Entries from June 2010 ↓

At the Museum of the City of New York last week I saw a picture of a ’sky garage’ in their transport exhibit. I’ve looked up the new apartment building that this garage is in.

200 Eleventh Avenue, complete with ‘en-suite sky garages’ ($2.5M – $14M!!)

Each apartment comes with a ‘garage’ space so that your car can travel in the elevator and be ‘parked’ outside your front door! Imagine that!! Watch the movie on the site, it shows you how it works.

What next?!

Cafes and espresso bars in New York (& other parts of the States we’ve been) all have these coffee stations:

They’re a bit Starbucksesque but very efficient. This one at Saturdays Surf is pretty trendy done in wood like their furniture and with their skateboards all parked up as the station is fairly close to the door.

Typically, coffee stations have:

• 3 jugs milk – full fat, half fat, skim
• Bottle with pouring nozzle – contains sugar syrup
• Honey – as an alternative source of sweet I guess
• Napkins
• Lids – for every size cup
• Cardboard cup holders – for when cup is too hot to hold (technically not necessary but are required for drinkers of black or ‘regular’ coffee (i.e. drip filter)), for every size cup
• Sugar sachets – usually white, brown & sweetener
• Stirring sticks
• Straws – for iced coffees

There are a few places on the NY Times coffee list on the Lower East Side that we’ve been meaning to get to, so we headed down there before a movie on Sunday. Our target was Bluebird Coffee Shop. It was a teeny tiny cafe on tree-lined 1st Street. The street was typically East Side (as far as our experience knows) with people lining up outside eateries, sitting on park benches catching up and lots of tattoos.

The coffee shop was a great little place – big windows over a counter you could be inside or out and feel part of the other – we sat one in, one out … not sure if that’s what you’re supposed to do but hey, East Side anything goes!

The coffee was good too, not going to the top of our list, quite strong and a fairly dark roast – absolutely drinkable but it might’ve been the hot day that meant we didn’t enjoy it as much as others we’ve had.

Bluebird Coffee Shop, 72 East 1st Street, New York

Went along to the annual Madison Square BBQ block party last Saturday. Not that I was going to hoe into plates of BBQ ribs but as it’s kind of our local park and an annual event we wanted to at least have a look. Plus we’d seen in promotional material that 50,000 people attended and we wondered how they would fit into the park … and where would all the little dogs go?

There were some streets closed around the park and everywhere there were lines of people waiting to get ribs, pulled pork sandwiches (The Mister), brisket, and blueberry crisp (me) and people sitting or standing and eating everywhere!

But again as we’ve seen in this town, crowds don’t phase anyone:

• there were stacks of portaloos and hand-washing/sterilizing stations
• there were loads of bins and recycling stations and someone clearing them constantly
• each food or drinks tent just did ONE thing, cash only, clear signs up and people didn’t muck around – just ordered what they wanted, paid, and left. The Mister’s pulled pork sandwich line stretched almost a block then bent back a couple of times yet he only waited about 30 minutes

• even though the food was mass-produced it was good and homemade and fresh – giant trucks ferried food in and parked in the closed streets ready to bring more as needed. My blueberry crisp and ice-cream could’ve come straight out of a suburban kitchen

• all the food tents had packets of napkins, utensils and those foil pouches of wet soap/sterilizing cloths – what a great idea – just the thing for sticky BBQ food eaten with hands
• all the tents had a coloured flag flying off them and a corresponding flag of the same colour being held by a guy to mark the end of the line – with lines snaking for miles and criss-crossing over each other it was a really obvious way to know where to stand with out going to the tent and tracking back down the line.

Had a lovely unexpected evening out on Thursday at the premiere of the Topp Twins movie Untouchable Girls at the LGBT Film Festival in Chelsea. We realised we’d been completely remiss in contacting our Chrysler photographer friend Brian since being here, and when we finally made contact he invited us as his company’s guests to the film. Turned out he was the twins’ manager for a few years back in the 80’s and his company had been the independent financial backer on the film. We also didn’t realise the Topp Twins would actually be there!

There weren’t many New Zealand accents in the crowd, but they were certainly distinctive. We had an entire row of the theatre for Brian and about a dozen guests – we felt quite honoured! The twins came out to do a waiata before the film which was beautiful – they really do sing as one voice and a waiata is usually fairly beautiful anyway. The film was great! A mix of their lives growing up, their political stance in New Zealand in the 80’s, their being openly gay and Jools’ breast cancer.  We laughed, sang, cried and cringed (just a little) at some of the small town New Zealand footage – kids riding sheep at A&P shows and the twins busking on Queen Street – I wondered what end of the earth New Yorkers would think New Zealand was at!

The film received a standing ovation and during the question and answer session after the film there were a couple of questions about how they managed to have the lives they have in New Zealand, how the country accepted them and held them up as heroes and national icons ‘despite’ being gay – the American crowd were very much in awe of the acceptance. We felt quite proud to be Kiwis!

They tried to teach the crowd to yodel then Linda showed us how it was done! (See the video on my Flickr site.)

So I was feeling quite star struck by the end of the film – silly really because I’m sure I saw the twins live at some point, but when I got out and saw the throngs of people crowding around waving CDs and t-shirts and post cards to be signed I just had to get in there. They were lovely! Took a few minutes to chat about what we were doing in New York and pose for a picture. Their film t-shirt is black with an orange print on it but by the time I decided I just HAD to have one there were none left that would fit me … fingers crossed for another print run.

It was great to see the film – we missed seeing it in New Zealand as it was constantly sold out! Days later and I’m still singing Untouchable Girls (well the that phrase at least).

There are so many street festivals on in New York during spring, where entire sections of large avenues are closed to traffic, and street vendors selling food, crafts and souvenirs set up shop. Tuesday evening this week was the annual closing of 5th Avenue so 9 museums could fling their doors open for free. We thought we’d head along to two we hadn’t been to before, the Guggenheim and the Museum of the City of New York.

The line to get into the Guggenheim was incredible, we got there about 10 minutes before the free entry started and the line went from 5th Avenue, all the way down 89th Street to Lexington Avenue and then around the corner and on up Lexington Avenue – we joined it by the time it had almost reached 90th Street and I reckon in snaked around there as well. It was just like those movies you see where people line up around the block, this was literally! However when the doors opened it only took 10 or so minutes for everyone to shuffle in.

The museum is not that large and has an eclectic collection of well placed pieces, some art work hanging traditionally, some art ‘installations’ and a few exhibitions involving film or lights and shadows. The museum itself is pretty incredible inside, a lightly campered continuously declining circular ramp leaving you quite dizzy even after walking slowly from top to bottom!

The Museum of the City of New York was also small and quite interesting – lots of old clippings and pictures from early mayors, transport systems and city newspapers/magazines.

It was really amazing to see hundreds of people who didn’t seem to be the regular museum set lining up to go – a lot of locals and their families, rather than tourists and scream school tours.

It was such a gorgeous spring night that we decided not to fight the crowds at one of the larger museums and instead chose to walk through the entire park (as we’ve done once before) – it wasn’t quite dark and we entered 3/4 of the way up at about 95th Street. Everyone was out running after work and the park was bathed in setting sun – it was really gorgeous, especially the reservoir.

We finished the evening with a late dinner/supper outside at Morrell’s.

This week, our international product team launched Xero Answers – a site for questions & answers for our new product Xero Personal. Rather than have a massive customer base flood our email support queue, we’re going to try this largely user-based approach to helping our customers, the aim being that people can see questions previously asked & answered, saving them having to do it, & also to give an opportunity for people to help each other out as they build up their own product knowledge & learn their own ways of using the product that they want to share.

It’s still orange & it’s had a few questions posted to it already; I’m nervously keeping watch over it trying to answer the questions as best I can but I am further removed from this product than Xero Business that I wrote most of the Help Centre for. I really hope it grows into a big community site like some others I’ve seen where eventually we can hook up a blog, the @XeroPersonal Twitter feed & stuff like that. And maybe even extend it to our business product. Early days!

Whoa it’s hot again today. So we tried to stay in most of the day with the aircon going instead of going out and walking the streets and making ourselves all swollen and hot! It’s so bizarre to have the windows shut tight, and look out at a grey sky and understand that it’s stinking out there; that if you open the window warm air gushes in. Just not something I’m used to coming from Wellington.

It doesn’t look hot out there does it, more like a coolish day, about to rain.

However, the pull of coffee was too great to resist so we put on our shorts and jandals and walked very slowly the few blocks it is to the airconditioned Fika. Quite a stiff breeze for New York today and that helped. Saw this hilarious sight near the cafe – a fan, that got itself whirling in the wind, looking like it was doing it’s best to keep the city cool.

The little fan that could!

Thanks to Time Out New York we’ve discovered another fantastic cafe in our work neighbourhood – well, a little further away that Saturdays Surf but will definitely be worth the walk some days. It’s not on the NY Times coffee list but we’re adding it to our own list – RBC NYC.

One main draw card is the Slayer machine – only 20 or so of these machines world wide and we know about them because the Customs Brew Bar opened by Supreme just before we left Wellington has the only one in New Zealand. Amazing due to the ability to control the pressure/temperature/flow for a single espresso extraction.

So we had to go take a look – also, the Time Out said they made the best iced latte in town and as it’s the season of cold coffee drinks for most people, The Mister thought it was about time to try one.

Upon entry the first thing we spotted was a guy in a trilby hat – a good start seeing as that seems to be the mark of a good barista here! They thought we were from Australia when we showed interest in the Slayer, because there’s one now in Melbourne – so we told them all about Supreme’s one in Wellington.

My god the coffee was good, both the cappuccino and the iced latte. And their cookies were regular size, not giant, and delicious – I had a peanut butter one.

RBC NYC, 71 Worth Street, New York

As we enter the milestone of less than 6 weeks until we have to leave New York and resume our lives in Wellington I’m trying to think of things I’ve missed in the vein hope that it will give me something to look forward to. There’s no way I’m going to think of things I won’t miss from here! People at home are now starting to enquire whether or not we’re looking forward to coming back and are saying they’re looking forward to seeing us. However, we’re not looking forward to going back and when we say we’re not pleased to be back, don’t take it personally!