First few days in New York City

I have now been here 3 full days and I am having an "awesome" time, as the yanks say.

I arrived late Wednesday night and was exhausted after 24 hours of travelling. My hotel is pretty cool and I recommend it if you want something new and funky if not a little compact. Check it out at www.thepodhotelny.com

Thursday morning I went for breakfast at a diner near Times Square and had challah french toast, I love that challah appears to be a fairly standard bread in New York! After some exploring, I met for lunch with a friend from Australia, Dani Hersz, who has been living here with her husband for the last 3 years. Suffering jetlag still, I went back to my hotel for a bit of a nap. That night I went out to a cool bar in midtown called Rare View, which is on a rooftop and has a great view of the city. The drinks were held by the people running my share house in the Hamptons, so it was great to meet some people that were in the house.

I had heard that dating was a little different in New York; it's more like a hobby here, I am getting the feeling that the way it is done here, it could almost be categorised as a sport. I met one guy at these drinks who had two dates lined up that night after he left drinks and he was contemplating how to end the first date to get to his second date.

That night I had an experience that I don't believe I have ever had in my life - someone told me I needed to be more aggressive! I was standing at the bar and was not being served and one of the guys I was with told me I needed to be more aggressive. I laughed (internally) as those words have never been uttered to me in Australia and one day in to my time in NY I get told that. I think I am definitely in the right city for my personality!

On Friday I did some more exploring, I have been walking all over the city, and I even took the subway once. I looked at a couple of places to rent, discovered I never wanted to live in Midtown West and that I love the Gramercy Park area and that is ideally where I want to live. It is quite an expensive area though and there are not a lot of furnished rentals available, so we'll see if I end up there.

That night I was invited for Shabbat dinner by my friend from Australia, Doron, who has been living here for 10 months. It was being held by one of his friends. Doron lives on the Upper West Side in the West 90s which is quite a religious area. Doron's friends are quite observant Jews and keep Shabbat and kosher and it was interesting to see that aspect of New York.

Yesterday (Saturday) I did a little bit of shopping on 5th Avenue (okay a lot) and tired myself enough to have a nap for a few hours. I'm still adjusting to the timezone here - I think I'm almost there now. Last night I met up with Dani and we were heading to birthday drinks for an Australian friend of hers on the Lower East Side. The birthday girl was a girl I didn't know but as she and I were walking to the bar I realised that I did have a very bizarre connnection with this girl, even though I had never met her....

Let me go back to a few days ago when I was on skype and a former client of mine from Australia who is now living in the UK, Daniel, sent me a message asking how I was. I hadn't been in contact with Daniel for about a year, and Daniel and I had always had more of a business relationship than a social one. I tell him that I have just arrived in NYC and am moving here. He says he has some Australian friends living there and could arrange an email introduction, which he did. His friends Rachel and Marty then emailed me and introduced themselves, but I hadn't had a chance to respond as I had been quite busy.

Well, it turned out that it was Rachel's birthday drinks that I was attending that night! Talk about Six degrees! Well, maybe 2 degrees! We went to a bar that is quite hidden away and used to be a bar during prohibition, where they would serve drinks in tea cups to disguise the fact that there was alchohol in them. They still serve the drinks in teacups, which while cute, is somewhat impractical. Anyway, there was a whole gang of Aussies there, there seems to be quite a contingent of us here.

At the drinks I also met an American girl who was nice enough to let me stay at her place for a week and a half once I check out of my hotel as she will be away for most of it. Her place is on the Upper West Side so it'll be good to get a feel for that area and give me some breathing room in terms of finding a place to live!

Well that's all for now. I am going to see a place in Gramercy park today that is available for a month.