1st New York Anniversary

I moved to New York on the 4th of January 2012 (and made a post about it a few days later), it has been a memorable 12 months to say the least (some good, some bad). 

It's equally embarrassing and endearing to think about how nervous I was on first arriving (I had never even visited New York before), for the first week we would make sure we were back in the apartment not long after it got dark and had no idea where anything was or how to get around, a couple of lost lambs.

We have settled in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn and it feels like something I'm happy to call home. The area has a slightly suburban feel to it, probably because of the old victorian houses and tree-lined streets.

(we live in an apartment building a block or so down)

A view from our apartment window

The neighbourhood also features some utterly fantastic eateries and we are really spoiled for choice. The quality of food here in general has been a revelation. Our local favourites in particular include:

Ox Cart Tavern do the best burgers I have ever had. Cafe Tibet is our go-to takeaway option (well, equal with Ox Cart), the ginger chicken is always ordered... I have enjoyed The Farm on Adderly every time I've eaten there although my wife prefers Picket Fence where we have also had some very good meals (the prix-fix menus during the week have offered great value). I ordered food from AM Thai on new years eve and was suitably impressed, it will definite be getting future business from me.

We're about a ten minute walk away from Prospect Park, which is a lovely place for a weekend stroll. Overall it's just a truly nice neighbourhood in which to live. We don't really know anybody in the area yet, I'm a bit of a social leper and too shy to engage, maybe in the future! I did go to the local bar, Sycamore (which doubles-up as a florist), a couple of times during the European Championships in the summer. The local blog, Ditmas Park Corner, has also proved an invaluable source of information.

To cap things off, the journey into the city is quick and easy on the Q-line (I have to make a quick change to get to work in the financial district) which goes direct up to Union Square and beyond. One early moment that will stay with me was when I was heading back after work (when our office was near Union Square), the Q-train goes over the Manhattan bridge, the sun was just going down and produced a glorious skyline and Afghan Whigs' Blame, etc just shuffled onto my ipod. Perfect.

I now work just off Wall Street, so unfortunately don't get those views anymore.

Wall Street

I find fidi boring compared to Union Square, which is snugly in between Greenwich Village and the East Village, as well as having great subway access to the rest of the city. But some of the architecture is cool down here and it's just a short walk to the piers or battery park so it's a good spot for a lunchtime stroll (but I do miss being able to head down to Other Music on a break), so it's not all bad.

The surprising thing about the city is that you can really cover a lot of ground on foot, you think of NYC as this vast metropolis, but in the scheme of things, Manhattan is fairly small (2.3 miles wide at its widest point), it's the little things and places that usually come to mind when thinking about what to recommend here.

Of course, one huge benefit has been the access to concerts, highlighted by my recent post, I've mentioned some local treats but I can't talk about consumables without mentioning two places in the city:

The best coffee I've ever had is from Abraco, a little hole in the wall joint in the East Village. Get the drip-coffee. One thing that has definitely changed since my arrival here has been my coffee consumption, something I didn't really drink back home (I was a typically tea drinker).

Little Cupcake Bakeshop seem to produce cakes that are simply out of this world, every time we are in that part of town we have to go in. My wife always gets the pistachio cake, which is indeed very good, I seem to be doing my best to work my way through the extensive array of goodies.

Another benefit of living here is to see the city change with the seasons, seeing the trees and flowers bloom between Spring and Autumn is truly a joy, although the "aroma" of all the linden trees in the spring takes some getting used to... and the weather in general has been great, the sun is out almost every day, although the summer was brutally hot (and there was one cloudy day in September I found myself slightly nostalgic for grey skies).

The weather can't be mentioned without a couple of pictures of the neighbourhood in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy (which in fairness came out a lot better than many parts of New York).

The storm was pretty close to delaying my trip back to England in November (I was given the all-clear from work the afternoon before my flight), it was nice to be back for a few weeks and I also managed to squeeze in a spontaneous trip to Paris (I'd never been), which does have a certain grandness and eloquence that New York doesn't have (not that it suffers for it), put it down to age and history. Here I am on the second level of the Eiffel Tower.

And just for good measure, a picture of me in my natural habitat:

It was fantastic to see friends and family again, they are just about the only thing I have truly missed since moving away, there might be a couple of other things but nothing ever seems to spring to mind when I have to think about it.

Other highlights of the last 12 months include getting tickets to see both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (see if you can spot me!).

This city does, however, seem to pull you in all directions emotionally, the hustle and bustle busy subway commutes (which admittedly are not as bad as I was expecting), the self-inflicted pressure of keeping up with and trying to get to various events takes a bit of a toll eventually, the cost of living, the crazy healthcare and of course the sheer number of people. They are, however, all part of the experience, and while the perception of NYC from the outside seems to suggest that the residents are rude and unfriendly, I have not really experienced that at all.

A final anecdote on which to end, at a meet-up with friends from a music message board I frequent, one of the visitors to the city remarked that I wasn't a New Yorker (which, I don't really feel like, everything still feels very new to me), at which point, before I even had a chance to agree or disagree, the locals jumped in and defended me, maybe I do belong here.

Hello America!

 
I became a "permanent resident" on the 20th of December, landing in Boston to spend a couple of weeks with family in New Hampshire before heading to New York City.

I set up a bank account with TD Bank a couple of days after arrival (fortunately a foreign national doesn't need a social security number to set up a bank account, but you can't get paid without one and I'm currently still waiting...). All seemed to go smoothly but after a couple of days my card was blocked, when I went into the branch to check why and seeing my details on the computer they had somehow put my middle name as my surname! So I was actually Mr Richard... this was a level of incompetence for which I was unprepared. The account took a little while to get sorted and I had a few other cards blocked over the next couple of weeks, hopefully it's sorted now!

That inconvenience aside, christmas is usually a period of time where vast quantities of food are consumed, this also happens to be the case whenever we visit New Hampshire. A combination of the two led to an ascension of gluttony that would cause Jabba the Hut to blush.

I didn't want to purchase too many things while we were still in New Hampshire as we'd only have to cart them across with us, but while in Bullmoose (I hate to think how much money I have spent in there over the last 8 years) I saw the Stax/Volt 1959-1968 9-CD singles box-set for a good price. It was actually gathering dust so I really had to give it a loving home.

The in-laws have a new dog since we last visited (as well as goats, a horse, chickens, ducks, guinea fowls and probably other species I'm forgetting) called Redford.

a rare moment when Redford is not terrorising me...

We arrived in New York on the 4th of January and made our way to our apartment in Ditmas Park. Greeted by a friend of the landlord who showed us in, after a nervous few minutes where none of us could get the keys to work we finally managed to enter and set our things down. The apartment is great (though the shared heat in this building is brutal, need the windows open and fans going most of the time we're inside and it's January!) and the area seems pretty convenient (I suspect I will do a separate blog about it at a later date). We're about a 20-minute subway ride to Union Square on the Q-line (of course!). Here's a view from our window.

So far we've gotten out and about quite well, experiencing many areas of Manhattan. Had a nice walk along the Brooklyn Bridge (best to walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan for better views, though parts of the view are obstructed due to repairs), drinks in the East Village (and onto Williamsburg, getting home at 3:30am...), record shops in Greenwich Village, and various moments of gawking at the various buildings in the city (and the general prices of just about everything).

Also nipped a bit further south to Coney Island, taking in a visit to the New York Aquarium but not before trying a Nathan's Hotdog and a stroll along the boardwalk.

The Bronx Zoo is a real treat and you need a whole day there to just about squeeze everything in. We were quite lucky because the Red Pandas were on real form, and I'd never seen a Polar Bear or Snow Leopard before. Other highlights included a Mouse Deer (too dark to get a decent picture), Fossa and many others.

I'm not getting these events in order, but in any case. We had a nice walk around Central Park (and we also had a long walk around Prospect Park near where we live), both will obviously be more impressive later in the year, but they're pretty immense as it is. From Central Park we took in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is huge, we whizzed around as much as we could in a couple of hours but you could spend days in there and still have plenty to see.

I obviously haven't had time to indulge in the usual myriad "best of 2011..." lists (though I'll hopefully fit in a music compilation of sorts before the end of the month). My first day of work will be the 16th of Jan (which is a public holiday here for Martin Luther King Jr. day, but our office is still open), by which point I'd have had 4 weeks off, and will have forgotten what it is I'm supposed to be doing! So far it has seemed like a long holiday so it's still too early to tell if I am missing things back home too much, though obviously I'm a little anxious at the lack of (real) football, we don't have any TV channels here (just a DVD player) and I had the misfortune of watching a game of "American" football, which seems like watching real football if only it were played constantly with set pieces, with the ball only being in play for a few seconds at a time. I'm not sure how anyone manages to get through a game without getting extremely drunk. It also proved quite difficult to find an electric kettle!