The Hamptons

I have now been out to the Hamptons on two separate occasions and have had some great times and met some really great people. Before I arrived in the States, I booked into two different Hamptons share houses.
A Hamptons Share house can vary with what is offered and how it works, but typically, the House is shared over the Summer which comprises 16 weekends, and people often purchase a quarter share (4 weekends) or a half share (8 weekends). I purchased a quarter share in a house on Millstone Road in Bridgehampton and 2 weekends in a house arond the corner on Noyac Path. The second house (a bit different to most houses) allows for any number of weekends to be booked.
I spent my first weekend on Millstone Road and my second (this past weekend) on Noyac Path. The two houses could not be more different, and each has its pros and cons. People that stay in the house on Millstone Road are screened to ensure that they fit with the remainder of the house, which tends to be fairly cool, outgoing (dare I say) good looking people, whereas the other house allows all sorts of people. To be somewhat politically incorrect, the Noyac Path house is referred to by the Millstone House people as allowing "Freaks and Geeks" to stay there. And ther are not entirely wrong. Having said that, I did meet some nice people and even some good business contacts there. I also spent most of my time last weekend hanging out with the people from the cooler house even though I was staying at the "Freaks and Geeks" house!
On the positive side for the Noyac Path house, they have maids that cook, clean and make your bed and there's loads of food and amenities that you take for granted like hand towels and hand soap in the bathrooms and lots of lilos for the pool. The Millstone house has none of that, which tends to make you feel like you are staying in a dorm.
Both houses organise outings to the local night spots of THEIR choice, as they get kickbacks from certain places for bringing a lot of people to the club. If you want to go somewhere else, you are likely to get loads of discouragement from the house organisers. I even heard a story about some people that booked a cab to go to an alternate nightspot, and then the house organisers turned around and cancelled that cab! Obviously the house organisers don't go to the trouble of organising a share house for the love of it, they need to make money out of it, but not at the expense of free will!!!
Not having been to a club in the city yet, I can't compare the Hamptons experience to the NY experience of clubbing, but to my mind, as is the case for many things in NY, night clubs are all about creating products that have differing levels of eliteness in order to extract more money from the punters. Most night clubs offer bottle service, which means, if you want to sit at a table you need to purchase bottles of alcohol which can tend to cost upwards of $300 each. On my first weekend, there was a guy that dropped about $1500!
Fortunately, being of the female persuasion, it is entirely possible to get away without spending any money on drinks, but one has to be fairly careful that the acceptance of drinks does not imply another type of obligation... True, this is a universal concern, but New Yorkers tends to be that much more aggressive and crass when it comes to these matters. Further elaboration is probably not suitable for this audience :)
My most recent Saturday night in the Hamptons involved a visit to a club called Pink Elephant, check out the link for photos and a description to get an idea. Outside are poolside-type cabanas surrounded by sand that you have to purchase bottle service for. You need an orange bracelet to go inside and outside, or a yellow bracelet just for outside. I was *lucky* enough to score an orange bracelet. It was a fun night, if not a little over the top!

New Digs - and just in time!

On Tuesday I went to see a place that was advertised in Gramercy, on the second floor in a walk-up building (no elevator). To us Australians, the third floor is actually the second floor. So, I got there and while the apartment he showed me wasn't quite right, there was one on the next floor up that was more suitable, quite spacious and really quiet as it wasn't facing the street. So I took it on the spot (I was so sick of apartment shopping) and moved in that day, checking out of my hotel a day early.

The apartment is actually on the border of Gramercy and Murray Hill in an area nicknamed "Curry Hill" ie. Little India. Ironically, Indian is the one cuisine that I absolutely refuse to eat and here I am living right in the middle of a couple blocks filled with Indian Restaurants! My door is indicated by the arrow in the photo to the right.

That night I decided to walk around my neighbourhood and explore. I am one block away from Park Avenue South and a short walk to Madison Square Park (not to be confused with Madison Square Garden). On my walk I had my first (minor) celebrity sighting - Ilan, the winner of last season's Top Chef!

My first morning in my new apartment there was flash flooding, but I had an empty fridge so I had no choice but to brave the wet and head out to get some food. Despite having an umbrella, my shoes were soaked right through and I could feel the water sloshing in my shoes.

Later (the rain had stopped), I was walking home from the grocery store and I noticed a whole lot of people standing in the middle of the street, most on their mobile phones, looking northward up Lexington Avenue (my street). I wondered what was going on and turned to see huge clouds of smoke billowing from the ground 15 blocks away on 41st and Lexington.

Being in New York, I automatically assumed an act of terrorism had occurred, as was feared by most New Yorkers. I checked to make sure that the smoke wasn't getting closer, (ie. it wasn't a building that had collapsed). I tried to call my friend, Dani, who lives 4 blocks away from the site of the explosion, but all the phone lines were jammed. I went upstairs to my new apartment to see what the local news channels were reporting but it was a good 25 minutes before anything was mentioned about it! (Isn't that bizarre?)

Anyway, it turned out to be a steam pipe explosion underground and one person died (of a heart attack) and there were a significant number of people injured, mainly with burns from the steam. It disrupted the public transport system and they cordoned off quite a number of blocks surrounding the blast site, where no-one could go in or out due to the risk of asbestos in the air. I was quite lucky I had checked out of my hotel early, as my hotel was in this cordoned off area!

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.

Second time is the charm

For those of you that don't know, I finally arrived in New York this week!
This is actually the second time I have tried to get here and I'm glad to report that my arrival has occurred without a hitch this time.

The first time I tried to get to New York was a month ago and I had decided that on my way to New York, to break up the trip and avoid having to go through LA airport, I would visit my friend Todd in Tokyo for 6 days and then head on to New York.

A good idea in theory. A couple days in to my stay there I was wearing new & unstable shoes and walking down some escalators at Shinjuku train station with my friend Todd and I lost my footing and slipped and fell back onto the escalator. I ended up with a few teeth marks on my legs and arms and an extremely painful hand.

It was 11pm at night and Todd and I had been heading home. So we get on the train back to his place (about a 45 minute ride) and I am sitting there in considerable pain thinking that the uncharacteristic lean of my middle finger to the right was probably indicating structural damage.

A word of advice - if you are ever in Japan and happen to injure yourself - make sure it's not at night, because if your not requiring an ambulance, it's going to be very hard to find a doctor on duty at a hospital at night! Todd's Japanese-fluent friend tried 2 hospitals before she found a third hospital in the area with a doctor on duty!

So we went to the hospital, they took some x-rays and I had a rather distinct spiral fracture on my third metacarpal - not good. The english speaking translator/nurse said it was possible I would require an operation. They gave me a splint on told me to come back in the morning to get a cast.

They next day I came back, got my cast and my x-rays. They were very reluctant to part with my x-rays as they apparently needed them for administrative pruposes. I thought this was strange, as I have always been able to take my x-rays with me when in Australia. They were nice (and honest) enough to offer us to take them and get copies made at the local copy shop. We thanked them and said we would return them soon....you figure out the rest!

That day I flew home to Australia to seek treatment. There was no way I could travel on to NY with 2 huge suitcases and 1 working hand and I was not about to subject myself to the medical system in either Japan or New York. Without openly disparaging other countries, it's in stuations like this where, flawed as it is, you do really appreciate our health system in Australia.

So when I returned home and saught medical advice, it was suggested I required an operation. I had 5 screws and a plate inserted into my hand! 3 weeks later I was given the go ahead to head off again, but my hand still has a way to go before it is totally healed and functioning.