nw3 to nyc

Observations on moving my family across the Atlantic


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Bonkers in Brooklyn

I, like many people of my generation, would often watch Eurotrash on a Friday night and titter at Jean Paul Gaultier and his straight-man sidekick, Antoine de Caunes, as they were spectacularly rude and offensive but in lovely French accents. Well worth looking up on YouTube for a blast from the past. It made the designer, Jean Paul Gaultier a household name; it’s hard to believe he is now 60 years old.

Why this trip down memory lane? Well, Gaultier has an exhibition on at the Brooklyn Museum showing an extensive retrospective of his work. It’s an hour long trek from here involving three subway trains (one extra to avoid the steps with the buggy) down to Brooklyn, but helpfully the subway stop on the 2/3 line is right outside the museum. A relief in the pouring rain today. I wrote about the museum a while back, where someone had removed the entire front staircase from the grand facade and stuck a glass monstrosity on the front, but I’ve decided that’s OK, because it’s buggy friendly and the atrium is great for toddlers who like to run. A lot.

The exhibition is fabulous. They have, as you would expect, all of the mannequins wearing frocks, which are all very elaborate and mostly bonkers. But what’s unusual here is that they have used projectors to beam a face onto the heads of the models and they really look like they are talking, breathing, blinking. It’s quite unsettling. Even more unsettling is the model of Gaultier himself as he rambles on in French and English on a podium all by himself. Most of his designs are crazy, s&M style and over the top, but some of the craftsmanship on the frocks is incredible.

Have a look at my pics and see for yourself. It finishes on Sunday, so if you’re in New York for half term, be adventurous and go.

Jean Paul Gaultier talks animatedly

Jean Paul Gaultier talks animatedly

Ladies chatting

Ladies chatting

Medusa gone wrong?

Medusa gone wrong?


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Farewell, White Bear

I was very saddened to read of the closure of the White Bear pub in NW3 earlier this month. The New York Times told me about this yesterday. It’s not a pub I liked a lot, but it is in a lovely location and it’s sad when pubs close. I loved the Holly Bush, the tiny, rickety old pub round the back streets of Hampstead. God I miss a decent pint. Here beer is all craft beer and imported bottles of Stella etc. There are a lot of sports bars, with loud TVs showing sport I barely understand and gassy horrible beer. We have a British gastropub, the Jones Wood Foundry, nearby but I think I’ve complained here before – that they keep the London Pride too cold and that’s just wrong. One of my friends recently told me about visiting another favourite pub of mine, the sticky floored Ship in Soho. Lucky thing. Reminded me about the lovely beer there too. Homesick now.


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A trip down Canal

Off to Chinatown today. I’m searching out exotic ingredients for a special Valentine curry. Yes, I know, romantic stuff. I like Chinatown, I like that Canal subway station has a lift and when you pop out on to Canal (the street) it’s like being in another world. It’s a Wednesday lunchtime, so not busy and there are only a few tourists around. There’s a calm about the place, with locals shopping, eating and walking with a purpose in the bitter cold. I am heartened by the great people in the Bangkok Center Grocery store on Mosco (yep, no w in Chinatown) Street and the masterful way they took my recipe and found almost everything I needed. I am brave and go into two Chinese bakeries and buy random nice looking cakes and buns with the hope of liking something new (and I do – I like Taro buns!).

And after a lovely trip out, I come across these t-shirts hanging from a tourist shop. Who would wear these?

Tourist t-shirts


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Sun, snow and sadness

I’m getting used to running in minus temperatures. It’s bloody hard to start with, but once you get going, you warm up a bit and with just my face exposed to the elements, I’m covered from head to toe. Running along the streets, it’s cold and sunless, despite the fact that I know it is a beautiful sunny day and not a cloud in the sky.  I pop out on to Fifth Avenue and breath a sigh of relief as the light returns and the pristine snow of Central Park beckons. It is lovely.

The 6 mile inner loop road used by runners is clear but the bordered by walls of snow. Vast swathes of the park are just covered in a blanket of white snow and everyone just seems quite happy. I run the bottom half of the loop road from north to south, all the way past the ice rink at 61st Street which looks great in this weather. Too cold to hang out at the reservoir for some stretching today, so I tootle back down to Fifth Avenue and the sun disappears in the shade of the tall buildings of Manhattan.

I pause at Park Avenue as I just miss the lights and am faced with a wall of photographers and TV cameras camped out in the central reservation of Park Avenue. What’s this? I quickly realise it’s the funeral of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s not yet started, but the press are out in force, flanked by many NYPD officers. In the few minutes I wait for the lights, I see no one arrive but the anticipation is great and they clearly expect Hollywood stars to appear at some point to pay their last respects.

The lights change and then I’m off. It’s a surreal pause in my journey today, where sun, snow and sadness mingle together in the freezing streets of New York.


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What is it with the weather?

I still haven’t adjusted to living in a New York winter. I keep expecting it to just rain and be a bit cold. I’m sure it was like that last year, bar one snow episode. But this year, it’s all snow, freezing temperatures and a bit more snow. New York was on tenterhooks last week as the Super Bowl was due to be played at the Metlife Stadium across the Hudson in New Jersey. Jointly hosted between the states of New York and New Jersey, but mostly seemed to be about New York City, not New Jersey  at all; in fact, I can’t remember the name of the town where the stadium is located.

Bitter weather hung on for a long time and I got used to saying, ‘oh yes, it’s minus 10 today’, like it’s normal. I have become a weather obsessive, frequently consulting the weather app on my iPhone. I get excited when the app tells me it’s going to be above 0 degrees Celsius, ‘that’s quite warm!’ I respond. So by yesterday afternoon, as New York bathed in 13 degree weather and it was  sunny and really quite pleasant, I thought that’s it, we’ve turned the corner, no more snow.

Err, no. It appears that the Super Bowl was so powerful, mostly the advertising, that it got the weather to get warm enough to satisfy the players and the audience, melt all the residual snow and encourage me not to wear a hat yesterday. But all that lovely warmness stopped as soon as the game did last night.  When I woke up this morning it was white outside. Snow, lots of it, falling fast. We are due 8 inches today. It hasn’t stopped. Time to hunker down, it may be some time before my hat comes off again.


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When is a museum not a museum?

Now there’s a question. I’ve been to a lot of museums in my life and I can safely say I would know I was in one, lots of old stuff sometimes behind glass, sometimes on the wall, sometimes on the floor, it’s not that hard. But here in New York they have purloined the word museum to mean something quite different. There are two examples of this that I’ve come across so far.

The Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Sounds like it’s full of old dolls, right? Wrong, it’s a giant play centre, guaranteed to induce a headache after about half an hour depending on how hyper the kids are that day. Over three levels, with the toddlers safely ensconced on the top floor, happily building blocks, climbing in and out of the fake bus and fire engine and playing shops with the plastic food. The second floor is an awful Dora the Explorer themed floor of horror that is frequently filled with local school classes, with kids around  6 years old, I’m guessing. Not for the faint hearted. And then the ground floor, supposedly for the older kid, but I doubt E who is about to be 8 years old, would want to spend any time there. It’s $11 a head and filled with bored looking child minders. Somewhere to go maybe once a month when it’s cold outside.

The second example is the Children’s Museum of Arts New York way down town in Greenwich Village. This probably has a greater claim on the word museum, but only just. It has an exhibition space with some stuff that’s mostly ignored by the visiting hoards. This place is much more hands on, with a great under fives artsy area filled with tables covered in play doh, painting, sticking, drawing and funky magnetic shapes. For the short attention span of your average 2 year old, it’s a great haven away from big kids. Beware the ball pond, which where I come from means vastly unhygienic pit filled with small plastic balls that your kids love and you hate. Here it meant a space filled with gym balls where I feared for J’s neck, ability to breathe and survive the whole experience. Not doing that again.

When I was there they had the Beatles playing on the speakers and I was humming away whilst building my magnetic house, which was promptly destroyed by J who had better ideas. I felt rather under dressed as the mums who were there from the neighbourhood are clearly a lot more fashionable than me – but then it is the home of Sarah Jessica Parker, I suppose.

I liked it, but it’s just too far to go for a bit of painting. But a bonus great large Pret a Manger just across the street for that well deserved sarnie and cuppa afterwards.


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Sometimes there’s just no answer

So I go into the local shoe repair shop, where the man behind the counter looks like he has seen a lot of shoes and a lot of polish in his time. I ask to collect R’s black work shoes which needed a new sole. He passes them to me and I look at them and say ‘wow, they look like new’. He looks at me quizzically and responds ‘what? You think I run ‘ot dog stand ‘ere?’ And what exactly am I meant to say to that?


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RIP Avonte

I wrote a while ago about a young autistic boy who went missing in Queens. Months went by and no sign until this week when his remains were found on a beach in Queens. The reporting in the New York Post was shockingly graphic and I don’t think you would ever see such detailed descriptions in the UK press.  I often thought about Avonte, wondering what happened to him. Now at least his family knows and can say goodbye. Rest in peace, Avonte Oquendo.


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The ire of the Upper East Side

It’s been pretty cold again. So cold today that after spending 45 minutes in the local park watching E sledge down the hill I couldn’t feel my nose any more. J wasn’t best pleased either as his hands were frozen, despite his gloves but when you’re 2 years old and getting to grips with the English language, it’s hard to vocalise that, apart from crying that it is.

Unlike my fellow Upper East Siders, who took no time at all yesterday to complain bitterly to the press that the new Mayor was ignoring them. The snow ploughs (plows here) were nowhere to be seen in my bit of the Upper East Side and looking out from our high floor apartment, the avenues near us remained white and the traffic very slow late into the night.

“Getting back at us” screamed the headline in the New York Post yesterday. Mayor de Blasio was not a fan of the Upper East Side and the voters were squarely against him, particularly as he supported the development of a new waste transfer station in the neighbourhood. And the maps that showed where the snow ploughs were nowhere to be seen were pretty similar to the lack of de Blasio votes from 5 November. However today de Blasio turned up on 86 street and Lexington Avenue to reassure Upper East Siders that he was ‘for all the boroughs’ and that the plough maps were missing GPS data, where some of the snow ploughs were faulty. Apparently. Who would dispute that, eh?

Tonight, the roads are clear. It is still bitterly cold, but not even the Upper East Siders could blame that on the Mayor, could they?