New York... part 3

Thank God for late check-out! We staggered out of the hotel around noon, weighed down with bags and a hangover caused by Daryl’s favourite “Delirium Tremens” and an even scarier beer he recommended called “Arrogant Bastard”, into Charles and Laura’s flat, our home for the next five days.
We filled the afternoon with a tour of the Tenement Museum and a walk through Lower East Side and then Little Italy.

NY is famous for its immigrants and this walk showed us why. From what my friends tell me, today’s immigrants arrive, rent a shoebox flat, and find a familiar bar to hang out in, probably just like their Italian, Irish and German predecessors a century before. But the Tenement tour showed us how much tougher the old guys had it.
We saw grubby crowded landings with no lights, heating or water, and rooms reconstructed with original artefacts to show how families struggled to cook, wash and relax in their tiny dark spaces.
The building had dozens of pointless brown-painted windows built into internal walls, an early attempt by landlords to circumvent public health laws. We also heard the fairy tale story behind the museum itself: a house that lay boarded up for generations until someone looked inside and found a century-old time capsule and a new vocation as a curator.
After that we walked through Little Italy, thriving with pavement restaurants and Italia football shirts, and Chinatown, where we heard no English at all.
Queuing later outside a restaurant with Charles and Laura, the sky clouded over at sunset in a spectacular fashion, bringing a crowd of amateur photographers out into the street.

If they were tired after a long week, they didn’t show it. C&L had us up, coffee’d and onto our hire bikes early on Saturday morning for a tour around Manhattan. We pedalled along the East Hudson past the replica tallship HMS Bounty (used in the films “Mutiny on the Bounty” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”), past the spot where a US Airways Airbus crash landed in icy water last January, a marina of stupidly flash motor-yachts, Ground Zero where the construction of the controversial 105-floor Freedom Tower is taking place, Wall Street, and over the Brooklyn Bridge to the fabulously named district of Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), a fancy former dock area, like London's Shad Thames. We then pedalled, a bit wobbly, back to the East Village via some of their favourite places – a German been hall, a wine bar called Grape and Grain, a cocktail bar, sake bar and a fancy icecream shop (chickheaven).

New York … part 2

Wednesday morning and we were back in New York again with a fantastically empty week stretching ahead of us. I lazed around Jess and Brian’s Latino neighbourhood of Jackson Heights while C honed her Carrie Bradshaw skills, lunching with Abigail and shopping all afternoon.
On Thursday, we left our generous and long-suffering hosts - thank you so much J&B!! - and decamped to the Hilton in Times Square, in the heart of the midtown buzz, courtesy of C’s airmiles.
Hopping into a yellow taxi cab, we went to Columbus Circle, HQ of the Time Warner empire and the CNN studios. Colleague Yana’s husband, Richard Morris, works there as a producer and had offered to show us around, an irresistible offer for both of us, especially as C’s new job in September might see her in front of TV cameras again.
Richard works for a daily current affairs talk show hosted by Campbell Brown, America’s female answer to Jeremy Paxman. In a very informative tour, Richard talked us through the production cycle for each one-hour show, from brainstorming topics, booking guests, morning editorial calls to live filming. A hot topic was whether the news station should broadcast videos of Iranian election riots, such as mobile phone footage of a woman shot by security forces. Apparently, CNN initially broadcast the clip, but after an urgent debate about verification and the risk of manipulation, decided not to show it again. It was a fascinating glimpse into editorial life in TV, where technology and reach are so different from the print world.
We visited the news studio with its famous touch screen where election results come through, Larry King’s studio (above), an editing booth and the control room. This high-tech bunker – which Richard saved for the end - is where the team of producers and directors edit the show as it goes out, directing and mixing camera shots, adding music and graphics, and counting in ad breaks with scientific precision. It is a dark room with rows of swivel chairs facing a wall made entirely of TV screens. Each seat has a flashing panel of switches, a bit like a flight deck. The room was empty when we went in, but you could still feel the adrenalin.
We emerged into the sunlight – many thanks to Richard for sparing his time – and headed to Greenwich village for my highlight of the week so far, a crawl of NY bars and beers! News of Michael Jackson’s collapse broke as we arrived in the first bar, triggering the first of many unprintable jokes from Jeff (surfer dude we met in Cambodia), Daryl (from Euromoney days, now at Pearson) and Charles. Strangely, I cannot remember too much more after ...

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Heidelberg

I'm now in Heidelberg for two weeks, following an intensive German course at the "Collegium Palatinum". C, who is in Frankfurt for a dental operation over the same period, dropped me here on Sunday after a relaxing day at her parents' house chatting in rusty German and trying to hide the foul hangover that Mac and Lucie inflicted the night before on Lower Marsh.
My host family runs a metal bashing business from a workshop in front of the house. Four of the six children have left home and the parents rent the spare rooms to various odd-bods, currently including a German theatre set designer, a super-earnest public health researcher from Harvard, a demographer from Burkina Fasso, a jurist from Budapest and me. As the only language student, I get to eat dinner with the parents and their two teenage sons, quite entertaining although the father is a little obsessed with house prices. I think he's also the one who made the weird metal scultures that dot the house.
At breakfast, I have a table for one in the kitchen and never see the others, perhaps they're still in bed.
The house is in Handshuesheim, a suburb of out-of-town stores and farmland north of the old city. The jurist, who has been coming to Heidelberg since 1968, told me that the locals have been trying to form a break-away republic from Heidelberg but no one has taken them seriously so far.
Twenty minutes bike ride across the river Neckar is the old town, beautiful old squares and ornate pubs and shop fronts. The school is in a high-ceilinged villa next to the law faculty and a short walk from the pub area, which we will explore tonight.
I am nearly 20 years older than the other students, who come mostly from eastern and southern Europe and the states, and the only Englishman. The students are shy but friendly and speak English to each other during the breaks, though I am stubbornly sticking to German. Bets on how long that lasts?
Tomorrow we will spend the afternoon on the Philosopher's Walk.
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ps - more NY blogs to appear here soon...

Rhode Island

I know, we are behind with the blog... sorry! But we are catching up and will post more in the next few days.
So on Monday we spent the night at Jessie and Alex's house in Rhode Island, the house that Alex built with his bare hands (and some help from me, if you look carefully above the front door you can still see the plank I nailed on). It's always impressive to visit and think back to the patch of mud that Alex showed me five years ago. We make a good construction team, no doubt about that.
When we arrived Jess was baking cookies to welcome Ian, who is now SIX, back from his first day at summer camp. Ian lost no time showing us how Luke Skywalker stands with a light sabre, which was lucky as I had forgotten, and telling us all about camp and his baseball team. He is a great talker and very entertaining. Alex then told us about his windfarm business and the big project they have won to install 60 turbines, good luck! Then we had a lovely evening of homecooking, whisky drinking and gossiping.
Next day we took our hire car down to Newport, the seaside town favoured by millionaire industrialists at the beginning of the last century. It has a Great Gatsby feel (though far from Long Island); the centre piece is Bellevue Avenue, a street lined with swanky mansions in various European styles. To C's delight, we visited The Breakers, the 70-room summer home of the Vanderbilts, and had an hour's upstairs/downstairs tour, taking in the sea views, gold-inlayed dining room, platinum-inlayed music room and dozens of slightly gaudy but impressive rooms.
The tour tells how the house was built and lavishly decorated in only two years, with whole rooms assembled in France and shipped in boxes, Ikea-style.
There are also tales of famous parties, the social heirachy of the day and the sad family history.
From one millionaire's mansion to another, that evening we drove back for a dinner party in NY's Upper West Side hosted by our mergermarket boss Charlie in his newly acquired "brownstone". Rick proudly showed us around, while caterers made dinner for a room full of editors (not sure what the collective term for editors is, a correction?) That was a great evening too, and a nice boozy way to start thinking about work again
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New York ... part 1

Like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, I have a long and enduring love affair with NY – how can one not love a city that is at the same time full of familiar sites and new discoveries, where the streets are constantly buzzing yet a short walk through parts of Central Park makes you think you are in a forest far away from all the craziness, where you meet people from all over the world who all share my enthusiasm for the city ... what can I say, I just LOVE everything about this place!!!!! Our love affair started after a weeklong trip to the city that never sleeps with the Raisig clan in 1997, blossomed during a short visit a few years later and fully came into bloom when I spent 6 months working there. Ok, enough of the smoochiness otherwise my HTB may get jealous!
We have arrived in NY on Friday and take up Jess and Brian’s kind offer to house us for a few days ... little do they know what they are letting themselves in for  A short trip from the airport takes us to their wonderful flat in Jackson Height’s, Queens. Both J and B are very artistic and so their flat is full of little quirky touches which we will shamelessly copy as soon as we are back in HTB’s flat in London. Our two hosts are out-and-about and so we just drop our bags and no 10 minutes later are on the F train over to Manhattan where we meet my good friends Abby and Charles for a speed dating session disguised as a salsa class ... seeing that Abby and I are both spoken for we feel it wise to leave the venue after the lesson and dinner and spend a wonderful evening sitting in a street side bar. When the evening draws to a close, HTB and I discover that getting home by cab is not an option ... please learn from our mistake: DO NOT MENTION that you want to go to Queens before you are seated in the cab, buckled up and well and truly on your way! We spend the entire w/e with J and B and afterwards, HTB and I once again remark that really the highlight of our trip is the fact that we can spend some serious time with our friends! J and B take us along to a wonderful bbq where delicious food is accompanied by far too much wine and beer and interesting conversation, after so many weeks on the road and only eating in restaurants it is a real treat to be in someone’s home and eat home cooked food! Sunday we go for a bike ride in Central Park and chat the afternoon away in a little bar in Long Island City. In the evening J and I pretend we are domestic goddesses and cook the entire content of their recently delivered veg box ... yummy!
Next we are off to Rhode Island to visit Greg’s friend Jessie, who along with her husband Alex and son Ian lives in a beautiful New England-style wood house in the middle of the RI countryside!

Traitor!!!!!!

It only took one day for my HTB (husband-to-be) to be seduced by SF and to now proclaims it ... his favorite city in the US! While I am still reeling from the shock, I have to admit that I can see the attraction – the city is buzzing but at the same time laid back, there is a huge focus on an outdoorsy lifestyle and generally having a good time, the weather (at least while we were there) was near perfect with balmy sunshine and a light breeze, the bay is right there ready for you to go windsurfing or running and cycling along the shoreline, the architecture where is survived the big earthquake and fire of 1906 is amazing, it's streets are filled with quirky cafes, bar and restaurants all serving locally grown food – a real SF craze by all accounts! Last minute planners that we are, we ended up only having a single full day in SF which does not do the city justice but we still had an amazing time.
I, for once, got up early and went on a walking tour of Victorian homes. We wandered around a neighborhood called Prospect Heights admiring this amazing houses and learning what a “painted lady” is ... NO, not that kind of painted lady, you people with dirty minds!!!! A SF painted lady is a Victorian house in which the redwood of which the house has been build has been painted in at least three different colors. Originally the wood was painted gray, white or brown to fool neighbors into thinking that you were able to afford the much more expensive stone to build your home ... entertaining considering that your neighbors were doing that same, thinking they were fooling you :) Anyway, since then however the owners have done away with wanting pretend that there houses are made of stone and they now just go crazy with the paint pots ... so you have houses that are white, with purple cornicing, pink window frames and gold gingerbread which is that lattice work that decorates the houses – that looked amazing!!!!! I then met my HTB for a cycle tour but was so taken by these little go-carts that you can rent that I bullied the poor chap into renting those and zipping around in them instead ... BOY, was I foolish!!!!!While he was loving every minute of it, I was scared within an inch of my life and at two stages had to even get out of the little thing to push it up the hill because it was too steep and the little soapbox's engine to weak to make it up alone. That said ... going down SF's famous Lombard Street was amazing and I am sure much more exciting in our soapbox than in a car – please see video!
In the evening we meet my old NY friend Ryan and his partner Rhonda for dinner in a bar called 21 Amendment – geeks may like to know that the 21 Amendment was the amendment that lifted prohibition. After a very tasty meal made with the afore-mentioned locally produced ingredients (the menu even told you which farm the beef came from!!!!!), the HTB and I went on a little pub crawl ending up at the rather swanky W Hotel and few G&T's rounded off what was a perfect day in SF!!!
Having said all that ... NY is still my favorite city in the US and so I am super excited about getting on the plane and visiting this fabulous city!!!!!!!

Mendocino to Santa Cruz

Mendocino is where East of Eden was filmed. It's a small, 19th century settlement of sun-baked wooden houses, complete with whitewashed picket fences and flowery gardens.
We spent an hour there, breaking our drive south on the California 1 highway.
Until Hollywood abandoned it a decade or so ago, the town was the setting for Murder She Wrote and dozens of other films. The inhabitants now are mainly kind-faced coastal folk who make their living selling tea cakes and - as this is the West Coast - cultivating marijuana.
Back on the road, we passed clifftops and hairpins on our way to San Francisco (without flowers in our hair), and crossed the Golden Gate bridge around 8pm as the sun was setting. This meant we had completed our overland journey from Vancouver with a couple of days in hand, so we carried on to a motel in Santa Cruz.
A word on American motels. These places are brilliant - cheap, all with internet, big rooms, no nonsense reception, and if you're a fan of cheesy films about outlaws on the run, strangely familiar. I loved them.
The main attraction in Santa Cruz is the boardwalk, where you can ride ancient rollercoasters, eat colourful junkfood and shop in Momo's beach shack. We stayed two nights in our motel, walking around the town and beach and visiting the world famous Mystery Spot, a brilliant outfit that turns a garden shed into an international tourist attraction by building it on a slope. Apparently, it is situated above pieces of space metal planted years ago by alien visitors, and the normal rules of physics don't apply. Mysterious indeed!
Next morning, with my sense of balance honed by the space metal, I took a surf lesson. Thanks to a timely shove from John, my professional surfing coach (now there's a job), I managed to stand up and ride half a dozen little waves into shore, along with about a hundred other learners, mostly aged 12 or below. I finished utterly exhausted but feeling ready for Hawaii. C, who had been waiting patiently on the beach, suggested we go to San Fran first, so that's the next stop.
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Northern California

We found where they filmed (bits of) Jurassic Park; no, not the side of California Highway 1, but in Redstone National Park.
We arrived in the park after leaving Oregon and spent most of the day there, driving and walking through the prehistoric forest. Redstone trees really are staggeringly, neck-achingly big. Stands of them line the roads and even the small ones are enormous.
The trunks are as wide as a house and 350 feet tall; anyone walking by immediately looks like a toy and feels like an insignificant little blip.
According to the blurb they used to grow all over America and Europe, but the mists of Northern California suit them very well and they are still here (apart from the thousands that were cut by loggers during the gold rush). I was fascinated and awed; these trees inspire respect.
So, like good tourists we paid $4 to drive through one with a road carved in the middle, and then took turns photographing each other shrinking into the giant forest. On the ranger's advice, we also drove down a dark, steepish track lined with ferns and Redwood stumps, half-expecting a dinosaur at each bend, to Fern Canyon, a spooky high-sided river bed with ferns lining the walls and strewn with fallen logs. It's highly atmospheric, though now best known as a setting from Jurassic Park. Movie buffs might like to know that some Star Wars scenes were shot nearby too.
After dark, C bravely drove us along the Redstone-lined Avenue of the Giants and we spent the night, after too many hours driving, collapsing into a very retro motel at Laytonville.
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Interesting, Oregon

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd would have loved Oregon, as it is full of silly place names. Their book "The Meaning of Liff" matches place names with things that have no word in the English Language, such as "FARNHAM (n.) The feeling you get about four o'clock in the afternoon when you haven't got enough done; PAPPLE (vb.) To do what babies do to soup with their spoons; and EMSWORTH (n.) Measure of time and noiselessness defined as the moment between the doors of a lift closing and it beginning to move."

In Oregon, home of Yankton and Sitkum, they would not need to be so imaginative. Sunny Valley, Pleasant Valley, Gold Hill, Sweet Home and Happy Camp give a fair idea of the Oregon state of mind (as long as you don't visit Hemlock).

There are plenty of websites listing silly place names but here are some that jumped off the map as we got into day two of our big drive (Seattle to San Francisco). Damascus, St Paul's and Lebanon; Goose Nest, Remote, Finn Rock, Swisshome, Denmark and Norway; my favourites Goble, Lookingglass (not to be confused with north Oregon's Looking Glass), Wagontire and Whisky Peak. Just spare a thought for the people who live in Boring.

We've passed the Oregon Dunes, a field of 500ft high sand dunes stretching 3 kms inland, and stopped for a walk around Eugene, a classic sprawling town of clapboard suburbs and downtown businesses where it would be impossible to live without a car (or a thai-dye t-shirt, if the local market is any guide). After about 400 miles we're now in a motel in Bandon, less than three hours to the California border.
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Birthday birthday girl

Apparently, if you travel across the International Dateline on your birthday then you don't grow any older. But if you go across it backwards - as C did last week - you get two birthdays!
C insists that she is only one year older than before, but somehow still argued for two presents and two parties. So we spent the first part of our 36 hour long Sunday in Tokyo lunching with Chani, Dani and Figgi; the second on board a Japan Airlines plane (no upgrade, before you ask); and the last part on the beach at Vancouver with Mark and Ling and a serious case of jetlag.
It was great to see M&L, nearly two years after the left London. They are now living the good life close to the beach, blending in with lycra-locals and claiming to be completely used to the alarming chirpiness of west coast Canadians. They've just opened a funky gaming store (www.cheekymonkeygames.ca) but still found time to take C handbag shopping and indulge me in a little beach-side "frisbeer".
The surprise birthday present for C was a half-hour seaplane flight across the water to Victoria BC followed by a whale watching trip. I think I'm still in credit for that one. We followed two Orca killer whales dipping in and out of the water for an hour, spotted an eagle and heard the story of lucky Thomas Argyle, a favourite story among the locals.
Argyle was the lighthouse keeper at Race Rocks in the late 1800s and so poor he had to swim for abalone and mussels in the freezing water to feed his six children. Then one day he started buying supplies from the mainland with gold coins. When he died he still had not spent all the treasure he'd found from the wrecks around the rock (bit of a conflict of interest if you ask me).
After that we visited my old Windlesham and Salamanca friend, Andrew Trinder, his wife Lara and baby rugby-player, Julian, before flying home for a pub quiz with M&L and a spot more jetlag.
We're now in Seattle, highlights so far: having our picture taken outside the original Starbucks (hmm, perhaps we spent too long in Japan); seeing fresh fish being caught at Pike Market (they throw each fish sold across the store front) and watching a honky tonk piano man busking in the sunshine.
Next stop - the SOUTH
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