Sunday, January 8, 2012

Starting 2012.


We had a relaxing, quiet Hogmanay at home involving dinner, champagne and keeping warm indoors. We watched the ball drop live online and were very glad we hadn't gone to manic Times Square (embarrassingly we also found ourself tuning into BBC Scotland to watch good old Jackie Bird - wouldn't be the same without her!)  

We've had a nicely busy and productive first week of the year. Lots of progress made on furniture buying (nearly ready for an apartment update post I think), Dave's getting nicely settled into his work routine and we're generally getting settled into life here. 

We've finally got enough stuff to properly enjoy using our kitchen so have enjoyed doing lots of cooking and baking.




We tried our local Korean place (excellent dumplings but the rest was so-so).



 And enjoyed a lovely evening with Rachael (who we went to uni with) and Rob who were in NY for a new years holiday. It seemed a good excuse to try the Taqueria Y Fonda which is tiny and rather shabby but gets rave reviews and is known as a popular Columbia hangout.


Definitely the biggest burrito I've ever seen (not even the largest they do)! Rob was impressively close to finishing it too



 The food was delicious and it was really fun to spend time with an old friend (apologies to Rob for lots of Glasgow reminiscing!)



 We had another truly delicious meal with Kate and Patrick who were also in town for new year. Unfortunately I failed to get any pictures which is a shame as we had lots of fun with them and it was great Malaysian food (the highlight of which was the unlikely sounding but totally brilliant crispy pork belly with watermelon). We followed dinner with some extremely strong G&Ts in Greenwich Village (seems legal to pour free-hand in US bars) which were much needed as we finally got some proper winter weather. 

I promise I started the evening looking fairly normal but by the time we got home it was -10 and i had been reduced to this... 
(thankfully i'd bought the ubiquitous NYC duvet jacket just in the nick of time - thanks Mum!)



On Friday I had a meeting about a great volunteering opportunity which I'm starting this week (still waiting for my permission to work to come through) so I'm looking forward to learning all about working life US style. The meeting was followed by a really fun evening at a Brazilian restaurant which pretty much completed my culinary world tour in one week!


Biggest achievement of the year so far is that we finally, finally managed to get our 'cell phones' despite some time-consuming and painful American bureaucracy and I'm very excited to finally be an Iphone owner. I'm having lots of fun with instagram photo effects so expect lots of vintagey images coming up.



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