Weekend of February 10-11: Bol & Engel...

From here on, I will hardly be on my own until the End of March.

This weekend Ann & Philippe came over to pay me a visit. We had a terrific time! We launched the weekend on Friday afternoon with a traditional ritual with which every decent visit to New York ought to start: a visit to BXL, accompanied by a couple of traditional barley products such as Kwak & Tripel Karmeliet... after which we had to go home to rest (drinking Kwak on a sober stomach isn't the ideal remedy to become hyper-active). Quite incidentally, we decided to play a game of chess, something that would become the weekend ritual for killing dead time between activities & restaurants (we still haven't found out who is superior though, the weekend ended in a tie...).

Saturday & Sunday were spent visiting traditional New York highlights (Metropolitan, Central Park, Soho, Village), and Ann did a thorough inspection of 5th Avenue, after which she declared that actually 'New York is not so different from Antwerp, you have the same shops, only they are bigger here'. Next time somebody claims Antwerp is not a world-class city, I'll refer them to Ann :-). I must honestly admit however that I have to thank Ann for the shopping trip; without her encouraging me to actually enter the shops I wouldn't have found the green sweater that I bought on Saturday.

The culinary moment-de-gloire of the weekend (and again a big thanks for this to Ann & Philippe) was our Saturday evening visit to Nobu (recommended by Christophe & Sophie after their visit to NY 2 months ago): Nobu is probably by far the best Japanese restaurant in NY; the food was exquisite, the interior splendid & the service everything you could wish for. Philippe picked the wine and proved again that his knowledge of wines is unprecedented.

In short, a perfect evening & a perfect weekend, thanks guys!

January 26-28: Long weekend!!!

This weekend my parents, sister & girlfriend came over to New York. For Anouck this was the first visit to New York and this meant of course visiting most of the famous NY attractions: the statue of liberty, Ellis Island (which is by the way a little more than just ‘some packed luggage boxes’ as Wouter describes it J ), MoMA, Times Square, Fifth Avenue & Central Park. Of course, no visit to New York would be complete without having visited BXL, so we managed to force this into our schedule on Sunday Evening.

On top of that, we experienced the coldest temperatures in New York in the last 2 years (approximately -15 degrees Celsius) so the frostbite was again not so far away… All in all, it was very nice to have all of them here & the time went by way too fast as usual...

Looking at that, today I’ve entered the last 2 months of my New York transfer, and it certainly doesn’t seem like I’ve already been here for 3.5 months…

(picture 1: Anouck in the MoMA, picture 2: view on Manhattan from Ellis Island registration building, picture 3: Family Southstreet Seaport)