New York

Well this post has been a long time coming. It's literally been a year since I was in New York and I'm only just getting around to posting about it (oops.) In case you weren't a reader of my blog a year ago I took 5 months off life and went around the world. If you're interested in seeing any photos from my time in Iceland, Europe or Egypt you can check out my travel tag. I spent an incredible two and a half months in the US so there'll be a couple more posts coming after this one - and no, it shouldn't take me another year to get to them!

Knowing that I was going to be there for a month and that I could settle in, my little room with a loft bed and enough space to unpack all my things, the great apartment I stayed in that was filled with art and sunlight, my host Jenaveve and her awesome bunch of friends who were always around and who made me feel so welcome and invited me along to their parties, Jenaveve's two dogs Henry & Seamus and all her friend's dogs too, a big brunch of French toast with a bunch of her friends, hanging out on the rooftop in the sunshine and a BBQ dinner with five dogs and sweet potato waffle fries and ice cream cones, seeing baby angel Drake play at Forest Hills Stadium, buying Rolling Stones and The Beatles 7"s for $3 from a street seller outside of Columbia University, being stopped in the street by a psychic and having a reading with her, meeting up with my wonderful friend Will who I met on my tour of Egypt, getting self serve salads and mini baked goods and rose & elderflower lemonade from Whole Foods in Union Square and sitting on the second floor overlooking the park, hanging with Chelsea on a rooftop in Brooklyn with a view of Manhattan, buying gorgeous vintage dresses from the Artists & Flea Markets in Williamsburg and running into a group of Australian women on a vintage shopping tour of America, seeing Bad Brains, Trash Talk, Valerie June and Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings at Afropunk Festival, searching for years for my perfect pair of vintage Ferragamo Varas and finding them at a flea market in Brooklyn and the seller discounting them for me without me even asking, reading in the grass in McCarran park on a Sunday afternoon, mailing home 27lbs (about 12kgs) of records, seeing amazing rare and signed books at a special exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum by Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and more, going to New Jersey for the day and eating the best cannoli of my entire life from Carlo's Bakery (the one from Cake Boss) and paying my respects at Allen Ginsberg's grave.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Lucky Charms, lavender lemonade and peanut butter pretzel vegan doughnuts from Dunwell, tonnes of delicious food at Smorgasburg, amazing tomato, spinach & goat's cheese baked eggs from Boulevard cafe, red velvet pancakes and everything else from Champs vegan Diner, salted peanut butter ice cream sandwiches with snickerdoodle cookies from Alchemy, apple butter toast from The Butcher's Daughter, a frozen custard peanut butter shake from Shake Shack so thick I had to eat it with a spoon, delicious two and three dollar Mexican food from a tortilla factory in Brooklyn, tofu salad from Digg Inn, the tasting plate from the Peanut Butter Co sandwich shop, delicious tea and little desserts from Caprices by Sophie and their lovely backyard area, Red Rose cinnamon struesel tea, hibiscus doughnuts from Dough.

Central Park like a huge oasis in the virtually treeless city, with its pine trees in the summertime that smell like an Australian Christmas and carnival rides and people sunning themselves on big rocks, walking past apartments my favourite writers used to live in and West 4th Street where the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was shot, Starry Night and a Toulouse-Lautrec special exhibition at MOMA, visiting the Chelsea Hotel which Leonard Cohen named one of my favourite songs after, tonnes of vintage shopping in Brooklyn and the East Village and Soho, L Train Vintage and Housing Works thrift shops which hit the secondhand sweet spot, wandering along the High Line and escaping the chaos of the city for an hour, Chelsea Market, a fantastic day at the MET, breakdancers on the subway, policemen directing traffic in white gloves, seeing Tavi Gevinson, Michael Cera and Kieren Culkin in a play called This Is Our Youth, buying secondhand books from street sellers on Bedford Avenue, the Beastie Boys mural at Rivington St where the cover of Paul's Boutique was shot, Adam Yauch park in DUMBO, visiting what's left of CBGBs, the Strand bookstore, going to the American Natural History Musuem and absolutely loving the Rose Centre for Earth and Space and returning twice more in the evenings for the Cosmology Frontiers lecture series - one was about Multiverse Theory and the Copernican Principle and the other was about nearby planets that could potentially harbour life and involved a current and incredibly detailed map of our local neighbourhood in the universe on the huge Planetarium screen and zooming in to within 6 metres of the surface of Mars!