I have to admit I’d been scared of the NY idea for quite a while. It seemed a bit too much like London- an enormous place full of people sucking money out of your pockets while you dithered about with a map trying to get from one tourist trap to another without getting mugged. After two days here I reckon that while there are definitely parts of the island just like that, we’ve lucked out and are in a great location where everything’s walkable, people seem friendly and there are proper, normal, shops and restaurants. Hellz, there’s even a Trader Joe’s about 10 blocks away. Just a question of training Atticus to understand the command ‘Charles Shaw’ to get him to retrieve the occasional bottle of 2-buck Chuck.

The apartment seems bigger than when we viewed it a month ago and with all our familiar charity shop/ikea furniture and knicknacks in place I’m really looking forward to living/ working here… This was the 1st time we had professional movers do it (because it’s a prohibitively expensive process). Basically on Monday two Ecuadorian blokes turned up with a huge lorry and more cardboard boxes, sellotape and packing materials than I’ve seen during our last 10 moves combined. They methodically swept through the house wrapping, stuffing and carting all our stuff into the van til about 6 hours later nothing was left except for us two, our suitcase and 10 months worth of schipperke fur. We did a final clean of the place, then headed round a friend’s house who made one of the best paella’s I’ve ever had for a farewell meal… next morning, we drove to Portland, left the car in storage, taxi’d it to the airport, flew to La Guardia, then ‘supershuttled’ it to our new quarters where the Ecuador dream team were already unloading our boxes.

It’s the 18th floor (the 17th floor in real money). Out of 30 or so. But the lift is very fast. The view is impressive… There’s a Picasso sculpture out side the entrance… we’re between Greenwich Village and Soho. Everyone seems to have a dog, and they all seem a bit better trained than ‘Cus for urban living. That’ll be a project.

Brunswick had more unsecured wi-fi networks than this area mind. I thought that at least one of the 40 odd available networks in this here skyscraper would connect us to the tubes. Mais non. So I’m typing this in a text editor and shall copy and paste it onto the webs when I get to Think Coffee, the nearest caffeine and wifi emporium. No point in getting internet installed before we bugger off to Guadalajara for a month and half tomorrow is there. That said, with no internet, no dog and no telly, productivity is through the roof.

Highlights this week:
Farewell to Maine and Maine-based peeps
NY Restaurants: Dojo, Tartine, and that Indian one.
The Lomography shop
Rediscovering NPR
Pain-free move