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... :-)]