Memories

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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" ...