It's a hell of a town!
Yes, hi everyone, I am alive and well and livin' it up in Vancouver, British Columbia, CANADA WOO.
Since I am anal-retentive about doing things in order, it may be a while before you get to find out about my Canadian hijinks, but for now, enjoy the rousing tale of New York, New York, with Montreal, New York (AGAIN) and Dallas to follow shortly!
NEW YORK
• After I flew in, I met my parents and brother at JFK, as their flight from Australia had got in around the same time as mine. They had Slight Baggage Issues, in that apparently the bags had to be driven from Australia; they took long enough to emerge onto the carousel.
• Eventually, we got into a taxi which conveyed us to the apartment on Manhattan (W 70th St; right near Central Park). We got there to discover that the apartment had no elevator and we were on the 4th (top) floor. I was slightly underwhelmed with joy at this as Tessie (the bag, in case you’d forgotten) was had clocked in at 27kg for the flight across the Atlantic, and I subsequently had to haul her up all four of those flights of stairs.
• We had a New York Style (or what I’m going to assume is New York style) pizza for dinner, which was huge and basically tasted like someone had spread bolognaise sauce over the base and covered it with cheese. It was frankly delicious. As soon as I get home I am making Pizza Bolognaise. Every night.
• The following day (and it was quite late by the time we got to the apartment, so this was our first full day of doing anything, and, for those playing along at home, the 21st of December (it’s been a while since I’ve provided an actual concrete date). Had proclaimed it for myself a lazy day, because as Elise will affirm, at this point we hadn’t had a single day off from mad touristing, and I was quite frankly exhausted, even notwithstanding the fact that I had spent three hours in the airport and eight hours on a plane the previous day. This day, in the morning, I managed to update the blog to I think Paris? Thus maintaining my admirable standard of being between one and two weeks behind!
• After a lazy morning, however, my cohabitors were keen to be out exploring the city, and the first thing that popped up on their list was the Museum of Natural History, which was actually just down the street. I went along, avid touristing being by now hardwired into my brain, and we enacted stereotypes by splitting up along gender lines: Dad and the Bro went off and looked at animals and dinosaurs, whilst Mum and I headed for Peoples of the World and the gemstones.
• We also watched a show in the planetarium—Cosmic Collision—which was very fancy and narrated by Robert Redford (iirc), but also made me motion-sick.
• That night, we watched Supernatural in its home timeslot of 9/8C, on the CW (which is, imo, the most amusing channel on American TV; c.f. later comments about Yule Log!). It was a repeat, but I hee! hee!ed anyway.
• Having had Pizza Bol for dinner the previous night, we had the more traditional Spag Bol for dinner the second night.
• The third day (we’re talkin’ the 22nd, incidentally), we caught the subway to Chinatown and had Yum Cha (aka Dim Sum) for brunch.
• Then we walked from there through Little Italy and down to Park (I think) Ave, and eventually found 34th St and Macy’s, which was huge and absolutely packed, it being two days ‘til Christmas. Ihadabitofashop and bought a top and a pair of jeans, a bag, and a whole ton of toiletries since I had either lost or run out of shampoo, conditioner, cleanser and moisturiser.
• That afternoon, I did laundry woo.
NEW YORK PART 2
(Helpfully broken up for less frighteningly long blocks of text)
• The next day, Christmas Eve Eve, the 23rd, and a Saturday, we caught the subway down to eyeball the Statue of Liberty, which looks really kinda weeny from the end of Manhattan Island. I believe it looks less weeny if you get up close to it, but I wouldn’t know, having not actually managed that. After our touristic stairclimbing activities in Paris, I am actually quite city-panoramaed out.
• Then, we headed back to the area around 23rd St, and had lunch in an All American Diner Whee! I had a buffalo burger not actually because I was being nauseatingly touristish and trying the weirdest thing on the menu, but actually because we had had buffalo steak way back in Madrid on the tour, and it had been delicious. I am a total convert.
• After lunch, I bought that puffy jacket you may have noticed in some of the later photos. It was from GAP, US$29.99, and has been an absolute lifesaver, because it is so so warm.
• Anyways, we got home from that at around 3pm, then around 4.30pm, my lovely friend Nathalie, a New Yorker born and bred, came and met me at the apartment. She took me to a restaurant called (iirc) Gyuu Kaku, which was a Japanese restaurant where you order meat and veg and sauce, then you grill it yourself on a grill in the centre of the table. Nathalie prevailed upon me to try Gyuu Tan (cow’s tongue), which was very tasty but has a slight squick factor (but was nonetheless very tasty), and I had some chicken and some zucchini too. For desert, I had… s’mores. Which, for my Australian and consequently unenlightened readers, basically comprises a graham cracker (a wheat sort of cracker that tastes vaguely like digestive biscuits but has a more crumbly texture), a square of chocolate, and a toasted marshmallow. So anyway, I ordered the s’mores, and they delivered to me four graham crackers, four squares of chocolate, four marshmallows, and a toasting fork, and I then proceeded to roast my own marshmallows over the Japanese-style grill.
• We had to hurry along, though, because that night, the family and I were seeing…. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA at the Majestic Theatre, on Broadway. Nathalie took me back there, getting impressively un-lost.
• The staging was absolutely spectacular (although, apparently, they haven’t actually changed it since the musical was first performed in the eighties, and speaking of which…), THE MUSIC WAS SO FABULOUSLY EIGHTIES ELECTRO-ROCK. I adored it.
• The most notable difference between the musical and the recent film was that the Phantom was acted very, very differently. Very differently.
• Afterwards, we waited around for Nathalie to come retrieve me again. She’d gone to a friend’s house, and was gonna come back so she could take me back to hers for the night. While we were waiting, The Producers let out across the street, and I had a minor celeb sighting, of Tony Danza, hose name you may no know, but you’d know his face (as I, indeed, did).
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• Then, we stayed up until all hours watching silly videos on YouTube. I showed her a couple of clips from the Chaser (the “Ad Roadtest” of the Nicorette ads… “no Gary no!” and “First in the USA”), for lols.
• The next morning, we got up quite late (by my standards, anyway), and I played The Sims 2: Pets (because I hadn’t tried it before) on Nathalie’s computer while she slumbered on. TS2:Pets was pretty boring, so we went and had breakfast (Nathalie’s mum made PANCAKES), and then I watched Nathalie play this playstation game called Guitar Hero where the console is actually a guitar thingie and you have to try to play songs of varying difficulty.
• We headed back down to Manhattan and met up with one o Nathalie’s friends for a relaxing afternoon of shopping and wandering and drinking of coffee and more wandering. I boughta couple of books, and then around 4.30pm we headed back to the apartment and Nathalie and I had a PHOTOWAR (hence all the pics of her I uploaded).
CHRISTMAS (STILL IN NEW YORK)
• New York really failed me by now snowing. In fact, they had a snow free December, and the temperatures were in the balmy high 50’s to 60’s range (FAHRENHEIT not centigrade!).
• Malcolm and I were the first up, of course, so we turned on the TV and sat down to watch the Yule Log. The CW, one of the American networks, actually broadcasts someone’s hearth with a log crackling away merrily in it for THREE HOURS on Christmas morning. With a soundtrack of Christmas Carols. On Christmas Eve I think they had a docco on it called something like, “The Yule Log: A Log’s Story”, which I sadly did not watch.
• Around midday, we went for a good long walk, across Central Park, along 5th Avenue (the swanky bit), then down to Times Square and back around to our apartment. It took a couple hours, but the New Yorkers were out in force, and it was really enjoyable.
• For dinner, we had turkey, then we turned in quite early, because the next morning, Mum and I had an early flight to…
MONTREAL
(coming soon!)
