It amazes me that I travelled 12,000 miles west to be less than a mile from the sights, sounds and flavours of The East. Which is still called The East here. Even though it’s to the west. Hm.

Take a brief stroll from my apartment in the right direction, and you can end up in the middle of Chinatown; which on any given day is crowded with foreigners who can’t speak the language, or read the signs, posing for photos and staring at the natives. A bit like Times Square with the ethnicities reversed really – which makes it quite an improvement.

The fruit on stalls lining the street is exotic, scandalously cheap and not to be bartered for. The jewellery and electronics within the glass-fronted shops named only with symbols I can’t begin to read are equally tempting, but unless you speak the language, haggling for them may not end too well.

Earlier this week was my first trip to Chinatown with someone who could show me what was really worth looking for – my Chinese workmate – and he decided to expand our horizons and take us to a traditional southern dim sum restaurant. I’m glad he was with us, because I’m not sure I would have managed to actually get any food if I’d gone by myself.

The premise is simple. You sit at a table, drinking lots of tiny cups of traditional tea (a bit like green tea) and every now and then a cart full of small dishes of wonder and joy comes past. Some rapid speaking in Chinese later, some of these dishes appear on your table, and you hesitantly pick them up with chopsticks and try to find out what they are. Alternatively you can ask your Chinese friend and get such helpful advice as “we call this ummm… [he looks in an iPhone dictionary] entrails. Flour entrails.” or “this is fish.”

Speaking of fish, there were a set of lovely, decorative fish tanks in the front window of the restaurant. Or so I thought, until someone wandered up with a net, took one of the fish out, and brought it to the table next to us 5 minutes later.

Anyone for lunch?

Xx

Takeaway – by which I, in the inexplicable British sense of the word mean ‘delivered food’ – is amazing in the USA. I once raved in an older blog about the joy of Deliverance in London which offers most types of food you can imagine to your door within 30 minutes; and will also take on pretty much any other request you care to make of them (“a backgammon set, a rare steak with McDonalds’ chips and a Thermos of tea? Certainly sir, right away sir.”)

Whilst impressive, you have to remember that’s a single, little-known company with really high premiums. Over here, it’s a brave new world: on seamlessweb alone there’s 175 places I can order from (20%+30% discount? yes please) with a couple of clicks. Want some Scandinavian food perhaps, or maybe a choice of 26 Japanese offerings? It’s fantastic. And I’m not sure I’m using that to mean good.

Those aren’t just specialist places either – it seems everywhere delivers around here, it’s just expected. If you want a Big Mac a lot more than you want to walk down the stairs and burn off 5% of the calories that come with it, just call up your local store. Hey, I’m sure if you’re a regular you can just leave them a key and have it delivered straight to your sofa. If you tip well, the delivery boy will probably even place it in your mouth and wipe away the clotted remains of yesterday’s BBQ sauce from your shirt with the extra saliva that drips from the side of your lips as he stuffs the burger into your face.

Yes, that is a KFC Double Down inside a Krispy Kreme. Yes, that’s serious.

Living here could be seriously detrimental to my figure, but the scary thing is that now I’m surrounded by so much excess, I don’t really know how to escape the seemingly inexorable slide into obesity. The portions, everywhere, are just bigger than is needed. Not so much that you’ll leave a chunk of uneaten food, but so much that once you’ve cleared your plate you don’t feel like doing much more than lounging in front of the TV and being assaulted by advertising. Welcome to the American Dream.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go re-warm the chocolate chip cookie that came free when I ordered this behemoth:

Xx

Rather than just flitting from bar to bar to home to office {repeat ad infinitum} I decided to spend Sunday morning being a bit more touristy and enjoying the sights that 46million people a year come for. Stats are all quite crazy when it comes to New York though: there’s 40,000 location shoots in any given year; and 1,580,000,000 subway rides a year – more figures available here.

So, I strolled out of my apartment, and along the river to the infamous Brooklyn Bridge. Before I got there though, I was thrilled to find a great little farmers’ market tucked away (though clearly not unknown) underneath a bridge by the side of the river. My day was already made when I found that they had Landaff cheese, which is Welsh-inspired and made in New Hampshire; and so much better than anything I’ve found in supermarkets here yet.

The bridge was beautiful, and is always fun to cross – tourists on one side and annoyed cyclists on the other, separated only by a single painted line, with predictable effects – and I’ve put a bunch of photos of the views from there up on my Flickr page. But, what really made me smile were these little pleasantries (and wonderfully obscene responses) tacked along the temporary walls of the Brooklyn side, where there’s some construction going on right now.

A couple are below, I’ve uploaded a full set here – enjoy.

Brooklyn, when I got there, was equally wonderful. Despite the 19 NYPD cars that drove past with their sirens on.

Xx

Today was my second Thanksgiving dinner, and if things keep increasing at this exponential rate (as I have every reason to believe they will) I may very well explode next Thursday.

The first, barely even worthy of note, was a small affair at the office. Some roast turkey, gravy, mashed potato, cranberry sauce…all very nice, and the somewhat sketchy quality greatly improved by the fact that it was quite literally a free lunch.

This evening’s offering shone by comparison. It was organised by a company called NYC Navigator, who, as far as I can tell, have been hired to generally be awesome whilst I’m in New York. Their first contribution was to turn the application process for a social security number into a piece of cake (this time alas, I’m not being literal); second was a bag of goodies (which I promptly lost); third was tickets to Sigur Rós; and fourth was an international Thanksgiving dinner.

A bunch of the business graduates from Thomson Reuters were there (for any strangers reading this: I’m on the technology graduate scheme there and am fantastically good-looking) alongside a few other British expats, Russians, Mexicans, et al. None of us really knew what we were doing – I’m not entirely sure the cake was meant to be the first course – but equally we had no complaints about the many courses of food that magically appeared in front of us.

Thanksgiving is non-religious, doesn’t involve giving presents, has a fairly half-arsed history and doesn’t seem to involve anyone trying to sell me anything or make me dress up, or sing, or well…anything. Other than eating lots. And drinking lots. And shouting at American Football on TV. On Thursday I’ll be celebrating it with a real-life American family, and am set to enjoy cranberry jelly. Not to be confused with cranberry sauce.

Brilliant.

Xx

You know what the funniest thing about New York is? It’s the little differences. I mean, they’ve got the same shit over here that they got back home, but it’s just, just here it’s a little different.

Example?

Alright, well you can’t walk into a movie theatre and buy a beer. And, I don’t mean just like a paper cup, I’m talking about a glass of beer. And, in New York, you can’t buy a beer in McDonald’s. You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in New York? They call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese; they’ve got the metric system.

But I digress. Let’s get back to booze.

You can buy beer or hard cider in a supermarket here, but for anything stronger you have to go to a designated liquor outlet. Hard cider, by the way, is well…cider. Cider, is unfiltered apple juice, and apple juice is a clear sugary drink. Clear?

Drinking in public is illegal, but that’s never been an issue for me to date. Provided you keep the alcohol in a brown paper bag, and it’s not in a playground at 10am, you’re pretty much fine as far as I can tell. On Marathon day some police came by as we were pouring beer from our coolers (Hashers are well-organised when it comes to drinking) into red plastic cups – just like those in countless American University movies – and just nodded to us.

I went out for a pub lunch one Friday with guys from work – as was the cast-iron tradition back in London – but fortunately I was the last one the waitress asked when it came time to order drinks. I was a little disbelieving that everyone else had gone for Cokes, but later learned that I would have got some very odd looks if I’d ordered a beer in the middle of the workday.

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I’ve just come back from an open jam session, where I would have struggled even if it hadn’t been well over a year since I played bass with any conviction. I’ll hopefully head back and play with those guys again, but until that time I intend to practise daily so I don’t embarrass myself quite as badly; I’ve finally just bought a copy of the Real Book to speed things along.

First though, I need a drink to forget quite how badly a couple of those standards went. A whiskey at home is the same anywhere in the world.

Xx

No, I haven’t joined the BNP, but I have made another decision that will upset my mother and may be ill-advised. Or may be awesome. I’m not saying that the BNP is awesome by the way, the analogy just got away from me a bit and I don’t have time to think of another one.

I’m going to be in New York for Christmas. Technically I might end up in New Jersey on the day itself, but that’s basically a suburb of Manhattan so I’m sticking to my claim.

I struggled with this one for a while; I was away for Christmas and New Year’s a couple of years back (in NC and NY – and had so much fun I decided to come live here) so feel a bit bad being away again, and this time there’s also the risk I might get a bit lonely over the holidays. Whilst I’ve met tons of fun people here and have things to do every night, I haven’t yet really found a lot of friends here.

But, I’ve been invited to a family Thanksgiving in New Jersey next week (I’m inordinately excited about this, I only have the vaguest understanding of what Thanksgiving entails but the whole concept seems fantastic), and to a completely separate family Christmas in New Jersey, and I’d be letting down those I promised I’d take full advantage of the city if I didn’t go out and enjoy these.

There may still be times I wish I had my family & friends around, but I’m optimistic for now; and I promise I’ll try and chat to everyone via Skype or phone around Christmas. Email me your addresses if you like cards, and don’t hold out too much hope for diamonds in the post (though Christmas shopping in NYC is definitely on the cards soon.)

Happy holidays.

Xx