In visits past shopping and family have featured but normally mixed into that is also a fair amount of food and sightseeing however shopping and family dominated my New York visit this time around. My cousin from San Fran, Penny, was home for Christmas – normally I miss her – so it was a good chance to spend time with her. Additionally I made sure to make an effort to make my way to Connecticut to visit one of my other aunt’s and her families.

More photos here.

The Shopping

Thanks to the tightening of security controls for flights in and out of the US my flight arriving in Newark was delayed nearly two hours. The security measures, which involved searching us at the gate, not allowing us access to any of our items in the last hour of our flight, treating us like prisoners but requiring us to have our hands on our laps in clear sight of the flight attendants at all times for that last hour and, unbelievably, having our luggage scanned once the luggage came off the plane prior to releasing it to us!, did not reassure me that I was any safer than normal. Some security consultant is certainly earning a sh!tload to create these suggestions – all they probably do is inconvenience the regular flyers – because, you know, as a terrorist you’d wait until the last hour of the flight to start any monkey business right? Ridiculous.

So, by the time I arrived in Flushing and got ready for bed it was just about 2 am on Sunday morning. Six hours later I was waking up to get ready for Day 1 in New York – shopping at Woodbury Common! Ha!

I absolutely love Woodbury Common and its unusual for a trip here NOT to result in me walking away with a ton of bags. And this visit was no different from any previous shopping visits although I did try to consolidate my shopping into as few bags as possible both for environmental and ease of carrying around the shopping reasons. Often its only when you get home that you realise what seems like so much shopping is just actually a heck of a lot of giant shopping bags!

The day was rather a glorious day and when combined with the fact there were post Christmas sales to say that Woodbury Common was busy was a total understatement. Its just as well we arrived reasonably early as we were able to get a fairly decent car park – many others had to resort to going into the overflow car park across the other side of the highway! Unfortunately queues were the order of the day from the Coach shop, to the Ugg Boot shop and to even leaving the complex. It took us just under two hours to crawl our way out of there at the end of the day.

On Day 2, whilst Kathleen headed off to work, Penny and I hit Barneys. I’ve never really gone into Barneys before and today’s experience proved why: super expensive price tags on everything! The dressing rooms are even personalised to the shop assistant (at least on the top floor) – I guess to give the guests a sense of pesonalised service but also to ensure the shop assistant gets his/her commission. Even the gear on the sales racks were pretty out of my budget! We started on the top floor where prices were scary but, opposite to my expectations, the lower we went the higher the price tags got. The good thing about Barneys is that it was not at all crowded except for the shoe area which, because of the sales, was absolute chaos. Whilst Penny hunted around for the perfect shoe I sat back and watched all the goings on. I can tell you that there are certainly some very spoilt people in the world. One lady, her husband and daughter had taken up a whole section and had what looked like about 60 pairs of shoes scattered around her. The daughter, who was about 10, was running around grabbing shoes and imperiously ordering the shop assistant around. What a pain in the butt she is going to be when she grows up! Needless to say they didn’t bother to help at all in putting the shoes back to where they came from or even pretend to be civilised about their browsing. Guaranteed they didn’t even buy one pair of shoes.

SoHo was Day 3. It was an absolutely freezing cold day so we, Penny, her Mum and I, made sure to stay inside the stores as much as possible. In fact we didn’t spend that much time in Manhattan that day purely because it was so cold. Just a few hours were spent whipping around Old Navy, where Penny and I rocked out on the Band Hero they had on display (probably there to entertain the men/kids who come in accompanying the women!) and UniQlo, where most of the time was spent in a gigantic queue. On the ground floor they had every attendant who could operate a till on the tills (at least fifteen!) and it still wasn’t enough to get the line moving. The store is massive but the sales meant it was super crowded.

The other day of shopping was my second last day in New York when we ended up going to Woodbury Common again (!) because Kathleen wanted to return some clothes. This time the queues seemed more reasonable, probably because it was absolutely fricken cold, only being three lines snakes long rather than five … so we waited in the queue to get into Coach. Not unexpectedly we were in there for a while though I had to escape because the women in there were driving me crazy! Because this was the second time in a week we were at Woodbury Common we didn’t spend much time faffing about. In fact the day was so absolutely freezing that we didn’t stay long at all! Just hit the shops we wanted to hit and got the heck out of there!

The Family

So, other than spending quite a bit of time with my Flushing family I also headed up to Connecticut to spend time with my Hartford family over New Year’s Eve. Hartford should have been an easy just over 2.5 hour bus ride but instead we ended up stuck at the Port Authority Terminal for a couple of hours as they cleared a “suspicious” van in Times Square. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d known the reason for the delay. The bus ride itself was great – our bus was quite comfortable, we had the funniest bus driver and, apparently, we even had free wi-fi. Nice huh?

I arrived in Hartford just in time for dinner. My Aunt, Uncle, Jesse and Ruthie took me to one of their Italian favourites. Food was pretty delicious and, naturally, with huge serves. They had the must divine garlic bread sticks which were bottomless, as were our sodas and ice teas! You gotta love America! After dinner, a quick visit home so I could meet Marley, their gorgeous chocolate lab (he’s so gorgeous I could easily forgive him chewing my boots up!), my Aunt and I drove to their cottage on the lake to spend a girlie night catching up.

It was great – a cosy cottage, a nice fire, a great DVD (Under the Tuscan Sun) and great conversation. She’d also made some delicious sticky rice for dessert. Mmmm …. I’m surprise I didn’t wake up halfway through the night to finish it off!

In the morning (New Year’s Eve) we woke to a beautiful snow covered landscape. The lake was nicely frozen over and was clearly solid enough for people to go cross country skiing and walking on. Out in the distance we could also see a hole in the lake where people had started to set up a fishing spot. After breakfasting in the enclosed patio my Uncle came to pick us up to bring us to Old Sturbridge Village which is basically how you’d imagine rural New England to be back in the early 1800s. It was a well cute village – farm animals, shoe makers, potters, candle-makers etc. The snow, which fell by the bucketloads whilst we were there, made it even more magical.

After Old Sturbridge Village, Ruthie wanted to take me shopping and to see a movie. We ended up going to see It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. I loved the movie – probably because I’m well into Alec
Baldwin at the moment thanks to his stint on 30 Rock.

By this time we’d worked up quite an appetite and were well ready for our New Year’s Eve meal which was at one of their favourite Mexican restaurants. A bunch of my Aunt and Uncle’s friends came out as well and it was very lively meal. The evening happened to also be a full moon or new moon and therefore the restaurant was all themed around a blue moon including blue tortilla chips! It was a bit weird! The meal was yummy though. My New Year’s eve was actually fairly sedate – we got home just in time to watch the ball drop in Times Square on TV. I was trying to find Audrey on the broadcast, one of my Flushing family, as she’d gone in to Times Square with her boyfriend. She actually got there for 6.30am to try and get a good position. What a trooper!

The Food

Other than some fantastic cooking by my Uncle at home (I love love love his ginger chicken – he makes the greatest sauce ever) I had two notable culinary experiences: Korean at Bann and L’Ecole at The French Culinary Institute.

Bann was notable for the way they present their tea to you – in cute little box with a backlit screen – and their desserts – which included a crème brulee three ways (tonight it was vanilla, ginger and strawberry.)

The food, which included a delicious Korean pancake and gorgeous Kal Bi Jim (beef short rib simmered in a sake ginger soy glaze served off the bone), was pretty damn tasty too. Though our dishes did look particularly brown!

L’Ecole at The French Culinary Institute, where I decided to treat Penny and Kathleen to brunch, was something just a little different.. All food is prepared by the student chefs but what made our brunch visit different was that, unlike all the other meals, the brunch service is not actually part of The French Culinary Institute’s curriculum but is carried out by volunteer students – so you know they wouldn’t be there unless they wanted to be.

The venue is clearly a popular place so it was lucky they could fit us in. The room is nice, bright and airy and, thankfully, sound levels are just right to give you that kind of a buzz without having you feel like you need to shout. The food was absolutely divine from the freshly baked breads to the Butter Poached Shrimp, Andouille Sausage and Grits (yummo – more please!) to the perfectly cooked Steak and Eggs, French Fries, Béarnaise to my Crème Brulee. We had a lovely time but if there was one thing they were let down on it was the slowness in the service – though our waiters were perfectly friendly, as they inevitably are in the US, they were a little slow. It was still a lovely way to finish off my visit to New York.