New York neighborhoods

Our time in New York ended up being just short of six weeks, almost double what we had initially planned. Lucky for us, my parents were gracious hosts who basically let us squat in their house in New Rochelle, a suburb north of New York City in Westchester County. There, our family of four usurped not only their beautiful residence, but also their phone, internet connection and car (and possibly sanity).
Above is a watercolor Daniel did of their home.
Meanwhile, they also looked after Sophia and Lulu while Daniel and I spent inordinate amounts of time researching cars and trailers. The girls love their grandparents.
THANK YOU, Mommy and Daddy.

But New Rochelle was not to be our only abode.
Friends and extended in-laws also threw open their doors to us.

We had several sleepovers at Stephanie and Scott’s grand brownstone in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, one with our hosts and two without them. Fort Greene is a happy mishmash of cultures, where the prevalence of multiracial children reflects a real coexistence I had only really ever seen in northeastern Brazil.
The place looks like Sesame Street, and is filled with beautiful people – many of whom seem to work locally. Minutes after I joked to Stephanie about the area’s resemblance to a photo shoot, we stumbled upon…a photo shoot.

Our second city home-from-home was cat-sitting for our friends Elisa and Eric, who live in the most picturesque pocket of the West Village. This is a block where windows offer the passerby views of rooms large enough to hold chandeliers, tall bookshelves and people who most definitely employ staff. Where gym-honed mothers at the local playground dress in Marc Jacobs, and where six-packs of American beer cost $16. We are not the only ones who appreciate its location…being diagonally opposite the fancy cupcake producing Magnolia Bakery, which featured on Sex in the City, the place is regularly taken over by tour buses and gawking, squawking crowds who take the now defunct show’s storyline very seriously indeed.

Our final Manhattan bolt-hole was a fancy company apartment at the flashy Jade Jagger-designed building called ‘Jade’ in the Flatiron District. The modular studio space gave us plenty of room to sleep, eat and even host a mini-pizza party. (Thanks, Stephie).

And we haven’t even gotten to the kindness shown us by my sister’s husband Steve’s extended family. One aunt-in-law included us on the invite list to a pool party at her and her husband’s mansion in New Canaan, Connecticut. We arrived via taxi from the local train station, to which we returned in a car driven by their butler (yeah, really!). Despite their wealth, they are super down-to-earth people. They even sent us home with a doggy bag (we had to leave early).

An aunt-in-law on the other side of Steve’s family actually loaned my sister, me, Daniel and the kids a house on the North Shore of Long Island. We jumped into the calm waters on the private beach, before retiring to a barbeque overlooking the Long Island Sound and beyond that, Connecticut.

Awesome, all of it.

Lulu update

Baby Lulu is still the calmest infant ever, and we never forget to appreciate her disposition. If she’s hungry, she’ll just suck her thumb. If Sophia’s love gets too rough, she’ll just give me a quiet look that says “Please help me, if you have time”. And when diaper situations turn dire, she’ll just sit there until someone notices.
Today, as she turns four months old, she weighs about 16.5 pounds and her bottom left tooth has poked its way through her poor gums. Apart from growing like crazy, she’s also rolling over and grabbing stuff. So no more leaving her on beds.

My aunt describes her as a baby dropped down from heaven, so calm is she.
That’s not to say that she’s a pushover though…when the girl wants something, she lets us know with high-pitched shrieks that *nearly* rival her sister’s.

She has racked up more gigs than Sophia, though. She’s been to two so far. The first was Scott Hardkiss’ mini launch party for his new album, ‘Technicolor Dreamer’, which by the way is fantastic. So’s the artwork.
Have a look:
http://godwithin.com/site/?cat=3
It’s sold in Best Buy and on iTunes.
She got passed around, then passed out from over-stimulation, then woke up when things got really loud – that’s when we had to go.
The whole family went to the second gig, an outdoor concert featuring Animal Collective in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The kids both enjoyed the lights and music until it went all crazy techno – then we had to go.
She’s been christened ‘Rock-n-roll baby’.

Sophia’s part-Americanization

My sister Annie and her kids, Patrick and Keira, came over most days to play during our time in New York. Together, the kids sang the alphabet song, splashed around naked in the paddling pool and chased my parents’ cats. From her cousins, Sophia learned the joys of American food like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, goldfish, Cheerios and hot dogs. The main thing they learned from her was how to misbehave.
Annie, a special education teacher, has taught us how to incentivize good behavior with a chart - circles to be filled with stickers as reward for doing or not doing certain things, with a grand prize of an ice pop or other small treat once the chart is complete.
Perhaps we could all do well with charts.
Sophia's British accent has started to dull a bit – it started with the words “half” and “tomato”, with American intonation gradually creeping in. After spending the day with her little friend Brecken, whose parents are from Michigan, she started pronouncing some words – like “water” and “four” in a way that actually sounds MORE American than how I speak. Crazy.
The funny thing is she seems to know what’s going on, and often gives me a crafty glance when she’s about to give a word the US treatment.
But then, to ingratiate herself with Daniel, she’ll go back the old way of saying things, tossing him a “harf” or a “bin” to keep him sweet.
That said, she is still a London girl at heart, and misses her mates Rocco and Oriel, and her godfather Chris terribly.

Inhaling culture

Being in New York, we obviously had a lot of Culture to appreciate. We did a good run of museums – The Metropolitan, the whole of which would be very difficult to see; the Natural History Museum, whose dinosaurs and blue whale never cease to amaze (though I do have one question: why does the blue whale look so much smaller once you become an adult?? I swear it used to be three times bigger); the MOMA, which has free entry on Friday afternoons (hooray!) and the Guggenheim, which was unfortunately mainly closed due to the installation of a Kandinsky exhibit.
We also spent a lot of time at Bronx cultural institutions, visiting the Zoo, the Botanical Garden and a Yankees game.
This is the Yankees’ first year in their new stadium, which is across the street from the old one. There seems to be a lot of controversy around the team’s new home – like how is the neighborhood benefiting and why is everything so expensive.
My friend Mike Gartland, a high school classmate who’s now an investigative journalist, is actually examining these questions and others in his documentary ‘In the Shadow of the Stadium’.
http://www.shadowofthestadium.com/
I don’t know much about the situation, but I did notice that the people inside the stadium resembled the people living outside it, that beer cost $11 and that sushi was on sale alongside the hot dogs.
Still, baseball – with its songs, camaraderie amongst the crowd and easy-to-learn rules - is a great representation of everything that’s good about America.

The leaf

Daniel’s birthday present from my parents last March was a weeklong botanical drawing art class at the New York Botanical Garden.
Unfortunately for him, though, when he went to register for the class, he was told that all students had to start with the basic level before moving on to intermediate and advanced courses. Being the mild mannered Englishman that he is, he acquiesced and was probably the only person in the class with an MA from an internationally recognized art school – one the teacher, in fact, had not managed to get into.
She was flexible, though, and let him work on a separate project: a leaf. An amazingly intricate pencil-drawn leaf that was to take over Daniel’s life for that week and beyond. My entire family was obsessed, and each day we waited for him to return from the Bronx with a leaf that had undergone another five hours of detailed artistry.
He gave the original leaf back to the teacher, but kept the drawing for himself. It will reside at my parents for the duration of our roadtrip. (That said, he did try to pack it in the car).

Florian, and what we’ve learned about cars

We thought it was going to be really easy to buy a second-hand car to get us across America. It wasn’t, and the effort took two days short of one month. But we did learn quite a bit about the used car market, and I for one, have expanded my vocabulary to include many an unexpected mechanical term.

What we needed was a vehicle strong enough to pull a trailer over the Rockies – ideally with a tow package (which, if you ask, is not the same as a tow hitch), not too expensive to fix and comfortable enough to keep us sane for six months. Our budget, which started out at $10,000, stretched during the effort to as high as $16,000.

The main thing we learned, though, was that it’s really hard to buy from private sellers, and that dealers are seldom honest. Their top trick is telling you they’ve still got a car at the dealership when you call to confirm, and then – once you’ve dragged your whole family miles away in the baking heat - to say that it has just sold, but would you like to look at a more expensive model. One of them wouldn’t allow us a test drive, while another said that a doing a test drive implied a promise to buy the car – and that was just one of his aggressive moments.

Still, private sellers can be difficult too. Like the guy who agreed to meet Daniel not at his home, but in the parking lot of a Walgreens pharmacy in Orange, New Jersey – he refused a test drive, the idea of an independent mechanic looking at the car and even an offer to buy it.

Our search took us to New Jersey, Connecticut, Rockland County, Brooklyn, the Catskills and Long Island – some of these more than once. Daniel really knows his way around the NYC metropolitan area now.

In terms of car models, we variously decided on a 2001 Volvo XC 70 station wagon/estate car (turns out the reason so many were on the market is that the transmission conks out at around 85,000 miles), Ford Crown Victoria/Mercury Grand Marquis (cool in a ‘Hill Street Blues’ kind of way and spacious, but possibly not up to towing) a Honda Pilot (not strong enough for towing), Nissan Pathfinder (not roomy enough to hold all our stuff plus a guest comfortably) and a Toyota Land Cruiser (too expensive).

Finally, we ended up with a good old American giant gas guzzler: a 1999 GMC Yukon SLT with 67,000 miles. We bought it for $5,000 from Joe Ruscillo (pictured above), the owner of Star Auto Glass in Hempstead, Long Island. The best thing about this baby is that its first and only owner was the Franklin Square Fire Station on Long Island – that means it used to have sirens, lights and big sparkly letters spelling out “Fire Chief”.

Unfortunately for us, these have all been removed.

What they did leave is a medallion invoking St Florian, the patron saint of fire fighters.

http://www.gocolumbiamo.com/Fire/Honor_Guard/saint_florian.php

So, we’ve decided to call the car Florian, Flo for short.

Top tools for our search were:

1. www.autotrader.com -- this is a listing that’s free if you’re a buyer, and paid if you’re a seller. You can search by budget, car type, mileage, model year, distance from where you are, etc.

2. www.edmunds.com -- on this site, you can see how professionals and consumers rate new and used cars and what the average price is for a car by model, year and location. It’s superhelpful.

There’s a similar site called Kelley’s Blue Book www.kbb.com , but we didn’t try that one.

3. Consumer Reports Used Car Guide – a book published yearly that includes an exhaustive list of most models of most cars, with pros and cons by vehicle type, tips for buying and selling, and cars to avoid.

4. Pat Saccomanno, an autobody mechanic who gave us some of his thoughts. If anyone needs their car fixed, his shop is called Beechmont Auto Body.

http://beechwoodautobody.com/

5. My sister, Annie, who has learned a lot about buying and selling cars through her own research.

6. My father (Stephen, also pictured above), who basically ceded us his own car – a handy Toyota Camry, itself used – to enable us to find The Car. We probably put 1,000 miles on it, so thanks for that.

A fiery farewell

Having arrived in the UK in June 2000, I never expected to stay more than a year or two. The plan was to complete a Masters and go back to New York.

Little did I know it would take nine years, and that there’d be a husband and two daughters in tow.

This is because I moved to Columbia Road, the best place to live in all of London. There, you not only say hello to your neighbors but also become friends with them. Cheesy, yes, but also true.

It’s probably due to the fact that the street, located in the city's East End, hosts a weekly flower market and is home to many artisan shops, meaning that many people both live and work there. Over the last decade or so, the area has had a resurgence, attracting lots of young families, so we’ve all been really happy there.

http://columbiaroad.info/home.html

So, when we did go (albeit temporarily) it was with a bit of fanfare. We had to say goodbye to a lot of people, so we had a little neighborhood party on Jesus Green, a small park behind our house. We had beer, juice and lots of snacks. The kids ran around, the adults caught up, and it didn’t rain.

What we didn’t expect was a bonfire. What everyone thought was a game to keep the kids busy – gathering sticks, starting with little twigs and ending with larger sticks and then pieces of cardboard – was not pretend, but a plan to light a real fire. Matches and lighters were used, and our farewell probably left an indelible mark on our local park.

We didn’t do it.

I won’t say who did, but you know who you are!!! (Culprit not pictured).

Anyway, we will miss our friends, London and especially our neighborhood.