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Land of the (Smoke) Free

The combined joys of jetlag and having to return to work immediately have so far prevented me from writing a proper account of our recent holiday in New York. I feel compelled to do so now, though, if only because if I wait any longer I will be reduced to simply posting a copy of my credit card statement by way of describing the events of the last week far more accurately than my increasingly fragile short-term memory ever could.

[Case in point: on Tuesday, shortly before we left for the airport, we ended up randomly wandering around the part of the Meatpacking district in which we had spent our Saturday night (if only because Kim Cattrall’s character in Sex and the City once fell down a delivery hatch up the road). If we hadn’t found ourselves back there, then we would have had to wait for Sal’s credit card bill (on which she happened to have paid the cover charge) to come to find out the name of the club (Lotus, apparently) in which we had spent the highly drunken latter part of the evening with a couple of friendly locals who we’d got chatting to in another bar a few streets away.]

Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves on the trip, although we were somewhat disappointed that our early celebrity spotting (as mentioned previously) proved to be the exception rather than the rule, although Mike Contre-Attaque himself, (as the French can’t stop calling him), did go some way to disproving the old adage about celebrities being a lot smaller in real life than you expect (although maybe there is some sort of inverse relationship when it’s horizontal size you’re talking about, I don’t know). Perhaps he hasn’t tried that low-carb beer (I mean really…) that is advertised all over the place.

We didn’t bother with any of that Atkins nonsense either, preferring to fill our time (when we weren’t sightseeing, celebrity spotting, shopping, or watching trashy celebrity documentaries on E!) by consuming vast quantities of food, either in the lounge (because we couldn’t get a table–if only I’d read this before, it all might have been different) of a swanky uptown pan-Asian restaurant (complete with a giant Buddha that had apparently had to be airlifted into the building), or in countless breakfast diners, or a bizarre Mexican restaurant off Times Square (the only thing we could find open at the time) where the non Smoking policy was only casually respected, the other customers were all slightly threatening looking young guys, and the jukebox was strictly Mariachi music and authentic Mexican Pop (we beat a hasty retreat when a chap with a box full of minidiscs and a microphone looked like he was about to start a performance).

What else? Well, we went to the top of the Empire State Building, wandered Central Park, caught the free ferry to Staten Island, went to at least one location used in the film Ghostbusters (thanks Dave), shopped for Von Dutch clothes in the Village, (almost) filled an entire 128MB memory card with photos, saw the excellent Good Bye Lenin! at a small cinema in SoHo, sat on the steps of Sarah Jessica Parker’s fictional house, ate cupcakes outside the Magnolia bakery, explored the wonders of the village and the meatpacking district (some parts of which are still not completely gentrified and therefore juxtapose smelly warehouses with shops selling Stella McCartney’s clothes and Manolo Blahnik’s shoes). Oh, and we saw a crazy dancing man at Victoria station on the way there. And it doesn’t get much better than that.