New York Diary

New York felt like going home this time. Everything is beginning to feel very familiar and other than the initial confusion about whether you’re looking uptown or downtown after you get out of the subway for the first time, we’re really beginning to get to know our way around. I even had a Metro pass from our last trip which I just pulled out of my wallet and topped up!

Here’s the quick day-by-day run down.

Day 1:

Late start after arriving at the hotel at 4am, and it rained solidly all day. Gumboots everywhere being worn as a fashion item. Went over to the Chelsea Market for a late coffee at Ninth Street Espresso.

In the rain outside Chelsea Market

Decided to spend the day getting some jobs for people at work over and done with. Note to anyone who wants to post, FedEx or UPS a bottle of wine across the States: you can’t. We traipsed around in the rain to each place with the wine, frayed tempers, muttering at the guy from work who’d wanted it posted. Bad news arrived via email mid-afternoon – Yankees game that night was postponed. The Mister was inconsolable. Went up to Morrell’s for dinner to drown his sorrows and got some New York baked cheesecake from a diner on the way home to eat in front of the late shows.

Day 2:

Up early and out to the Bronx to Yankee Stadium to see what to do with the tickets from last night’s game. A couple of other games that weekend we could’ve gone to, but no good seats. Tickets can be used to enter any other game within a year, or the postponed game now scheduled for September or a full refund seeing as we’re from out of New York (still deciding, could be a good excuse to go back again soon!). At least the Mister got to touch Yankee Stadium, little by little he’ll get in to see a game!

As close as the Mister got to a Yankees game

Fine warm day (27 degrees), so headed back down towards 5th Ave, wandered around Bloomingdales, had lunch in a very green Central Park, headed on down to Madison Square Park to catch up with our New York friend for coffee, and finally got to Union Square Cafe for dinner. Very nice and a bit more up market than I thought it would be and great service. Walked the 20 blocks home in a very balmy 20-ish degrees.

Day 3:

Headed out to Chelsea again to find the other cafe that we’d read rivaled Ninth Street Espresso and had won this year’s Time Out New York Cafe of the Year Award, Cafe Grumpy. Coffee was pretty good but not as good as Ninth Street Espresso however we certainly felt very cool being there even if very straight – and the 2 guys next to us were certainly very grumpy with each other so perhaps that’s where the name comes from! Walked around Chelsea on our way back uptown to get another job done for someone at this amazing huge electronics store where you ‘order’ your purchase from an ‘agent’ and it is retrieved by a robotic arm in the basement somewhere and rides in little glass elevators and a conveyor belt on the ceiling in little green buckets up to the counter where you pay and pickup on your way out! Saw some really amazing huge old brick buildings and tree-lined streets when walking up through Chelsea.

Huge brick building in Chelsea

That night Sara and Lucy arrived and we went to the extremely hip outdoor Shake Shack in Madison Square park for fantastic burgers outdoors for dinner and then walked up to take in the bright lights of Times Square.

Day 4:

Took the girls down to Ninth Street Espresso to prove to them that you can get decent coffee in New York if you know where to go then headed right downtown to show them around Ground Zero and Battery Park where they got a look at the Statue of Liberty even if across the river. Had a poke through the Century 21 outlet store seeing as we’d never been there then headed up to Union Square for a picnic of sandwiches and sushi from Wholefoods. Then it was back up to Macys to get glammed up with posh make-up from the Estee Lauder counter, then on with the posh frocks and back down to Wall Street for the Webby Awards.

A very cool night, saw quite a few famous people from both the internet and Hollywood worlds – Seth Meyers, Lisa Kudrow, Sarah Silverman, Molly Simms, Jimmy Fallon, Martha Stewart, Beeker, Cameron Diaz and Tim Berners-Lee. We sat at a table with a group from NASA which was pretty amazing and went to a dreadfully loud underground club in Chelsea for the ‘after party’. We only lasted about an hour there, then stayed up until 3.30am back at the hotel writing up the blog post about the awards for work (http://blog.xero.com/2009/06/google-sexy-fun-addictive-xero/). There was a wicked thunderstorm a little while later – thunder sounds so different there, I guess because it rattles around the tall buildings so sounds a lot closer and louder.

Day 5:

Home time. One last visit to Chelsea to Ninth Street Espresso seeing as we were all so dreadfully tired and in need of one last coffee then a wander through Greenwich Village and Soho before heading back to the hotel to get our bags.

Wandering along Bleecker Street

When we came out to the taxi there was the most solid and brief downpour I’d ever seen – I think New York was crying because we were leaving! It was enough to set me off, I don’t know why I can’t leave that town dry-eyed! The flight back was without delay although we were lucky to leave pretty much on time from JFK as the rain earlier in the day had caused a bit of a backlog on the runway. Planes were being re-routed around the storm clouds and unlike planes in New Zealand, they seem to be stacked 3 layers high in the sky so you can’t just go higher or lower or turn left to avoid a thunderstorm because there’s likely to be another plane in the sky to bump into. I amused myself for the first hour or so on the plane listening through the headset to the pilots of all the planes in the area talking to the air traffic controllers – the Texan’s are particularly amusing.

Got back 2 days later and managed to get into work by 10am a couple of hours after the flight landed. It was a reasonably tiring day but I did get quite a lot of work done and even managed yoga that night although I must admit almost fell asleep during the little rest time at the end!