Chilling in the Big Apple!

Aaah New York. The city that never sleeps. Where the underground is the subway, the footpath is the sidewalk, and restaurant service is so quick that your (very large) main course is slapped in front of you before the last forkful of your entree has even met your mouth (although is that really a good thing?).

As we've both been to New York before we didn't feel the need to spend much time on touristy-stuff, but instead enjoyed a taste of New York life by hanging out with lots of friends who've been living here for a while. So we enjoyed dinner and drinks at a trendy West Village bar with Nicola, Simon, Daniel and Jen and the New York institution (we love it!) of Sunday brunch with Marie and Paul. Also got to visit Justin and Laurel Moffatt's church which was awesome. The weather was gorgeous so a cycle around central park (another feature of New York which we wish we could take home with us) was a must.

So, it's now time to leave the Big Apple, loaded up with a new pair of jeans, a little too much junkfood in our stomachs and a lot more insight into what the hype is all about (and our verdict is that it's generally warranted). The only mystery that remains is the authenticity (or otherwise) of one of our favourite TV shows Friends - how DO twentysomething New Yorkers with minimum-wage jobs afford spacious apartments right on Central Park and $200 haircuts?? Oh, that and the technical definitions of words like "Schlep", the New Yorker's ability to insert the words "awesome", "like" and "so" ["You are so moving"; "You are so dead"] into almost any sentence, why the question is always "are you done?" instead of "are you finished?" and why it is now more common to say you are standing "on line", not "in line" (what the?!). Although, when we reflected on a large portion of the Australian vocabulary, we realised we can't really criticise.

See youse later...