It's the weekend, and it's time to go into manhattan, and see what's happening! I'm concentrating on Chelsea today. I started with an antique market that takes over two floors of a decrepit parking lot between w24-25 off 6th ave. The space is divided into different lots manned by the sellers who specialize in different things - old manolo blanik shoes, furs, silverware, printing press pieces, and general flea market junk. Fascinating to forage through but nothi...

My first day in New York has been spent taking care of the basics! Like cleaning... Unpacking.... Laundry I am staying at my friend Linda's apartment in scarsdale, a quaint village 30 minutes outside of central manhattan. Tudor style architecture features heavily, and there are lots of trees that look naked without their spring foliage, but I can see buds starting to appear. The village has everything I could want, a supermarket, restaurants, a particularly goo...

It all started off so well..... I got up for a final stroll around the garment district and got CHEAP exercise shoes (and retired my old ones. I had an authentic pastrami on rye from an oldstyle deli that could have fed 4 (here you eat what you want and leave an almost full plate, the wastage makes me how they all make money). Then the street got closed off for filming scenes from the new men in black movie, and a seriously expensive winnebago pulled up, the kind...

It's raining it's pouring.... It's starting to annoy me as it is not the nicest weather to be hanging around parks and walking the streets! I headed out to madison park to see the flatiron building and the market stalls. The flatiron building is built on a triangular slither of land and is very beautiful. Opposite it is a cluster of market tents with mostly ethnic food - streetcart Mexican tacos, Belgium frites, tea ( scarce around here!), spices and chutneys, a...

More neighbourhood exploration - starting from a different point in Chinatown (the more authentic part) I walked through blocks and blocks of Chinese businesses and apartment blocks. It is very obvious this is the cheap part of town, nothing very beautiful or even functional about it. I then moved into the lower east side. This area started it's life as tenement slum buildings, overcrowded, unsafe, ugly, and the area still is pretty oppressive. However, in some p...