Feeling Better...

I am being ridiculous! FML.

So I was thinking about NYC again. It makes me feel better.

I remember that I don't think I ever had a slice of pizza there. Wait, I take it back. There was a pizza place around the corner from where I lived. I think I bought pizza a couple of times from there on my way home. Everything was so close to where I lived. :) There was also a pizza parlor a block from the Tribeca office.

Pizza is not really in my diet. I hate pizza now. When I was little, I used to be able to eat 9 slices. Today, I can barely finish one slice. In NYC, it's a staple. When my son came to visit, he loved it. It was that and the hot dogs. I love the NYC hot dogs. The ones from the street vendors are fabulous. That's the first thing that one should do when visiting NYC.

I also thought about how pizza is very popular in Italy. But in Italy, the pizza is square, not round. The servings are square pieces. I can still picture the guy behind the pizza counter there. He was all dressed up. Italians are so cosmopolitan.

Thinking about NYC makes me feel better.

When Tom came to help me settle in, we ate at many places. I was reminded the other night that Edward had taken us to this churrascaria that had just opened up in Tribeca on West Broadway. They also served sushi. That was strange. We hit a bar in West Village after that. Or was the bar in Soho? Can't remember exactly. I know it was on the way from Tribeca to West Village where my apartment was. I lived on Sullivan between Bleecker and 3rd Street. The address was 207 Sullivan Street, Apartment 8.

Tom and I also ate at the Turkish restaurant in the Upper East Side that had the deep fried liver and onions. Delicious! Our experience was funny because we decided to walk around Central Park to build up an appetite, but we got lost. We couldn't find our way back, and so we just tried to head out to the streets on the East Side of the park. As much as we tried, we couldn't get there. It was too funny. We finally did find a way out but only when we hit South Park. Then we had to make our way to the Turkish restaurant which was many blocks away.

Where else did we eat? I remember we ate in Midtown our first night there because we had to stay at a hotel while the apartment was being prepared. The restaurant was near the hotel. I had beef tartare. It was pretty good. They prepared it fresh at the table.

We also ate at this Mexican restaurant that was the second location of one that I had gone to with Cheryl, Jon and Veronica. It was also in the UES, but the one that Tom and I went to was at Grand Central Station. I think the specialty was a drink - a margarita perhaps. I can't remember exactly. Tom and I wandered around Grand Central Station.

We also had eaten hot dogs from the street vendors. And of the foolish things, we ate at the McDonald's at Times Square. I took Tom to see a show on Broadway. We saw the Putnam County spelling bee one at the Helen Hayes Theater that I had seen a few times. It was funny.

Tom and I also took the double deck bus tour. We did the Downtown route, and it's funny that the route went past my apartment. I used to look out my window in the mornings to catch a tour bus go by. Gotta love NYC.

I wonder if we ate Suzies Chinese restaurant around the corner. I used to eat there a lot. I loved their crab claws. Those were so delicious. I made friends with Francis, one of the managers there. That place would be open late, and I would order food and then pick it up to go. One time, I had them deliver because I was not feeling well enough to go outside. My apartment was so comfy and cozy, and there were times when I just stayed put.

Of course, we went to Jing Fong in Chinatown for the dim sum, I think. I went there so many times with so many different people. I went there with Scott and Rajiv and Peach and Vero and Cheryl and Jon and Kate and Julie and Kaerensa and Alexis.

Where else did we eat? There were a couple of Japanese restaurants nearby. I'm sure we ate at one of them. I think we also ate at the Italian restaurant where I befriended a manager - Lenworth. He was a nice guy. He gave me a bottle of Spanish wine as a "welcome to the neighborhood" present. I ate there so many times too with Peach and Nikki and Taina and Laura and Lien and Zald.

When we were setting up the apartment, Tom and I did a lot of shopping. We bought the IKEA furniture online. Unfortunately, the furniture would be delivered after Tom was scheduled to fly out. So I had to figure out how to put the furniture together myself. I hired a guy at $50 per hour to put my couch, TV stand, coffee table, bed, and dresser together. I put the bed together myself. All that furniture made it a tight fit in the apartment. Mind you, the apartment was between 500-600 square feet, and I was paying $2,400 per month. It was a pricy neighborhood. But I loved the coziness of the apartment after all the furniture was in place. I had also bought a couple of footstools that you could open up and store things in. The couch was L-shaped and had storage. It was a pull-out bed, and so when Peach and Dave and Janelle and CJ and Lien and Zald came to visit, they had a place to sleep.

We went to KMart and Home Depot and Best Buy. At KMart, we bought so much, we had to taxi home. Same thing happened at Home Depot. It was interesting to see the escalator especially made for the shopping carts because it was a multistory Home Depot. When you have so much stuff that you have to taxi home, that's weird.

At Best Buy, we bought my TV that was a DVD/CD/TV combo. Of course, the DVD/CD puked after a short while. It was cheap. Later, on one of their visits, CJ and Janelle bought me a DVD player to replace it. The funny part was that Tom and I carried the TV home. There we were carrying a large TV many blocks from Best Buy to my apartment. It was hilarious. Nobody looked at us funny. Only in NYC is that considered normal. Ha ha.

Tom and I had a good time. When I was working, he would stay in the apartment and watch TV or movies. The cable had not been hooked up yet, but the Time Warner guy came soon enough. Because the furniture was gonna get delivered later, there was nothing to sit on or sleep on. So we went to KMart to buy a couple of sleeping bags. I still have them today. They moved with me back to San Jose.

So we slept in the sleeping bags. Poor Tom had a camping like experience during his first trip to NYC. It was pretty memorable though. Tom painted some of the apartment walls with the olive green color that I have here in San Jose. It was nice and clean and ready to be furnished. It had a small refrigerator -- not the compact one but one that was between that and a full size refrigerator. The apartment was really small, and the kitchen was about a third or a fourth the size of a regular kitchen. We cracked up about the bathroom because it was so small that you could sit on the toilet and brush your teeth over the sink at the same time.

I had to get used to the small closets as well. My wardrobe was cut in half. Most of the stuff had to fit in my dresser. I accumulated a lot of boots and coats to survive the cold weather. I lost about 5 pairs of gloves when riding the taxis. Actually, I lost 5 halves of 5 pairs of gloves. I would take one off to pull out money to pay the cabdriver and leaving it in the cab. I did that a lot. You'd think that I would have learned.

After the cable/internet was available, I hooked up the computer for webcam, and we chatted with the Academias and showed them the apartment. It was a 2-minute tour. My sister cracked up at the size of refrigerator.

Settling in was a fun experience. I'm still trying to remember where else we ate and what else we did. I think we went to Canal Street and Madison Square Garden and the 24 hour Post Office, etc. Tom had a Metro Card to ride the subways, but he really didn't want to go out by himself because he said he was bad with directions. He would have been lost in NYC. I told him that all he had to do was jump in a cab and tell the cabbie to take him to Bleecker and Sullivan.

We might have gone down Bleecker to the other side of 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) where that cheese store was. I remember seeing a Bobby Flay episode with that store featured. It was Murray's on Bleecker between 6th and 7th. Or maybe it was between 7th and 8th.

Did we go grocery shopping at Morton's? Or Gristede? Or Gourmet Garage? Those were the typical ones I went to. Morton Anderson's was a few blocks from where I lived. I remember sometimes grocery shopping after midnight. One time I shopped hungry, and I bought so much food that I had to get it delivered. It was an interesting experience to get your groceries delivered. I didn't really know how much to tip, and so I gave the kid a dollar for each bag. There were 6 bags total. He had to walk up to the fourth floor, and so I wondered if that was enough.

That's one thing about delivery there. Or any kind of service done. You had to tip. When I packed up the office in Los Gatos and arranged for delivery at Manhattan Mini-Storage, which was somewhere in Soho or West Village, there was a tip charge. Strange. I should remember where that storage unit was because I went there all the time to retrieve files and take them home to work with. My apartment was my office for awhile until we settled into an office in East Village. Then from there, we moved to the Tribeca Film Center where Robert DeNiro was. We were on the same floor as DeNiro! I still love to tell the story that even though I spent a lot of time working at TFC, I never saw Bobby. Everyone else in my office did. At one time, Anne Metrailler and I were coming back from lunch. We were waiting for the elevator, and she gave me this funny look. When we got in the elevator, I said, "What?" She said, "Didn't you see Bobby? He was right there at the lobby." Aye, it was not meant to be.

The delivery memory reminds me of when they delivered my stuff at my apartment. My microwave was missing. I reported it, and they found it with stuff delivered to a different place. When they finally delivered it, the microwave was broken. There was nothing I could do because it was only an $80 microwave. How could I make a claim on that. So I ended up not having a microwave while I was in NYC. When I ate leftovers, I would warm them up on the stove or in the oven.

I don't think Tom and I saw any celebrities, but while I was in NYC, I saw Vincent D'Onofrio, one of my favorite actors. I also saw Christy Turlington when she was walking down Greenwich Street, pushing a stroller. I saw Mark Consuelos jogging in the No. Moore, Varick, Hudson, Beach Street area. Janelle, CJ and I saw Chevy Chase when we were seeing a Broadway show. I can't remember which show it was. I know we went to see Beauty and the Beast, but I think this was a different one because Janelle and CJ came to visit me twice.

Scott said he saw Sean Bean at TFC. He and I were also at a coffee shop in East Village once, and he said that we interacted with Mary Louise Parker. She was with a group of friends, and when Scott and I grabbed the table next to them, there was a purse and jacket on the chair that I wanted to sit on. She smiled and moved them so I could sit. When we left, Scott told me that was Mary Louise Parker. Oh, I said.

I actually saw Vincent D'Onofrio twice. The first time was when the Tribeca Film Festival was going on in 2007. The Street Fair usually happens the Saturday of that week, and he was there with his son. Vincent is very tall. I just stared at him, thrilled that I was looking at one of my favorite actors. The second time I saw him was when I was in a cab on my way to TFC (sometimes I would walk or grab a cab, depending on my mood and the weather). He was having a cigarette in front of the garage on No. Moore, between Hudson and Greenwich, as he waited for his car to be retrieved.

When we were at the Turkish restaurant (I think I was with Cher, Vero and Jon), they said that Toby Maguire and his girlfriend walked by. I can't remember at the moment if I saw other celebrities.

Did I take Tom to eat at Cendrillon? It was the only Filipino restaurant I knew of in Manhattan. It's located in Soho. I ate there with at least Cher, Lien and Zald and CJ and Janelle. We met the chef. I can't remember his name, but of course he's Filipino. He said the food is Filipino/French fusion. I didn't really see any authentic Filipino food. It was good though.

I'm still trying to stay in the perspective of when I first moved to NYC. I had visited NYC many times before with Edward on our business trips. Those were memorable too because it was NYC and we were meeting with McGraw Hill. I'll have to do a blog on those trips too because they were great experiences.

But back to the time with Tom. That was an adventure. I'll have to ask Tom what he remembers. I wonder if we went to the World Trade Center. I think we did. I think we went to Canal Street, the flea market of lower Manhattan. Ha ha.

I love remembering NYC. It makes me feel better.