior to my move, my boyfriend of ten years and I (amicably) split up so while the opportunity to move to New York couldn’t have come at a better time in my life, doing it by myself was also a very new, equally exciting and daunting, experience for me.

I only knew three people in the City but I was so excited at the prospect of living here that I forgot to factor that into the equation … I have to admit that I did question my sanity as a result almost as soon as I landed!

Were you homesick at the beginning? If so, what helped?
As this is the second time in my life that I have uprooted myself and moved to another country (I moved from France to the UK 15 years ago), I’m not sure I really know what being homesick means. I am used to finding excitement in the challenges of learning to live in a new culture and noticing both the mundane and more fundamental differences. Having said that, I missed my friends a lot (and still do), closely followed by Waitrose groceries, Marks & Spencer lingerie (only British girls will understand me on this one), British television, decent Earl Grey tea and roast dinners!

Thankfully NYC is a transient place and the people who live here know it and are therefore very welcoming of newcomers and I made friends quite quickly, not only through work but also through friends of friends who kindly and seamlessly included me in their social group. Being transient also means that the people you get to know come and go too, and friendships can be on one extreme very superficial or, on the other, very intense. I definitely have fewer friends here than I do in London.

The Internet (already a huge part of my life) was crucial in helping me stay in touch with friends. I started some intense e-mail correspondence with my closest ones and Facebook helped fill the remaining gaps with the others.

Read more about how Stephanie became a happy New Yorker in a week!

Little Graduation

2010-08-09T21:48:00.003-04:00

My “Little Sister” graduated from PS 131 Middle School at the end of June and it was quite a momentous occasion not only for her, but also for me as I have grown very attached to her over the 3 years that we have known each other.

She is a 12 years old Chinese girl called Jenny whom I started mentoring when I joined the Big Brother Big Sister of New York City charity in 2007. While not being the most child-friendly person (I don’t dislike children but I just don’t relate to them easily), I loved the premise of the program which is based on providing a positive role model in the life of children whose families often live in modest and sometimes precarious conditions. I never realized until moving here that a surprising 16% of kids drop out of High School in the US and the program is designed to make them want to pursue further education to build a better life for themselves.

I feel I have been very lucky professionally and my career has taken me places I only dreamed of as a little girl. I therefore liked the idea of sharing that with a child and showing her that everything is possible if you work at it and pursue your dreams.

Jenny’s graduation was a great accomplishment for her and she is going onto High School in Manhattan in the Fall. It has been truly amazing for me to watch her grow from a frail little girl so shy that it was paralyzing for her, to a more self-confident young teenager who is starting to ask me about boys!

But the event, which I was very excited to attend in person (American graduation ceremony just like in the movies!), also marked the end of our time together as the program is not available in her new school. Her parents couldn't attend due to work commitment unlike every other parnts so me being there was even more important for her. We have sworn to stay in touch however and I can’t wait to see how she gets on next year and hopefully for many more years to come.

Country Girl

2010-08-05T08:31:00.004-04:00

I am in France with my family for a few days and following the same reassuringly predictable and relaxing schedule I have described in the past.

I have been spending more time than usual with my brother however as he off work at the moment and most days have included games of squash, cross-country cycling with Dad and cooking with Mum.

We made a day trip to my parents' country house to enjoy the fresh mountain air and to go for a long walk in the woods surrounding their property. No walks in my family is without purpose however and ours was to pick wild mushrooms (specifically a vibrant yellow variety known as "chanterelles") which, as surprising as it may sound, is one of my favourite things to do in the world ... yes, as high up the list as drinking cocktails on rooftop bars!

Mushrooms tend to grow in the same areas over and over again and therefore the first rule of mushroom hunting (and second and third) is to never divulge your best picking spots. My parents for example would never tell their friends or even their siblings where their spots are and in fact, Mum and Dad themselves don't even know all of each other's hunting grounds as they tend to split up when going mushroom picking and only meet up later, each smiling widely and carrying a wicker basket brimming with delicate and aromatic fungi.

There is something very eerie but also incredibly freeing about being in the middle of a forest and not knowing where you are, which way you came from and more importantly, how to get home. Thankfully my parents seem to be equipped with an almost alien sense of spacial awareness and can not only find their way back very easily (thankfully, as neither of them carry a mobile phone!) but can also tell exactly where they are, even down to the actual ownership of the plot we are standing in!

My Dad's family owns several acres of forest in the area as it was customary for my grand-father to buy plots for his children and grand-children. I guess that for his generation it represented the safest and most long lasting form of financial investment. I must admit that I do always get a tinge of pride when, after having apparently crossed some kind of invisible boundary lines, my Mum or Dad casually drop in that we are now on my very own piece of land.

From country-side lover to stereotypical New York City girl, I realise that I am describing two different lifestyles that should in theory not co-exist very happily together. But I have come to terms a long time ago with the fact that they are both "me" and that I would never truly be able to appreciate one if I didn't also have the other.

The Situation

2010-07-28T21:38:00.002-04:00

I had a great time with the girls in AC last weekend.

It was exactly what I needed - away from the unbearable heat of the City for a few days in a place where, despite temperatures reaching 102F on Saturday, laying out in the sun is actually possible due to frequent dips in the pool and where daytime alcohol consumption is not only tolerated but highly encouraged!

But of course Atlantic City lived up to its tacky reputation. I'm not sure that I have ever seen quite so many tattooed bodies in one place before and "tramp stamps" seemed particularly popular. I have nothing against tattoos but most of them were so bad that had I taken pictures of them, I would have been populating the pages of ugliesttattoos.com for months to come.

A trip to the ladies room in the club of the Chelsea Hotel was quite an experience as the air was thick with hairspray, cheap perfume and girls were giggling as they shared cubicles in groups of two - something that I haven't seen done since my University days in the UK and a strange custom I don't, and will never, understand.

What I was not expecting however was for it to be a little scary too. On Saturday night, all dressed up and teetering in our high heels, we were determined to venture outside of our hotel for dinner and went hunting for a highly recommended Italian restaurant we read up about, just a block away from the boardwalk. We were stunned to find streets lined with desolated houses and what looked like shacks and started to feel quite unsafe. After being propositioned by a couple of men standing outside a Gentleman's Club, we pretty much ran back to the safety of the boardwalk!

I know that all of the above will make me sound like a snob and maybe that's what I have become but with the right company and a great pool, any city can be the perfect getaway and despite all its shortcomings, that's what AC was to me.

Atlantic City!

2010-07-22T19:36:00.006-04:00

Well, the "City Fatigue" that I described a few days ago got the better of me and I couldn't even wait until my impending trip to France to get out of New York! So CS, KM and I made the rather last minute decision to go to Atlantic City this weekend.

Based on what I heard about it, if I could describe the worst city in the world for me, Atlantic City would fit that description pretty much perfectly with its plethora of casinos, characterless streets, tacky boardwalk and Jersey Shore cast lookalikes everywhere, complete with fake tan, bulging muscles and brains the size of a (small) pea (I appreciate that this is a vast and probably unfair generalization and I'm sure there are some perfectly normal people there too by the way!).

So why are we going there? It would have never crossed my mind had KM not come up with the idea and she also managed to find the only boutique, non-gaming hotel in AC, The Chelsea, although she really only had me at the words "rooftop pool" and "cocktail service".

I am fully prepared to embrace the tackiness and spend the weekend mostly reading books, swimming and sipping on ice cold Mojitos. Beats a weekend in the stifling heat of the City anyway ;-)

Photo by Ronald C Saari

City Fatigue

2010-07-20T10:43:00.000-04:00

"New York is a great city to live in if you can afford to get out of it".

I have reached the wall, that point of no return when no matter how much sleep I get. Or how much I try to limit my activities and nights out in an effort to slow down. Or how many extra workouts I do at the gym to "reboot" my brain. I am constantly exhausted. Quite simply burnt out.

This "city fatigue" is something that I have only ever felt in New York, where the pace of the City and of my life in it, can be quite terrifying.

In my first couple of years here, I felt it even more than now, needing to desperately escape the City at least every 6 weeks. I am a little better equipped to deal with its relentless speed now but with my last trip being almost 9 weeks ago now, I am well overdue a break.

And there's no better place in the World for me to get a true break than at my parents in France. I never sleep as well as in my childhood bed. I never feel more relaxed than when I am eating a long and leisurely lunch in the sun with my family. I never feel more at peace with myself than when I am walking in the empty forests surrounding my parents country home.

My flight to Lyon is booked for July 31st.

Can't wait.

Play Me

2010-07-14T12:33:00.001-04:00

About a month ago, around 60 pianos were randomly installed in public spaces across the five boroughs as part of an interactive art project called "Play Me, I'm Yours" by Luke Jerram in association with the charity Sing For Hope.

I was lucky enough to come across two of them before the project ended - one (pictured here) was near the entrance of the City Hall park, the other was in Dumbo if I remember correctly.

I played the piano for 6 years when I was a child but I was too shy (and far too out of practice) to dare twinkling the keys in such a public forum! Thankfully, plenty of people were not as self-conscious and the pianos were put to good use - this blog article has some lovely accounts of how people interacted with the pianos - from impromptu group sing-alongs to solitary serenades ...

Meatopia

2010-07-12T21:32:00.010-04:00

I went to the inaugural Meatopia festival this weekend with my friend and colleague JR. He invited me after even the most virile of his friends turned down the opportunity to eat meat for an entire Sunday afternoon. I, of course, jumped at the chance.

The event assembled some 30 chefs from across the City and beyond with the premise of enjoying multiple tastings of BBQ food on Governors Island, many of the cooking teams roasting whole pigs and lambs right in front of the public.

It was a glorious day for it - hot and sunny but not as humid as the previous few days - and the short trip to the Island from South Ferry was suitably scenic as we slowly sailed away from the gleaming high rises of the Financial district.

The event attracted a very mixed crowd both in terms of age and style. But a love of sustainable, local products and of meat in particular is what united all the revelers. JR and I had opted to get 6 tastings, which turned out to be a fairly decadent choice and we only made it through by taking a break a couple of hours in! Notable highlights included a fantastic grilled bacon roll with pickled green tomatoes from Bobo, smoked duck tacos from Suenos Restaurant, smoky pastrami from Mile End and an incredibly tasty and moist lamb shawarma from Ilili Restaurant.

In the end, I believe that around 5,000 people came to Governors Island that day for the festival and many queued for long periods of time at some of the most popular stands. If that doesn’t further prove New Yorkers’ enduring love affair for all things food related, I don’t know what does ...

River Flicks

2010-07-08T10:59:00.004-04:00

I attended my first ever outdoor movie screening in New York last night (if you discount the short documentaries I watched at the Food Film Festival a couple of weeks ago of course). It had long been on my list of things to do and I was very excited at the prospect of going to see the hilariously funny "The Hangover" on the opening night of River Flicks at Pier 54, just off 14th Street and Meat Packing, with a bunch of my friends.

We knew we had to get there early to secure spots as close to the screen as possible so some of us headed off from work at 6pm, stopped at Whole Foods to grab some bread, hummus, salsa, cheese, olives and of course some wine before making our way there.

We arrived at around 7.15pm (the movie didn't start until 8.30pm) and managed to secure a relatively good spot on the Pier where two long sections had been cordoned off to form viewing areas separated in half by a narrow corridor.

As time went on and more and more people arrived, chaos started to ensue. We thought our area was full but were dumbfounded when latecomers managed to literally squeeze themselves in the tiniest of spaces, sitting on other people's blankets in the process. I learned a new thing about New Yorkers' sense of personal space that night. They have none. They almost sat on top of each other, on top of us ... I was literally expecting any random stranger to at some point ask if it was OK to sit on my lap!

Of course sharing such confined space, along with a certain feeling of claustrophobia, comes at other costs. A very affectionate and demonstrative lesbian couple decided to squat the half a meter we had left between us and the people in front and proceeded to give us quite a show during the entire movie - I don't care about their sexual orientation but, straight or gay, but that's just not cool. And another other couple who sat at my feet talked loudly throughout. And I could barely see the screen. And it was 95F. And we were sitting on a blanket barely protecting us from the heat emanating from the asphalt. Not to mention how uncomfortable sitting on the hard ground was in the first place. And all the while we were trying to secretly pour ourselves some wine as drinking is strictly prohibited outdoors (a rule that, unlike in Central Park, was enforced).

All in all though, a very interesting experience and, despite the circumstances, one that I am glad to have ticked off my list and strangely enjoyed - if only for the comedy value of what was going on not only in the movie but also around us! There is something undoubtedly magical about watching a movie under the stars or - as no stars are visible in the New York skies - the gently blinking lights of passing airplanes ...

Heat

2010-07-06T15:02:00.006-04:00

When I learned that I would be moving to New York, I remember dreading in advance the bitterly cold winters. I had seen TV News footage of people skiing in Times Square over the years and not being a cold weather person myself, I was not looking forward to that at all.

But what I didn't anticipate was how hot the summers are. In fact, nothing could prepare you for the sweltering heat and humidity apart perhaps from a prolonged acclimatization trip in the Amazonian rain forest! There are some days (like today) when, while the sun is shining invitingly, the 103F temperature and 40% humidity make it impossible to spend more than 15 minutes outside without melting into a pool of sweat.

Subway platforms are the hottest places of all, particularly at the end of the day when the heat has had a chance to accumulate. It is close to unbearable - especially with the addition of the smell of stale air and urine.

As a woman, one pretty much gives up on hair and make up on days like this. My wardrobe has almost completely changed since I moved here and I wear exclusively dresses in the summer as I find that floaty garments in lightweight cotton or silk are most effective against the heat.

Having said all that, I am prepared to deal with the few really hot days that we get every summer because the trade-off is amazing - temperatures start warming up by mid-April and stay that way until late October. As far as I am concerned, this means a summer that spans nearly 6 months and make the July and August heatwaves all worthwhile.

Pride 2010

2010-06-30T15:14:00.005-04:00

I took these photos during the Pride Parade last Sunday. To me, they represent everything that day is about.

Colour - not only because of the rainbow flags but also because of the people of every single ethnic origins that are there, including some very colourful characters.

Family - Pride may sound like the least family-friendly activity there is but it is in fact the complete opposite. Every single age, whether young or old, can be seen.

Crowds - lots and lots of people cramming the streets and hanging from balconies and fire escapes!

NYC Food Film Festival

2010-06-28T22:14:00.002-04:00

I read about the New York Food Film Festival a couple of months ago and on a bit of a whim bought 4 tickets to what was dubbed "the World's first food truck drive-in movie", one of the events scheduled to take place during the 4-day extravaganza.

I knew that it wouldn't be hard to convince at least 3 of my friends to come and spend a whole afternoon (and most of the evening) eating and drinking alfresco under the Brooklyn Bridge, which is exactly what we did last Saturday.

The festival combines two things I love - trying lots of new things from different chefs while watching food documentaries. As the name indicates, the event centered around the City's most reputable Food Trucks and around a dozen of them congregated under the Bridge, giving us the choice of sampling anything from Rickshaw Dumplings' delicious chicken & basil creation, to Korean kimchidillas from The Krave, goats cheese and hazelnut crostinis from Pizzamoto and pastries from Street Sweets, amongst many others.

Food Trucks are a particular obsession here and the better ones have gained quite the cult following. People readily queue in line to get to their favourite morsels of food (patience is not a virtue normally granted to New Yorkers!) and many, myself included, follow their movements in the City on Twitter. Rickshaw Dumplings (brain child of Anita Lo, former Top Chef Master contestant and Michelin starred Chef) has over 5,600 followers for example!

Food in general is a huge component of New York culture and way of life and most people consider themselves foodies, which means that there are many food events to attend throughout the year. Next up for me - Meatopia on Governors Island on July 11th where I will be going on a BBQ tasting adventure with my friend JR!

Bittersweet

2010-06-25T23:00:00.010-04:00

Bittersweet is what best describes last weekend as we waived goodbye to MT who decided to move back to the UK after 2 years in the Big Apple. After FM's departure just a couple of weeks ago, I feel like I can't really handle any more friends leaving for a while now!

MT and I have been close friends since we met in London 6 years ago. I will miss her more than words can express but will always feel incredibly grateful and lucky that we were able to share our experience of the City together and having her here (she moved a year after I did) shaped it in so many ways. She not only helped me feel more at home but also made it a lot more fun as we have always been partners in crime when it comes to going out and partying!

The farewell events started on Thursday night with a long night of drinks at the very Parisian looking Bar Artisanal for the main party with all of MT's colleagues and friends. Followed the next night by one last evening at MT's apartment where we diffused the rather emotional atmosphere with plenty of jokes and laughter and a few glasses of champagne.

On Saturday morning, I had planned for MT and I to take a walking and eating tour of Astoria, which was very interesting. I fell in love with Astoria. Unlike Brooklyn (or at least the few parts of BK I know), it still feels very much like Manhattan with a similar energy and buzz, albeit a little more laid back and the visit was also a real sensory experience. While the area is known for its Greek heritage, it's actually incredibly multi-cultural and we sampled everything from freshly made, smooth and creamy mozzarella and spicy pork sausage at Dave & Tony Salumeria, to Lebanese sweets and Colombian pastries. One of my favourite tastings was in fact a Chilean hot dog from San Antonio Coffee Shop which had avocado, sour cream and fresh spicy salsa on top of it.

On Saturday night, 8 of us gathered on KM's rooftop deck and had a picnic and sipped wine while watching the sunset over Hell's Kitchen on one side and the Hudson River on the other, and talking well into the early hours of the morning.

We somehow found the energy to all meet for brunch the next day at Boqueria and then spent the afternoon walking around Soho and Tribeca.
A few hours later and it seemed like a great idea to go for Blue Crabs at The Hideaway, which they have on specials on Sunday and Monday nights. It reminded us of last year's roadtrip when we shared the same meal in Baltimore : a pile of steaming, spicy (from the Old Bay seasoning) crabs poured straight onto our table and armed with a hammer and other torture instruments to extract (with much difficulty) the delicious flesh. And finally, for "desert", we hopped in a taxi to the new Mermaid Oyster Bar on MacDougal for a dozen Blue Points.

While I am exhausted from the lack of sleep, the excess of alcohol and the sheer range of emotions I have felt in the past couple of weeks alone, I am so happy that we all gave both FM and MT the send-off they deserve.

Petite Abeille

2010-06-21T22:03:00.002-04:00

With 3 visits in almost as many weeks, Petite Abeille has fast become one of my favourite hangouts in the City.

The tiny Tribeca restaurant specializes in Belgian cuisine and is very much styled like a low key bistro, complete with a long dark wood bar and checked tablecloths. Tintin books and artwork adorn the walls and complete the look.

I have to admit "half priced wine" Tuesdays, while being very bad news for Wednesday mornings, is a big part of the draw of this place. But the even bigger draw is the fantastic selection of mussels dishes they are famous for. I have a particular fondness for the morish, calorie-ladden Moules Grand-Mère which are prepared in white wine, cream and bacon and served (as with all the other mussels dishes) with salty, crispy French fries. But the more traditional Moules Marinière in their heady garlicky broth are excellent too.

As my friends all love the place as well, I have a distinct feeling that I will be spending a lot more Tuesday nights at Petite this summer ... here is to hangover Wednesdays!

Photo by OKG @ Flickr.com

Romantic New York

2010-06-16T21:14:00.009-04:00

My friend CT, who is just about to move to NYC from London with her husband, emailed me today asking for ideas for a special and romantic evening out in the City to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

It is with a touch of sadness that I realized that, while never having given it much thought before, I knew exactly what the ultimate romantic night out would entail for me ... yet I have never done it precisely in that way with someone I love.

To be frank, from a romance perspective, this City has been a disaster for me. I moved here a year after the (amicable) end of a 10 years relationship and while it took me some time to get used to being by myself, I was very much enjoying being single and carefree. Was I looking for a fresh start? Yes of course, but the last thing I expected in these heady first couple of weeks in New York was to fall in love ... but I did, head over heels, and quickly embarked on a short, intense and very much doomed from the start relationship (though "entanglement" may be a better description!). It took me 2 horribly long years to quash any lingering feelings I had for him and mend my broken heart. And despite various distracting flings, I have not met anyone since that I have felt any special connection with and would therefore want to spend a truly romantic evening in the company of!

Still, for what it's worth, here is what - to me - is the ultimate romantic night out in the City ...

Meet at the Metropolitan Museum late in the afternoon. Perhaps linger in the museum a little first for a stroll through the Greek and Roman gallery with its collection of handsome marble statues and imposing columns, or through the Sackler wing which houses the Temple of Dendur under a huge conservatory. Then head for the rooftop sculpture garden or more precisely the Martini bar there. Sipping a couple of cocktails above the green expanses of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline in the background is simply incredible.

Walk across the park before it gets dark, heading South West. Make your way towards the Boat House and the Bethesda Fountain and then hop into one the many rickshaws available across the bridge that overlooks both. They're great fun and will get you out of the park much faster than walking.

Arriving at the Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, in time for dinner is the plan. In the event that you can't score a table at the amazing but eye-wateringly expensive Per Se (which I was lucky enough to go to once), Landmark (lively) or A Voce Columbus (classy) are both great restaurants with beautiful food and plenty of dark corners to huddle into.

The perfect end to that evening for me would be to catch a late night performance at the Dizzy Jazz Club, also located in the Time Warner complex. The Club is both intimate because of its size yet impressive because of its high ceilings and particularly the wall of windows affording a magical view of Columbus Circle, the Park and the glittering skyscrapers in the distance ...

Street Fair

2010-06-13T13:14:00.001-04:00

Great thing about having a Japanese Street Fair happening literally outside your window:
- Access to yummy spicy crab noodles is less than a minute away.

Not so great thing about having a Japanese Street Fair happening literally outside your window:
- The live/loud/frankly not so good music streaming right into my living room!

ADD Weekend

2010-06-07T21:24:00.005-04:00

I like nothing more than busy weekends running around the City while catching up with lots of friends but sometimes I really overdo it and this weekend was a perfect example of how crazy things can get in a City that tends to breed a very short attention span.

So, the weekend saw me -

Meeting the girls at Schiller's in the Lower East Side on Saturday at 2pm for a quick Mimosa before heading off to a British Expat Pimms themed BBQ on the rooftop of the Delancey. There, we met more girlfriends and my friend PC, who is over from London for a few days, also joined for a couple of hours and a few burgers. In the early evening, I dragged the girls to Spitzer's Corner for just one drink because I wanted to quickly catch up with CB who had texted me earlier that he was there.

From there, we made an inexplicable stop at the Steve Madden shoe store across the street, drunkenly trying on the most ridiculous shoes we could find while singing loudly to the music in the store ... much to the dismay of the sales staff but to our endless amusement. We then hopped in a cab to Ace of Clubs where the Brits Expat group had organized a live music night and we danced along for a few hours until our itchy feet got the better of us again and I suggested that we go to Fat Baby for more dancing. Another friend of mine, SG, met us there at 1am and we finally all left at 3am but not without stopping at a hole in wall for a slice of pizza of course.

Get up with a bad hangover far too early on Sunday and get ready to meet an extended group of friends, including the girls, for FM's leaving brunch at Odeon in Tribeca. Linger and gossip about the night before over Bloody Marys and Eggs Benedict. Brave the by now extreme weather conditions (there was a tornado warning in the City) to head out to The Hideaway. Stayed for one drink before deciding that we really wanted to be at Forgione's instead. Drank their Cote De Provence Rose reserve dry by which point having food seemed like a good idea but we were told that the kitchen was closed. Staggered over to Flor Del Sol for tasty tapas before finally jumping into a cab home, absolutely exhausted, at midnight.

2 days. 10 bars/restaurants.

A new record, even for me!

Islamorada

2010-06-04T14:46:00.007-04:00

I've said it before but one of the things I love the most about New York is its close proximity to tropical paradise, particularly in the midst of the bitterly cold winters, and short escapes to South Beach are now a January ritual for me. The Caribbeans are less than 4 hours away and it turns out that the Keys, despite being a couple of hours drive south of Miami are pretty straight forward to get to and equally heavenly.

A couple of weekends ago, a group of about 15 friends and I headed down to Islamorada, a tiny spot about half-way down the Keys to celebrate our friend FM's birthday. She is originally from Florida and wanted to celebrate this significant milestone surrounded by her family, her closest friends and on the beach! Something we all agreed was a rather fine idea.

We only stayed in the resort for three days and most of our time was spent in the lagoon, where we could swim in the sea without worrying about the strong currents of the ocean or the creatures with sharp teeth that inhabit it!

CS, ES and I did get to swim with dolphins which was something I had dreamed about doing for a very long time. They are such amazing creatures - incredibly gentle and graceful in their movements - and I loved every minute of it, even when the dolphin trainer asked me to swim out to meet one of the dolphins, Sebastian, as she had something special in mind for me. As Sebastian had just "kissed" ES and gotten a hug from CS in the previous stunts, I got a little worried about the increasing level of intimacy we were asked to share with him and what mine might entail! Was I going to be used for a hybrid dolphin/human insemination project?! All joke aside, it turns out that when Sebastian emerged from the sea in front of me, all I had to do was shake his fins :-)

Much fun was had by our raucous group throughout our stay and I have to say that our behaviour would have made any prepubescent teenager proud - from jumping fully clothed in the pool at 2am while frankly very inebriated, to involuntary parodying "Dirty Dancing" when the lovely boys we met at Tom's bar one night invited us to a house party which turned out to be staff quarters as they all worked at our hotel!
No-one made us carry watermelons* but I have a feeling that, should I decide to go back to the resort and get tennis lessons, it won't be too much of a problem! Finally, we ended the weekend in style by driving back to Miami airport in a gorgeous, gleaming red convertible Mustang.

The weekend was bittersweet however as two of my closest friends (including the birthday girl herself) are leaving in the next couple of weeks. I've written before about the City's transience and it is again proving to be the case, reminding me that this place is not as easy to live in as we'd all like to believe. MT is leaving after just 2 years, as she missed her family back in the UK far too much and never felt at home here. FM is at a stage of her life where she wants to meet a decent man and settle down to have kids - something that's hard to find in New York unfortunately ...

I feel fortunate that at least we were able to spend an entire weekend together in an ideal setting with the rest of our girlfriends, all feeling connected by a friendship that is stronger than any physical distance that life may put between us.

* For straight male readers - this is a bad reference to a scene in Dirty Dancing!

Memorial Day

2010-06-01T16:42:00.005-04:00

While the majority of New Yorkers chose to escape the City for Memorial Day weekend in favour of the beaches of the Hamptons, I love nothing more than staying here.

I mean what's not to love about a long weekend where you can:

Score a table outside for 6 people on a Saturday night without a reservation at Flor Del Sol in Tribeca.

Share a bottle of Rose at A.O.C over brunch without looking like an alcoholic. And then sip even more Rose while sitting in a paddling pool on my friend JC's private roofdeck in the heart of the West Village.

And let's not forget that this is the first weekend of the year where having a BBQ is in fact mandatory. Mine was at LJ's in Brooklyn and involved us grilling meat right in the street!

Manhattanhenge

2010-05-31T11:08:00.002-04:00

Twice a year an amazing natural phenomenom occurs in New York - the sun sets in perfect alignment with the grid of streets in the City.

It just so happens that we will be treated to this awesome sight tonight at 8.17pm EDT.

For instructions on where to best view it and more details on Manhattanhenge, click here.

Photo by Steve Kelley, New York Times

Summer!

2010-05-30T10:07:00.002-04:00

You know that it is officially the start of Summer in New York when you wake up to find a street fair is casually occupying part of Broadway ...

Restaurant, Inc.?

2010-05-27T18:43:00.007-04:00

I have just read a very interesting article on nymag.com about New Yorkers average monthly spend on eating out, based on the neighbourhood they live in.

Topping the list at a whopping $2,350 (not far off my monthly rent!) is Chelsea, with my own zipcode coming in not too far behind at a choke inducing $1,895. Step outside of Manhattan however and the spend goes down quite dramatically to $710 in Park Slope and $233 in Astoria to pick just a couple.

While this is clearly a reflection on the differing affluence levels (and restaurant pricing) across each of the boroughs, I also believe it is a unique Manhattan trait for other reasons.

Apartments in Manhattan are small and cooking in some of the kitchens I have seen here would be the equivalent of performing a circus contortionist act. A friend of mine saw the most unbelievably small kitchen once when apartment hunting - so tiny in fact, that the shower cubicle was literally next to the fridge. No joke.

Grocery shopping can be a hit and miss experience. Delis and small supermarkets, while convenient as most of them are open 24 hours a day, usually only carry a small and sometimes quite odd selection of food products while larger places such as Trader Joe's and Wholefoods are expensive. I have often walked out with enough ingredients to cook just one meal that costed me nearly as much as if I had eaten out at my local restaurant.

And lastly restaurants are just amazing here. There are so many of them, spanning all the types of cuisines one would desire and all price ranges. I've had the tastiest eggs & bagels at Barney Greengrass for $10 and the most exquisite and elaborate food at Per Se for $250 per person. Overall the food and service in New York restaurants is overwhelmingly high compared to many other cities.

I must admit that I very much embraced New Yorkers' restaurant habit as soon as I arrived here and I eat out at least 4 times a week. And while I am not storing Manolos in my oven quite yet, my empty fridge always gives my visiting European friends a bit of a chuckle when they come and see me ...

* Screenshot taken on bundle.com

Bloglovin'

2010-05-25T13:52:00.005-04:00

I'm sure a lot of you know about Bloglovin' already but if you don't, check it out. It's a great way to keep up with all the latest posts from your favourite bloggers, all in one place.

Follow my blog with bloglovin

Boqueria

2010-05-25T10:42:00.000-04:00

My original boss in NYC and now good friend ML, a Mexican native, is the person who first introduced me to Boqueria. She had invited me to a lecture at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea and we decided to grab a bite to eat afterwards to catch up. ML remembered having amazing tapas in a nearby restaurant but didn't remember the name so we went in search of it and with the help of Google finally arrived at Boqueria, on 19th between 5th and 6th, which turned out to be a very narrow but long space, completely packed with diners and particularly loud.

I instantly loved the decor with its characteristic New York exposed bricks and high tables and chairs but most importantly I fell in love with all the tasty morsels of food we shared, particularly the Pane con Tomate with Proscuitto, which I am actually obsessed with. I have subsequently taken many friends there and distinctively remember one evening in particular with my friend IB (who had never been there before) when we ordered said Pane con Tomate four times in a row as she loved it as much as I do!

Having said all that, the noise levels in the restaurant were such that I never completely enjoyed the experience. I was therefore very intrigued when Chef Seamus Mullen expanded his empire and opened a second Boqueria, this time in Spring Street, Soho.

While retaining the same feel and atmosphere as the original restaurant, this one is more spacious and therefore a little quieter. With the food as delicious as ever, my prayers were answered and the Soho branch is now my venue of choice.

Aside from the Pane, my favourite tapas include Pintxos Morunos (lamb marinated in lemon and cumin and served with salsa verde), Txipirones (baby squid a la plancha with arugula), Cojonudo (quail eggs and chorizo on toast) as well as the Churros to dip in a delicious chocolate sauce. I also love the excellent brunch menu, which includes the most delicate yet satisfying soft scrambled eggs with juicy shrimps and Guindilla peppers on a brioche bun... to be consumed with a lot of sparkling Rose wine of course :-)

Borough Market

2010-05-20T13:14:00.003-04:00

For my final day in London, last Saturday, I wanted to go back to a favourite haunt - Borough Market - and could think of a no better companion and guide than Pete, the lovely friend and fellow foodie who first introduced me to it years ago.

Together we spent a few hours slowly meandering through the market and grazing on delicious morsels of food as we walked past the multitude of stalls.

While I don't really spend much time trawling farmers markets in New York (considering how rarely I cook here), I have a particular affection for Borough.

Even though I couldn't buy anything (due to the strict US customs rules), I still reveled in the atmosphere and found myself imagining which occasions other people there were shopping for - A large family gathering around a roast organic chicken? A romantic steak and wild mushroom dinner for two? Or a decadent and solitary cheese fest?

Over the years, Borough Market has become a rather posh affair and while I think it has lost nothing of its charm, it has gained many, many more visitors and making your way through the small lanes can be quite challenging.

I love the fact that it is located in the arches of the old railway viaduct at London Bridge and despite the gentrification, it still retains a slightly gritty, old London feel to it. A little bit like stepping back into the London of "Oliver" ...

http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/

Back in Blighty

2010-05-11T10:26:00.009-04:00

I have spent the last couple of weeks in London as my US work visa was up for renewal (2 more years in NYC!).

The last time I was in here was over a year and a half ago and I have been delighted/amused/occasionally annoyed to realise that in all that time I was away, I had forgotten :

How intelligent, interesting and caustically funny British television is. Without a doubt the best programming in the World.

How yummy Pret A Manger sandwiches and salads are.

That whilst it doesn't rain nearly as much as one would think, the skies do bear a shade of grey most of the time unfortunately.

How much I miss English pubs (dark and cosy, complete with exposed bricks, low ceilings and ideally an open fire place) and even more when they serve a proper Sunday Roast (lightly pink and thinly sliced beef, perfectly roasted potatoes, string beans, a voluminous Yorkshire pudding and rich gravy).

How the other half lives until one of my friends let me stay in her $1.8M apartment set in a quiet Chelsea mews for a week, minutes from ultra-chic Kings Road. Living the life of a posh girl about town was really, really hard but someone had to do it!

What normal/human sized packets of crisps and chocolate bars looked like.

How eye-wateringly expensive public transport is, with a return zone 1 ticket on the Tube costing almost $8. And to add insult to injury, the noticeably increased presence of taxis on the streets is only explained by the fact that they are now prohibitively pricey!

That I am apparently old enough now to genuinely enjoy listening to Radio 4 every morning ...

I've had a really wonderful time rediscovering London, going back to old haunts and finding new ones, but most of all catching up with a ton of friends. One thing is for sure ... I won't leave it as long to come back again.

8th Street Winecellar

2010-05-06T12:26:00.002-04:00

I love nothing more than being taken to a place I have never been to before and knowing almost instantly that it will become a regular haunt, somewhere I will come back to over and over again and in turn introduce other friends to it, confident that they will fall in love with it too.

T, a Spanish friend of mine who recently moved to New York, did just that a few weeks ago when she took me to 8th Street Winecellar, on the corner of Macdougal, in a patch of the West Village I was until then less familiar with.

The block is very picturesque albeit a little unusual with its high concentration of wholesale shoe shops and what looked distinctively like a clothes shop for transvestites ... 8th Street Winecellar itself is a small and intimate space located below street level so it can easily be missed. Their wine list is beautifully curated and T and I shared a lovely Russian River Californian Zinfandel, along with very generous platters of cheeses and cold meats.

Highly recommended.

Photo by Konstantin Sergeyev @ NY Mag

Subway Secrets

2010-04-28T08:57:00.003-04:00

While surfing the net the other day, I discovered a fascinating fact. There is a secret subway entrance disguised as a walk-up brownstone in Brooklyn. It is unclear to me exactly why - is it to merely blend in the neighbourhood or is this service entrance meant to be truly secret for security reasons?

Regardless of the true reason behind it, I love the fact that one can be walking down a perfectly quiet suburban street and not realize what is hidden behind it. I may have to make a trip out there so see it with my own eyes.

Curbed NY article here.

Let's Go Knicks!

2010-04-26T16:15:00.002-04:00

It happened for the first time on a late Sunday afternoon in November ... My friend M took me to see my first Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. Not because either of us are basketball fans but because it had long been a common yet unticked entry on our "things to do in New York" list.

I had no idea how much I would fall in love with the game, or more precisely with watching this particular team in their impressive home venue - surely one of the best event space I know, managing to be at the same time huge yet almost intimate in the sense that even with seats far away from the court, one still doesn't miss a beat of the action or feel in any way removed from it.

I have been to five more games since and each of them only further fueled by new-found passion and I have shared it with different friends every time, eager as I was to share my enthusiasm with them.

Sure the Knicks have not played well in years but I must admit that I love everything about the experience, even when they lose ... The grace of the players, who despite their customary 6'9 frame, move around the court with incredible speed and agility, and sometimes the same lightness of step as ballet dancers ... The fact that, in typical American fashion, the game has been turned into a slightly tacky entertainment show with musical interludes being played throughout - along with dancers, cheerleaders, singers, pizza throwing contests, audience 80s dance-offs and usual celeb spotting courtside providing a spot of light relief between periods and during longer time-outs ... That shouting, screaming and singing ("Defence! Defence!", "Let's go Knicks!") are generally encouraged in the audience during the game and I unashamedly and liberally indulge in all of it.

While it may sound rather distracting from the main reason for being at the game, it's an integral part of the experience of watching basketball at the Garden. I certainly wouldn't have it any other way and I can't wait for the 2010 season to begin!

New Beginning?

2010-04-05T21:38:00.006-04:00

Spring has finally sprung in the City and with it, it seems, my desire to continue blogging about my experiences here. Shorter posts perhaps, but updates nonetheless, is my intention.

To celebrate the mild temperatures and brilliant sunshine, I spent the entire weekend outdoors. Starting with Central Park on Saturday which was so busy that it actually looked like an amusement park with the entire population of New York City (alongside a fair share of bewildered tourists) seemingly milling around its numerous paths and crowding every single patch of green grass available.

E, C & I rented bikes for a couple of hours before settling down for a picnic. I love cycling in the Park. In a little less than an hour it is possible to cover its entire periphery and it's always fascinating to me to see how different it looks as you progress through it - from the crowded area around Columbus Circle, to the lush meadows around the 80s, the sparser expenses of the Harlem Meer and not forgetting the beautiful and serene conservatory gardens of course. I can't imagine ever getting bored of that ride.

On Sunday, I was feeling adventurous and headed to Brooklyn to hang out with L in Prospect Park. I have become a terrible Manhattanite and outer-borough trips are even rarer for me now than ever before. The hour long subway journey was actually not bad, especially as I had planned ahead and taken a few magazines to distract me. And if you discount the fact that a homeless person with a huge dirty blanket almost huddled against me (I didn't want to make him feel self-conscious by moving seats) for most of the trip, it was actually enjoyable. It was worth it regardless - compared to the madness of Central Park, its Brooklyn cousin was positively subdued and L & I wiled away the hours sipping Prosecco and watching entire families, with up to three generations present, playing ball games and enjoying animated barbecues.

Summer in March

2010-03-18T22:23:00.010-04:00

Well not quite but FM, MT and I were determined to pretend that it was.

Today was admittedly the first mild day of the year after what felt like an eternity of a winter so after meeting for eggs Benedict at the Market Diner in Hell's Kitchen to mop up our collective hangovers (St Patrick's day was yesterday after all), we thought it would be a great idea to pop over to the rooftop of 230 Fifth to enjoy the brilliant sunshine and clement temperature.

What were supposed to be just a couple of glasses turned into many bottles of champagne over the course of several hours. As evening dawned and the temperature dropped, our constant laughter to our own jokes/stories, as well as huddling underneath the heated lamps and under the big, fluffy blankets that the bar helpfully provides, kept us warm and happy. The amazing sunset over the Empire State Building also helped I have to say.

What a wonderful way to celebrate the early arrival of Spring!

Break

2010-02-03T17:08:00.000-05:00

I am surprised and incredibly flattered by the comments I have received asking me to keep up with the blog.

Apologies for the recent silence but I am experiencing a bit of (amateur) writer's block after 3 years of documenting my experiences of living in New York.

I hope that this is only temporary and that I will get inspired to share my ongoing adventures in the City again soon!

Parent Trap

2009-11-08T19:11:00.002-05:00

Great things about my parents visiting me for two weeks:

* Saving a significant amount of money from the enforced quarantine away from my party-loving friends.

* Sleeping soundly for 10 hours every nights (see above point).

* Having a seemingly endless of supply of bagels in the house as my parents are strangely obsessed with them and made daily trips to H&H to stock up.

* Feeling like a child again as we sat down for breakfast every morning (I had to build in an extra 30 minutes in my morning schedule), Mum cooked some of my favourite dishes (and froze them so that I could have homemade food when they left) and they generally looked after me as if I was not much older than 12.

* After many trials and errors, finally finding a decent baguette in the City at the Food Emporium.

* Quitting smoking.

Not so great things about my parents visiting me for two weeks:

* Trying to look very interested while Dad showed me all the pictures he took of the vegetables growing in their garden.

* Being completely up to date, in sometimes more details than strictly necessary, on all of our extended family's news.

* Realizing, after they had left, that Mum had subtly reorganized all my kitchen cabinets.

* Being left with a fridge full of cheese and a brand new pot of Nutella.

* Being shamed into realizing there are still so many areas of New York that I have yet to explore such as Brooklyn Heights, Ellis Island and well ... the Upper East Side, while my parents on the other hand adventurously wondered around by themselves despite their very limited command of English and came back from their escapades with wonderful observations and photographs.

* Quitting smoking.

All joking aside now, the greatest thing about my parents' visit is that it turned out to be quite a revelation for me.

When they first came to see me here I was so new to the City - barely 7 months in - and although I had managed to pack in many experiences in that short time, I didn't know the City in the way I know it now and I also wasn't the person I am now. Despite our enduring love affair, New York has kicked me pretty hard to the ground a couple of times very early on and taught me tough lessons ... some of which I only very recently finally absorbed and accepted.

So in the midst of all this, I hadn't really realized until my parents' second visit that in the past two and a half years, New York has actually become home. Not just an exciting adventure. Not just a place in which to temporary put my bags down for a while before moving on. But instead the place where I belong. Where I feel comfortable and happy. Where my heart is.

View

2009-11-04T18:09:00.003-05:00

I have a new job and an amazing new view of the City seemingly lying at my feet from my desk ...

Autumn

2009-10-25T17:44:00.002-04:00

Autumn is quite possibly my favourite season in the City.

The air is as clean and crisp as freshly laundered bed linen yet the sun still warms your face during the inevitably long and leisurely walks you take to enjoy its last balmy rays before the frigid cold of the Winter.

I love that, at the very end of October, it is still possible to share a delicious blueberry cheesecake from Pinisi bakery while sitting outside without a coat on.