We've arrived!

The flight over took 22hrs door to door.  Thanks to Virgin, we had a very comfortable trip and thanks to Donald the Guru who organised our seats.  Our little apartment on Essex is surrounded by every form of cafe, deli and top end restaurant serving culinary delights from all around the world.  Decisions on where to dine are best decided by walking by, so walking is our most common form of transport, closely followed by the subway.  Oh how I wish our train system could resemble the NY subway system.  It's efficient, appears to be on time (at least there always seems to be a train arriving shortly after we stand on the platform) and easy to navigate.

We spent our first day walking - covering almost the entire length of Manhattan, from lower east side to  78th Street, East to West and in-between.   Hmmm, maybe we didn't need to do so much on that first day, but it's hard to stop walking when you're finding such interesting bars - ooops I mean seeing such interesting people and sights !

We spotted our first Santa as soon as we stepped out into the street on our search for a good hearty breakfast (what was I thinking?  every meal is "hearty" in this town!).  Then we spotted a group of Santas, then a guy dressed as a pink rabbit, then some elves, then more Santas.  At first we thought they could be headed for work, but quickly realised there were far too many - en-mass - for that to be the likely explanation.   We learned later that it's a traditional Christmas time pub crawl - SantaCon - where everyone dressed as a Santa receives free drinks at participating bars.  We wondered at some of the queues, who would bother ?  but they did.

Cartier

Santas en-mass

Nigel at Guggenheim

Times Square was jammed - traffic and pedestrians all attempting to keep in the direction intended.  We stumbled (well, banged into is more accurate) into a couple of guys selling half price tickets to a standup comedy club on 78th Street.  Was it a con?  We took the chance.  Glad we did!  Five guys, all with great material, small room (apparently it was the same room Gerry Seinfeld worked).  Two hours of great comedy.  What an amazing first day we had.

We met Uncle Sam on the way