THE NEW YORK DIARIES – DAY 1

I’m back from my five-day shopathon in New York! D and I decided to stuff the credit crunch and splash out on a joint birthday pressie so we treated ourselves to four nights at The Bowery Hotel. We arrived on Thursday afternoon and we hadn’t even left Kennedy airport before we ran into trouble. D got stopped at passport control because they thought he was a wanted man – poor D! We had to sit in a waiting area for about half an hour while they checked his ‘papers’. I don’t think my quips of ‘is this like being in The Wire?’ went down too well. Finally they let us go and we hotfooted it to The Bowery. What a cool hotel! I’ll do a separate post about the hotel but it was beautiful and the staff were top-notch from start to finish. After checking in and freshening up, we had a bite to eat then went for a wander to the West Village to check out the Marc by Marc Jacobs shop (why waste time, huh?). Last time we were there two years ago we got a fab haul of cashmere scarves and gloves, a couple of belts and my famous $30 black PVC tote bag which is still going strong. Alas, nothing tickled our fancy so we left empty handed. We went back to the hotel via Dashwood Books where I couldn’t help buying a Japanese magazine full of Bruce Weber pictures and trivia. Of course, I couldn’t read a word of it but it looks good!
We promptly conked out at the hotel but had to stir ourselves as we had promised our friend S we would check out his exhibition opening.





Talk about mobbed! We queued for about 20 minutes to get in then did a quick 180 before going to the hotel bar to meet my friend G for drinks followed by dinner at Gemma. Gemma was great – buzzy, good food (although pricy) etc but we were both so zonked out we didn’t last long. We were fast asleep by 10pm.