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New York – Days 17 to 23
Be good to the people who work in the bars and clubs and they are good to you.
Things I have discovered.
1) Again I ended up somewhere twice in one week that if you sit at the bar and get wasted you end up with not much of a bill to pay. . Be nice to the bartenders and they are really nice to you. They free pour the spirits here so you end up with a glass of vodka and not much else to flavour it. This would never happen in the UK. Never. Well unless you were home doing the pouring.
2). You can get your nails done in every block here and your eyebrows too. How there are so many nail bars and brow bars in business is a mystery. Great prices and can always walk in. What a treat for the hands and feet.
Sickly Sweetness
3) I met an old friend and went walking, walking, walking around the city streets to buy as much sweets to make us sick as possible. The girl in a Disney like candy store looked and sounded like she was sugar rushing to the moon. Never has someone spoke so much crap so fast. I left my friend to deal with her. Note to self, don’t work in candy stores.
4) They like to have big menus here to match the portion size. See the burger menu and the beer menu.
- Any beer or ale you desire. Well alot of it.
5) Clubs here are still like clubs ten years ago. It was a weird experience to be back in a nightclub. I don’t think I had been in one for years. I knew I could have talked to loads of people but I was just enjoying watching the crowd and thinking of days gone by. And as they prance by with their not so creative face paint and sparkly tutus (just the guys) I wondered in ten years time whether they would be the one like me staring back at them thinking – ooh how boring.
6) Everyone has a dog. Big or small. None of these dogs bark. Weird.
7) If you want to play catch the Frisbee in Central park the pre requisite is to be in your early twenties and have a six-pack. Good thing I don’t like catch the Frisbee.
New York Day 16 – Lower East Side
Mary Poppins Comes to the Lower East Side for one night only.
I’ve discovered the app HopStop. This is amazing in NYC for someone like myself who gets lost turning around. The only problem is that it tells you at the end of a subway stop to go in a compass direction which is an immediate fail for someone like me. Luckily on day 16 the friend who called me to do coat check called me as I got out of Canal Street and asked what way the traffic was going and told me it was the wrong way and to turn around, This was repeated on Day 17 too. Day 18 someone showed me that there was a compass on the iphone. Life is complete.
Day 16 was a Saturday and I was out in Soho wandering around with a friend trying out various vessels of white wine in various bars, which is always going to create a more than drunk night. You never know which way it will go but becoming utterly wasted is always a certainity. I get a call from my friend who has the direction of a magnet asking me to do coat check in his bar. I was drunk so it seemed like a fab idea.
I didn’t really want to do coat check but I had blabbed on about how i would do any job the week before if someone asked me just to try it once and of course when you brag it comes back and hits you in the face. So off I went. A thirty something in a twenty somethi ng lower eastside bar. It was like a drunk Mary Poppins had come to town. ‘Oh do have a fabulous time tonight’ I crowed in a posher than normal voice as I tried to contain my OCD with arranging the tickets as they came back. I thought people would be really rude to me but they weren’t and it was fun until the hangover kicked in at 3am The rail behind me, of course, fell down.
One particular individual eyed me up suspiciously and said ‘What’s going on here?
What do you mean ? I relplied . ‘Your’re far too cute to be running coat check’ I went up to his face and said ‘ you are right – I am too cute to be doing coat check. I’m filling in for a friend.‘What do you do when you are not running coat check?’ he enquired.
‘Run An Empire’. I deadpan replied.
Thank you Pinot Grigio you served me well.
New York, New York Days 7 to 10
Spring in New York
So after resting up in Florida and moving onto New York I turned up still exhausted. Who on earth escapes from a city like London to come to a city like New York to rest? Lucky for me that I have a couple of very good friends in New York and I was looking forward to spending some quality time. I didn’t have an apartment arranged until Day 11 so I stayed with a good friend until then on the Upper West Side.
The Upper West Side is probably my favourite area of New York to be situated in. It’s residential but has a lot going on with cafe’s, supermarkets and of course banks. You can’t not look up and see a bank so no need to worry about that for a second in Manhattan. Banks that have the biggest waste of space known to man. I entered through the door and then turned to left and walked what felt like a mile to some cash machines. There was nothing in that empty space apart from my thoughts. I could have moved into that space and it would have been bigger than an average studio apartment in Manhattan.
Although I was staying in an apartment that had a married couple and two small children it ended up being a pleasant experience. The little girl aged three could rationalize like a thirty-three year old so that proved challenging at six in the morning when the life, universe and everything needed to be discussed. Even trying to convince her when she put the light on that maybe we needed more sleep time I was met with ‘ No it’s daytime and in the day time we get up and are awake.’ By day eleven, the conversation was flowing with
‘Morning’
‘ Morning’
‘Sleep well?’
‘ Yeah.’
‘ It’s awake time? ‘
‘Yeah.’
End of any argument.
The second child who I stayed with is an anomaly to all babies. At five months old I’ve never seen such a happy chilled out little chubster. I was told that if you get the timing of the milk wrong by the minute you will certainly hear about it but honestly I was present in the room whilst the baba was changed and bathed over half hour and I didn’t even realize that had happened. His mother’s nightmares are that she forgets him somewhere because he can be so quiet. She is not wrong.
A place to walk
So the first few days I was in family land. Eating home cooked food and chilling out. Watching rubbish TV and going to bed early to rise early. Central Park has become a place to go walking. I didn’t realize that from Broadway you can walk a few blocks one way and come to Riverside and walk by the Hudson and go the other way and you are in Central Park within ten minutes. And Central Park is huge. A sudden haven in the concrete jungle. I already have a favourite place to walk around which is the Jackie O Reservoir.
Day 9 the Sunday I ventured out to a place in the Lower East Side called Fat Buddha. And one thing I love about New York bars is that if you sit up at the bar and you are friendly enough the drinks start coming for free. Yes you heard it free. You don’t know this is happening until the end but when would that ever happen in London? The place where alcohol is measured by a thimble, here they may as well be holding you down and pouring it down your throat and for a borderline British alcoholic and most definitely a lush this was Manna. The next morning of Monday (day 10) waking up at half six to work was most certainly not.
Florida Day 1 to 6
Clearwater, Florida; a home from home that I have grown up in for over twenty five years and am full of memories. Some happy, some sad; mostly of being bored when I was a kid. As time as gone on it has become a place of comfort. An escape from the City and a place to recharge.
It’s a place of solitude. You can get nowhere easily without a car, perhaps a bike if you are lucky. Forget walking to a local shop – are you mad? There is no local shop. There’s a beach with rows of Condos (expensive blocks of flats to us) or houses on the sea. And I was lucky enough to be in a house on a sea to witness the sea safari.
To be in a dwelling on the sea with only a murmur of cars behind you is a grounding experience. I arrived exhausted from the energy of the city and I knew I had minimal time to rest. Is it not ridiculous that life can be so hectic in the city even for someone without children that they feel so ill they have to rest? I’d over eaten and over drunk for months. Well that didn’t stop in Florida but the food was at least healthier and the booze less. I blame all that sea air for having to go to bed before 10pm.
During some time with family that reside there I got to see a strange experience for a person who has no children, which was babies learning to swim. My niece of 18 months was going for swimming lessons and I was impressed by her ability to actually swim albeit a panicked tiny amount but still it was impressive. Unfortunately I was distracted by the other half of the pool containing some pensioners doing a class of swim aerobics. I couldn’t help but notice how full of non movement their class was. If anything they just seemed to be still in a circle and not really treading water at all but then why should I have been surprised? The guy taking the class was bigger than all of them. How could they have a sense of hope looking at him?
So not much to report on the first few days, except relaxation and watching the dolphins swim by morning and eve. A baby turtle even popped by to say hello. A dead seahorse had been discarded on the dock but that wasn’t as much of a shock as the giant dead fish in the pool that some Pelican had had enough of.
It’s hot in Florida the sunshine state; too hot for someone as fair skinned as myself to enjoy but I got out there and soaked up the Vitamin D. I don’t think my body had seen the sunshine due to the UK’s miserable weather from the summer before.
I ate seafood galore (although the lobster was from South Africa which I think might ruin the local seafood idea a tad) and enjoyed the stillness. On my last day at the house, I threw my bread to the fish (always one to give back to nature even if it was garlic bread), and then panicked as a sea of crust lay atop the waves and started to roll towards the neighbours. I thought fish ate bread? I would be forever known as the polluter or poisoner of wildlife. Well I didn’t have to worry because after not so long the birds like a Hitchcock movie came pelting down. Problem solved. If the birds died it would be nowhere near me.
It was farewell to the Sunshine State and onwards to New York City.
Artigiano
Artigiano is a local Italian in Belsize Park. I’ve been here a few times. It looks wonderful. Clean and spaced out tables, inviting. A real neighbourhood gem. HOwever something about it always lets it down. A place that is capable of giving an excellent experience but yet a few times has had something lack when I have visited. The food is excellent but last time I ate there the inside of my ravioli was cold, which for an Italian restaurant is a no no. Another time I was there in a large group and the service was a let down. It’s also somewhere that sits people close together when there is plenty of room to be spaced out and have some privacy.
The food is excellent. The service good but insincere. I would eat here. It’s so much more than a local Italian but doesn’t quite make it to the classic Italian restaurant that it could be. It would only take a bit more of a step up with an attention to detail for this place to realize it’s potential.
Life is short
Today our caretaker at work suddenly died. Bob was a smiley fellow in his sixties. Slim frame, smoker’s gentle London voice and smoker’s lungs. Slim and cheery, always so cheery. He was someone who had become part of my every day am. I park my car and there he would be, popping out to say ‘morning’ from his underground office or in the lobby and a comment about another day in the rat race and a chuckle. That was 9am this morning. At three pm someone came into me to say he had been found dead in his office.
Already this week my family have been in remembrance of my Uncle who passed away a year ago on the 19th May. His wife had fallen seriously ill and was in intensive care in hospital. The panic and shock and unhealthy life style he had led took it’s toll and he died of a heart attack; A broken heart. She made it through to find him not there…
It’s also the remembrance of my granddad Alf. The blond curtain haired cheeky chappy that I was so close to through all my years. He is the one who used to sit with me as a child playing a word game. He would say to me ‘Think of as many words as you can beginning with the letter G’ and being about seven or eight years old I would sit and concentrate for what felt like an hour. I’d have a list of about ten words. If we had the same word we’d cross them off and the winner would be whom had the most left. It took me years to work out that he had always been reading my words and putting less than me so that I would win but learn also.
Grandad was a religious man who never went to church. A solitary man who married once and then was never connected to anyone else although we were always suspicious that he liked the lady in the local launderette. He had watched every nature programme on television. He saturated the meat in too much fat. When he cooked for my friend and I and I told him my friend was vegetarian, grandad panicked and said ‘but kid what does he eat?’ My friend ended up with a big plate of cabbage.
He snored like no other and when I was age seven I used to have the top bunk of bunk beds and him the bottom and I’d fallen asleep on an old style cassette recorder where I had tried to tape the evidence of the snoring. Everyone knew though. You could hear him from down the street. Grandad who started crying when I cried at the monkey’s dying in the film Project X, because he didn’t want me to be upset. Grandad who laughed the loudest when we did impressions of him. Grandad who listened to every thought I had like it was the most important thing he could have ever heard. He loved us all so much and we loved him. He really was the best Grandad a girl could have wanted.
So in remembrance my little blog a reminder that all we have is the here and now and it is a waste to not live life for the moment. And a glass raised to Bob, John and Grandad Alf. Rest in Peace.
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