May 26 [Monday]......Memorial Day & the Yankees
Today is the Memorial Day holiday, something equivalent to Anzac Day in Australia. Usually this holiday weekend marks the start of summer and many people head out of the city to the beach like up in the Hamptons. The weather has been atrocious this weekend so there wasn't much chance to head out far. We had tickets to the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Heavy rain all morning and early afternoon looked like it might cancel the game. Due to start at 1pm, it was eventually delayed to 3pm and we didn't leave home till then as they previously announced it was delayed "indefinitely". So we had to then rush to not miss the game. Once over at Lexington Avenue, we caught the 4 train up to Yankee Stadium and arrived at the start of the 4th innnings (a little more than ticked off about it too).

One of the Yankee pitchers, Roger Clemens was pitching for his 300th win that game, a rare feat in baseball, but his crud form and a disappointing Yankees team were not up to it today as they lost 8-4. Some light drizzle over the last few innings made it an average day, so we will be be back to see another game on a better day. As we were leaving, we ducked down to the lower levels to see the view and saw former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani heading off the field as he had been a guest at the game by the Yankees owner.

May 25 [Sunday]......Dragons Playoff game
Anh took her first trip out to Long Island with me today when we went to a playoff game of the New York Dragons arena football. Things were off to a bad start when we missed the hourly train that goes from Manhattan to Hempstead in Nassua county. As the next one would make us miss part of the game, we hopped on a train heading in the same region and then got a cab out to Nassua Coliseum.
The game was the Dragons against the Chicago Rush. It was an incredibly close game for the most part before Chicago took a 14 point lead going in to the last quarter. Unbelievably, New York scored the last 17 points of the game, including a field goal with a second left on the clock to win the game 48-45. The team and crowd went nuts in possibly the most exciting sporting game I have ever seen. To make it even better we had seats in the 2nd row from the field immediately behind the team bench.

On the way home once back in Manhattan we stopped over at some cinemas on 34th to see Matrix Reloaded.

May 19 [Monday]......Blue Man Group
The Blue Man Group is a Broadway show that has been running for 10 years. It takes its name from the fact that the 3 performers have their heads painted completely blue. They have put a new show together "The Complex" which is a once-off tour of a rock concert mixed with theatre, performance, rave and so on. I only decided to go late last week so after I had bought a ticket on ticketmaster.com tonight I picked it up from the "will call" window...after all that I had a very long wait in lines.
The show itself was very visual and stacked with percussion, 4 drummers no less, while the Blue Men have modified instruments like drain pipe or a piano tipped on its side and opened up. Go and see their website here and read about the Complex tour. The best song they did was "Exhibit 13" as part of the encore. You can listen to it here and see the video clip. I highly recommend this one, the song was very sombre and featured a video clip of all bits of papers that were found in a park in Brooklyn that had come all the way from the WTC after September 11. It is well worth a look and listen.

May 18 [Sunday]......Food Festivals & Flea Markets
There was an annual International Food Festival on today over at 9th Avenue. They had 20 blocks open to food and other vendors with 9th Avenue blocked to traffic between 37th and 57th street. I can't estimate crowd numbers, but 20 blocks full of people in the street doesn't give you much space to move in. Since it was such a nice day out we walked all the entire distance. Food probably didn't compare to the Norwood Food & Wine festival, but we had pad thai and then some crepes with strawberries. Anh still hasn't had the new york hotdogs that she keeps going on about.

Later, back on 8th avenue we dropped in at The Big Cup for some coffee but was forced yet again into taking away since the cosy couches are always occupied ala Friends style where people just sit and read the paper etc. On the way out we passed by a gay bar called The View I think where a group of (boy) cheerleaders who were dressed in the US cheerleader style outfits were parading around and advertising a party at the club after the Aids walk that day.

As we walked back to 26th street we noticed several flea markets still open, as they occupy car parks every weekend in large numbers especially around Chelsea. We strolled around and then went in for the night.

May 17 [Saturday]......Arts & Parks
This afternoon it was time to finally visit one of the art galleries that Chelsea is famous for. From our place we walked over to around 10th Avenue where there are a series of galleries in a row. The main one we went to had an exhibition that opened this week. Who knows if the artist is famous but his works (which were a mixture of photos that were then painted with some other digital effects) ranged from $us35,000 to $us75,000. From one extreme to another, the next gallery had an exhibition "American Cockroach" and you guessed it, the whole subject matter was cockroaches, including a 1.5m tall resin cockroach hung from the roof by a noose (I actually liked that one).

Then it was time for a change of pace. Along 23rd street we jumped on the cross-town bus over to Park Avenue where we chanced upon a street fair in which Park Avenue was closed for traffic for 10 or so blocks. Anh bought a cheesy "I love NY" t-shirt, and then we had a gyro to eat. Walking home, we stopped over at Madison Square Park (at Madison Avenue) where we had a look at the dog run. What is a dog run? It is a fenced off area in many parks where you take your dog and can let them off the leash so they run around with other dogs, mostly sniffing each other from what we saw. They have rolls of plastic bags installed that people also use to put on their hand so when they throw a tennis ball around for the dog they don't have to touch it. Seriously.

Next up we did a change of plan and went up to Times Square to catch a movie. Since all 30 sessions of the Matrix was sold out, we went across to the cinema across the street to see the new release "Down With Love", the new Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellwegger movie that is not only a 1960's recreation, but totally set in Manhattan. Great movie - highly recommended!!

May 16 [Friday]......The Yank from Australia
Kent Stoll is originally from New York and moved to Adelaide 2 years ago where I had worked with him. This week he has been back in NYC and tonight we went out to a dinner with Kent and a few others from work here. Location was the Mustang Grill, a mexican place on 2nd Avenue up on the Upper East Side. It was good to catch up with Kent who has been acting like a tourist this week taking in Broadway shows, Manhattan cruises and a Yankees baseball game.
After dinner, Anh & I headed over to Serendipity 3 for a late night dessert.

Other good news today, our sofa that we ordered 6 weeks ago arrived today making our apartment a little more complete. It is a modern take on a retro design in a charcoal colour and a big blocky appearance. Sweet.

May 11 [Sunday]......Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca is part of the downtown Manhattan area (named after the TRIangle BElow CAnal street) and this week has been the second Tribeca Film Festival which is run by Robert De Niro (who has been a long term resident there and has his Tribeca Grill restaurant there). It was created to try to bring more business and life into the Tribeca region which has been very hard done by from Sept 11 (it is just north of the WTC site).

This weekend we took in 2 movies as part of the festival. On Saturday night we went to the world premiere of a documentary style movie "Naked World" which followed the photographer Stanley Kubrick across the world. Both Stanley (who lives in Brooklyn) and the producer were present at the showing and they did a Q&A session with the audience at the end after which I met Stanley as we headed out.
Sunday afternoon we went to the premiere of a low budget arthouse style movie Cowards Bend the Knee which was essentially a modern day silent movie. Again, the director was present to answer questions at the end of the movie and during the movie he was sitting 2 seats away from us.

Today we had heavy fog in New York. It has been the heaviest I have seen yet and especially bad downtown. Down in Tribeca, the buildings just disappear around the 30th floor.... you look up at these tall buildings and they simply vanish at some point into the fog which is very eerie. From our apartment, the empire state building has completely vanished, all 100 or so floors - and that is only 8 streets away!

Tonight we are currently watching the finale of Survivor which is being recorded live at the Ed Sullivan theatre on Broadway and 55th street, the same place we saw David Letterman. They moved it at the last minute as until 8am this morning it was going to be recorded at Woollman rink in Central Park, where I had been ice skating 2 months ago, however the weather in New York today prohibited an outside shoot.

May 5 [Monday]......Hockey Controversy
Last night was our lastest Roller Hockey match at Chelsea Piers. In a fiercely contested match our team, House 4, emerged victorious with a 5-0 scoreboard. The match was not without some tense moments as several fights had broken out with several players in the penalty box at different times. I kept out of trouble and played a good game, and since the opposition didn't score our defence played well (which is where I play). Our next match is scheduled for this Wednesday at 11pm, however it is not known if some of our players have been asked not to come back, as House 4 have been suspected of having some ring-in players who haven't paid up etc. In the meantime we are trying to lock down our roster and I will have more on that later in the week!

May 4 [Sunday]......Aussie Report
Actually seen some Australians on TV here over the last day but at the opposite end of each other. This morning there was some quick coverage of Howard meeting Bush on CNN and the newpaper had a story on p.8 also mentioning Howard was off to a Yankees game today. On the other hand, on some disgraceful late night TV last night, one of the reality shows on a repeat from a couple of years ago came down to Australia for an Aussie Rules challenge. The team of contestants were coached by none other than Hawthorn's Shane Crawford. It was pretty sad as one of the young female contestants was all over him which he didn't seem to mind and even the other contestants were complaining about it. Shane coached the group with help from Nick Holland and took them clubbing and they stayed at his "uncle's" house which happened to have 13 rooms, spa etc.

Last night I saw the new movie, "A Mighty Wind" which is a very funny mockumentary about a group of folk musicians getting back together for a tribute show after 30 years. Don't know when it starts in Australia, but I highly recommend it!

May 3 [Saturday]......Lovely Spring Day in NYC
Woke up to the sound of jackhammers and all sorts of rukus this morning, it was 9am and shows that you just sleep-in here apart from Sunday which is the only day of the week there is no construction going on. I caught the F train downtown to go Chinatown way only to find one of the frustrating things that happen with the subways on the weekend. The city does maintenance work on wekeends and often change the subway routes while some areas are blocked for repair leaving the proper routes meaningless and you have to do a few transfers to go to where you need. Times like this if you didn't know the subway well, it could get very confusing.

I got off at Spring St and decided I would just walk from there over to Hester St which is a street away from Canal St (the main strip of Chinatown). On the way I stopped at Wooster St to see an Installation featuring Madonna I read about, it had several large video images of her with creepy music and was kinda interesting. Then I stopped at some of the carts that the little chinese women wheel around with all the pirated dvd's and cd's on Canal St. If the police are near they through a black cloth over it and walk to a new corner. I picked up X2 on dvd which had only started in the cinema the day before and the new Madonna cd. The cd's are good at 3 for $10, while the dvd's go for $8 which is a ripoff as they are still poor quality "handicam" in the cinema versions.

Next stop was over on Hester Street where I went to get a haircut finally. Later, walking down the street I saw a chinese store with a sign out the front that they had herbal tea that actually prevents SARS. Let me know if anyone wants some, I'm sure it must work but the medical community hasn't seen it yet. Feeling hungry I then stopped at a street vendor in Chinatown that sells noodles for $1, the cheapest I ever saw in NY and it was alright. I walked to Spring St and sat in a park to eat them on a lovely day outside so there were kids playing basketball and people sitting around. There is no grass or trees in this park though, it's NYC afterall, but the open space is nice. Walked over the street to pick up some ricecream from Rice to Riches and then headed home.

Again, the F subway wasn't running uptown so as it was so nice out, I walked home all the way up 6th avenue. Lots of people out with pickup games of hockey and basketball in the parks plus all the street vendors.

May 2 [Friday]......The Ataris
I had a ticket to see a band, The Ataris, tonight at the Roseland Ballroom on 52nd. Was a little tired from being out a couple nights this week already and it was raining outside with a forecast of thunderstorms (they never came). I headed up on the 1 train which goes up 7th Avenue and the stop is a a couple minute walk from our apartment. I missed the first act and stood through the next 2 support acts who were both average.
The Ataris I only know from mp3's I've downloaded but they played pretty well live and it was an enjoyable show. Not on par with the Good Charlotte show on Tuesday but still worth seeing and they played the 7 or so songs I knew. The crowd were getting a little too crazy for my liking though and the lighting was average so many of my photos didn't turn out that flash.
Walked home from the subway on 34th street and was mystified by several hundred people lined around 2 blocks outside a shoe store just before midnight.

May 1 [Thursday]......Anh's Volunteer Party
Tonight the New York Foundling Hospital where Anh volunteers had a party to recognise the volunteers. We had some food, they gave out awards to the long serving volunteers (one woman had 35 years) and they had one of the doctors perform some old-time music on guitar & banjo (most of the crowd was in the 60+ category). In a typical New York moment he had to stop on 2 occasions due to the overwhelming sound of the NYPD and NY Fire Dept sirens on the street as they were trying to get through peak hour traffic jammed up on 6th Avenue outside us.