Saturday January 20: Coney Island

Inspired by one of the books that I recently read ("The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald) and not having visited many of the other New York boroughs besides Manhattan, I decided to take a metro to Coney Island yesterday. Taking a metro to its end point makes you realize just how big New York actually is (the trip took ~1H from downtown Manhattan)

I arrived at Coney Island (the name was given by the Dutch and originally stems from Coneyne Eiland or "Rabbit Island") in the early afternoon and if the temperatures in Manhattan were between 0°C & -5°C, the sea breeze at Coney Island made it feel like -20°C. The view made up 200% for the cold temperatures. I must say I really enjoyed being at the seaside and having escaped from the upheaval of Manhattan into the quietness of the promenade and the beach... I've started to realize that I need nature and open air more than I originally thought...

Martin Luther King Weekend (January 13-15): Montréal

As my new project is taking place in Boston, I have been travelling back-and-forth a lot over the last few weeks so I thought it might not be a bad idea to combine the travelling with another city than New York for once.



Montréal is a city with many faces and is absolutely fantastic (visiting it alone instead of with Anouck is somewhat less fun though...); on Saturday I strolled through the old part of the city (Le Vieux Montreal) which has some of the typical Parisian features; nature-stone mansions, rennaissance churches & little alleys... What struck me immediately was that, given the very low temperatures [-5°C to -20°C] there is not much life on the streets, everybody hides in one of the numerous coffee places [where, opposed to NY, you don't get kicked out after 30'] or in the underground city (the entire city centre is connected through well-lit corridors containing ~2000 shops, theatres & office/residential buildings -> it's perfectly possible to spend your winter in Montreal without ever going outside). A visit to the Downtown area & a fabulous diner at Brontë restaurant concluded the day

On Sunday, given the good weather in the morning, I decided to "climb" (big word for a 233m hill :-) the Mont Royal, Montréal's most famous landmark. Taking the walking tour that goes around the Mont Royal gets you going for a decent 8km walk & takes you to the Kondiaronk Belvedere (see picture 1), the Colline de la Croix (see picture 2) and the Beaver lake (see picture 3), which serves as an ice skating rink in winter and as a public pool in summer.

After that I took a metro to Montréal's most fashionable neighbourhood, the Plateau , a residential neighbourhood (see picture 4) with again lots of coffee places, side-by-side with fashion retail outlets. By the time I got there the weather had turned so cold that I decided that I had the choice between losing my fingers because of frostbite or buying gloves.... I chose the latter.... A visit to the Olympic Village (Montréal organised the Summer Olympics back in 1976) with it's famous skewed tower (see picture 5) concluded the day.

On Monday, I woke up in what seemed like another city; during the night, a blizzard had dropped about 1 meter of snow onto the city and the rest of the day, snow kept falling... which made it a good opportunity to explore the underground city...

Sunday January 7: Chicago [the musical]:

Since a couple of months [and under influence of Al Gore's documentary "An inconvenient truth", which I recommend everybody to go and see], I've started thinking more than ever about climate change. Today proved to be a bizarre climate anomaly; January 7 and it's 22°C in New York, the weather gods are definitely still drunk from having partied too much during the holidays...

That being said, I've visited my first Broadway show: Chicago. Although I was a little reluctant beforehand (tickets are not cheap, even if you go to a TKTS booth [where you can buy same-day tickets at 50% discounts] you still pay around 60$ per ticket) this proved to be just fantastic. The atmosphere, the play, the actors & the music... everything just came perfectly together! I have decided that I definately want to see a couple of other plays before I leave...

Saturday January 6: NY National Boatshow & Central Park

Having read about "The biggest boatshow in the US", I felt that my 6 months in New York wouldn't be spent optimal without having visited this event; unfortunately for me it was indeed a "BOAT" show, meaning that it was stuffed with manufacturers of fishing boats [their stands came standard with a bunch of complimentary fat American fishers], racing boats, cruising boats, look-at-me-I-am-cool boats ... but almost no sailing yachts (which was basically the only thing I was interested in). I still managed to spend about 2 hours inside, which was mainly because I started talking to Victor Mooney, a guy who is determined to ROW accross the Atlantic, starting Dec 1 2007 (all money raised in his campaign will go to fighting AIDS), genuinly a remarkable person!

Afterwards, having come to the conclusion that until now I had only visited the first part of Central Park (that is, the part between 59th & the Metropolitan Museum), I spend the rest of the afternoon reading in the park & found the first bar in NY where you can sit for more than 30 minutes without being kicked out because you still haven't ordered a second drink: Saurin Parke Café at the Northwest end of Central Park, in Harlem.

December 2006:

OK, after 2 months of not being able (or being too lazy) to fill in this blog, I finally decided today that I should at least put a summarized version of the last 2 months on the web.

The first week of December was spent in Boston, attending Harvard Business School's yearly Healthcare conference, after which I stayed in Boston for a couple of days. My housing was provided by my former colleague Jens, who is currently doing his MBA at harvard and lives in the centre of Cambridge (see picture for the view from his appartment). Coming from New York, Boston is such a quiet city: you can actually cross streets not having to watch out for taxi's coming from all directions at high speed to claim their dominance over pedestrians. Going back to new York at the end of the week, I decided I might as well go by train instead of by plane. The Amtrak takes ~3h to get from Boston to New York and crosses 4 states: Massachussets, Rhode Island, Connecticut & New York. The late-autumn (Winter had not set in yet) landscapes full of colours were absolutely stunning & although I had some work to do on the train, I decided to postpone that to the evening, instead enjoying the beautiful sights...

The third week, my brother Thomas, my sister Julie and Manu, my sister's boyfriend, came to visit me. After the expected immigration hassle, they immediately experienced the favourite sport of most New York taxi drivers: ripping of tourists. Although there is a fixed rate from JFK Airport to anywhere in Manhattan (45$), the taxi driver made them pay 80$ [which, to be honest, included a Dutch tourist guide of Manhattan, that one of his previous passengers had probably forgotten]. Welcome to the big apple! The week went very quick (with me sometimes forgetting that I was actually still working); visiting the Metropolitan Museum & the MoMA, walking around in Central Park, going out for drinks, discovering new restaurants [by the way Kitchen 22 was the culinary discovery of the week: a 3-course top-class diner for only 29$...] and I'm leaving out a lot...

We flew back right before Christmas, and to be honest: it became about time, given that I was very Anxious to see Anouck back [okay, I know how this sounds, but that doesn't make it less true... :-)]