From New York to Nicaragua…..And Back

NYC street scenes April 2009 from Travis Melvin on Vimeo.For reason I am still not sure, I decided to walk from Houston and Broadway up near Times Square yesterday and  film the whole thing with the FlipMini Video Camera. The weather was beautiful and I totally felt like that touristy dork guy but I wanted to play around with Flip more and it felt good to be outside. This video is a few different scenes all tied together from the various things going on in NYC with some shots of Union Square farmers market, Macys, & Times Square. The video is real loud and shaky but can’t help it much when your’re walking with the Flip Cam.

Spring really has sprung here- and you know it has affected my mood when I am touched by the pigeons living on my fire escape reproducing more city birds. But my god it is so cute!

Little Birdie from Kara Strong on Vimeo.

Not sure why I decided that I had to walk to work today but I was intrigued to see how the snow storm was coming down on the city. Unfortunately I was pelted in the face more than I anticipated and only snapped a few photos and now and then. I will say that I am very much impressed with the fortitude that New Yorkers have when it comes to moving around in bad weather. There were all kinds of people out on the streets slogging their way to work and getting on with their day. Now I am in the office trying to concentrate and the weather looks terrible still. Here are some photos for any of you that have some nicer sunny weather.   Hope you are warmer than I am and sorry if the layout of this is all blown out. It’s number 127 on my to do list and I should get to fixing it around the time the federal budget is balanced.  

It’s been busy as usual over here in New York City these days and the guilt of letting this blog fall by the wayside keeps me posting slow and steady updates. I put in a few more building photos on this post just for kicks, but haven’t really been taking pictures lately. I’m hoping to get into putting up more video with the Flip Mini K got me for my birthday, but this is long these days and I never get to the bottom of it.What’s new and exiciting you ask? Not much. The falling price of real estate in Manhattan has got us trying to decide on if we want to buy an apartment or not and we both seem to go back and forth on this as something about a life time commitment to pay rent along with the multiple horror stories from friends and family out in CA on home values combined with our spontanious urges to pick up and leave make it tough. We’ve also grown to be displeased with our current apartment and like every good New Yorker are planning to leave it behind, regardless, when the lease is up this year. Kind of like a snail moving to a bigger shell.Thats all the update I can muster for now. Here are some pics for kicks!    

We managed to escape the cold weather for a long weekend and headed down to Key West, Florida last weekend. K goes to Florida a lot for work but neither of us had ever been to the “keys” (makes you feel like a local just saying it) and in the blink of an eye K worked her internet magic and found some last minute discount specials. When I say last minute I mean it - she booked it mid day friday and we flew out that night!

The tropical blue water and beaches were beautiful and we were skeptical that we were still in the united states as we departed the mainland of south florida and drove the 90 some miles south across small strips of land until we got to Key West. We stayed at a Sheraton where somehow our room turned out to be a suite that was awful close than being bigger than our apartment - even thought we didn’t spend a lot of time there.

We packed a good amount of time into two days riding around on beach cruisers, eating all forms of seafood - both fried and grilled, drinking from plastic cups while walking around the street, reading magazines on the beach, and generally doing what tourists do. Aside from the crystal blue waters and great views it was nice to eat a varitey of tasty food and just relax in the sun. Wearing flip flops and shorts was a welcomed break from the long johns, coats and beanies of NYC to keep warm in winter.

Coming back was tough but we both felt that we got the most of a short amount of time. I went back to work yesterday recharged and last night a snow storm rolled in so we are pretty much back to reality over here. Thanks for the sun Key West, hope to see you soon.

This blog is so bittersweet for me in the sense that it started off my wordpress obsession (which has spread faster than cancer across a few other domains and other such ‘big ideas’) and was really the ‘original’ blog we started before taking off on 9 month central america trip last, last year (you like that new years addition? it also gave me the excuse to put two things in parenthesis in one runon sentence which is a double no no, no).

It was so exciting back then because we had new experiences to write about every day - new people came and went at the hostel we worked at, stuff broke, my spanish got better, we had no tv and the electricity went out every day. There was all kinds of good stuff, new countries, interesting people and more to write about.

Since we got back, the excitement has definitely faded as we returned to the American curse of structured work schedules and high costs of living. Heading to the office every day to go to work is nowhere near as exciting as walking across country borders and cramming on old school buses with live chickens.

The point being that we will both try to keep this blog going with a little spit, glue and creativity but for the most part I think the most exciting posts are over. At least until our next trip…

Walking around Manhattan on Christmas morning might be one of the few times the city seems quiet. I did it once a few years ago and this year the circumstances were right for me to do it again. Although I was hoping it would be more empty than it was, for New York City it might just be as slow as it gets. I walked from the east village all the way up to around 50th and Lexington, at which point I decided to turn around and head back. There were still a few bodegas open, taxis in the street, and a small assortment of folks outside but not much. I also decided to go to Russ & Daughters for some caviar, bagels and lox to celebrate and had to deal with a 45 minute wait from the second they opened the doors to all the painfully ridiculous rich people ordering food for small armies uptown somewhere. Painful experience.

Here are some halfway decent pics of some random buildings from the walk for my own amusement. I am attempting to make rack of lamb later on and hope all goes well. Enjoy.

Not sure if this short and low quality video will work but thought I would share a short video of it snowing over here in NYC out my office window. This will most likely only play on a Windows PC or in Windows Media Player.

NYC-first-snow Click to Watch the Video Clip - May play slowly.

To download, right-click the link below and choose ‘Save Link As’

It’s getting harder and harder to find the time and energy to write something interesting on this blog since our lives have pretty much slipped into a relative routine, so you may notice the gap between posts widening. Big news right now is that thanksgiving is in the past (aside from the few pounds of turkey weight I gained) and xmas is rapidly approaching. FYI I am going to spell christmas as xmas just because it so easier to type.

This weekend was filled with one positive and one negative so far, and I would say generally balances out. The negative - we had to return our cat back to the adoption center after about a month long vacation in our apartment. Since we can’t commit to actually getting another cat, we decided to “rent” cats from a local no kill animal agency (they refer to it as ‘fostering’). Basically we give the cats that have been on lock down there a breather for a month or two by taking them in and getting them out of the tiny cages there. It gets a little hard to take a cat back to this place you have gotten used to having around, and we had to return our second one yesterday, which was a little difficult. I put a pic in this post for reference and still feel bad that he is over there right now wondering WTF!

The positive is that we bought a xmas tree the other day from the sweet and mysterious french street punks selling them a few blocks up. We put the lights up, loaded it down with decorations we had brought back from Oaxaca and others, and now we are fully ready for santa to come crashing down our chimney. I’m looking forward to it smelling like pine when I get home at night as well and the tree is both a festive thing as well as a giant air freshener. I put some pics in of this as well but they are a little crappy as the smell of bacon cooking is causing me to cut this post short right quick. And Wendy if you read this we have a stocking up for you too!

I’m sure I join a chorous of people who all went back to work after the Thanksgiving holiday with that ‘wow, it’s December already’ feeling. K and I both spent around a week or so on the west coast and it was good to take a breather from the city and visit some family. I wish I could say the weather was a little better but most of the time it seemed overcast and even a little misty and rainy. I don’t know why these trips always seem to go by so fast but all of a sudden we are back in NYC in our regular schedulues - except for K who had to go straight back to work.

So far no real snow over here, and although it is cold so far nothing has been intolerable. I’ve stopped walking to work due to the weather which will definitely lead to less exciting pictures, at least until the spring. I’m not exactly sure what to keep writing in this blog as we no longer have any exciting travel stories and have been relegated to the mundane work and regular life days. That is all for now.