NYDiscovery

Being in the Tube - Getting an MRI Taken

When talking with people about MRIs a lot of different experiences and even some horror stories bubble up! Are there so many claustrophobic people out there? Makes me wonder...

So, I got one done today and the experience was more interesting than anything else. Admittedly, I am not claustrophobic and I know that I am not since I've been using sun tanning beds every now and then. (Relax, this was back in Munich!)

Granted, there's much noise going on once inside the tube but I got my ears well covered and I managed to make some beats out of that noise. I closed my eyes and tried to come up with some ideas, ideas for lyrics/poems. I got a couple of bits and pieces and will work on them.

The more annoying part is having to wait for 16 days before my doctor will discuss the results with me! 16 more days with pain. But this also means 16 more days to potentially recover anyway...

-- By Elke

My 2009 Favorites - Happy New Year!

Continuing a little tradition, here are my favorites for 2009:

Favorite Bar: Bar on A
No change here. Bar on A continues to be our favorite place for all situations.

Favorite Bartender: Amanda at Bar on A
With Yvette being a very good friend more than anything else, we enjoy drinking time most with Amanda, the inventor of the Hendricks and cucumber-based gin & tonic variety.

Favorite New Local Artist: Kendra Morris
There's a lot of great talent working in Manhattan's bars. Here's one of them: Soul singer Kendra Morris.

Favorite Restaurant: Festival Mexicano
We haven't discovered many new places, so this one goes to a restaurant that gives us unpretentious comfort since the first day we've moved to the Lower East Side. It also offers pretty good South Mexican Food.

Favorite Album: Fever Ray - Fever Ray
Who would have thought that?

Favorite Song: Fever Ray - Seven
And that?

Favorite Concert: Fever Ray at Webster Hall
Besides the fact that I love Fever Ray's music, she also staged an awesome concert with very unusual, nightmarish visuals.

Favorite Movie: Avatar
We haven't been to the movies very often, but here's finally one big theatrical release that blew me away.

Favorite TV Show: Mad Men
This show continues its greatness. Nothing else makes me watch TV regularly.

Favorite Moment: Wasting an afternoon at Schiller's
This year was full of great moments (I had the sneaky feeling that it wouldn't turn out as bad as expected) and it's very difficult to pick one. Since I have to, I choose the one when Elke, our friend Lesly and I spontaneously went to Schiller's on a Friday afternoon, after shopping for the Fourth of July BBQ. There we burned through various cocktails, carefree like in times when we were much younger. Unfortunately this is unrepeatable, the check in the end alone is prohibitive.

Favorite Vacation: Summer Weekends on Fire Island
We did the QM2 again this year and it was awesome by any means, but by a small margin Fire Island was my favorite this year. From boarding the train with a glass of wine, over riding the ferry, meeting good friends and hanging out at the beach to the delicious meals, every weekend was again a blissful experience.

Merry Christmas!

 

Happy Thanksgiving

 
Happy Thanksgiving to everybody who celebrates it today. Since we going to be stuffed for the next 2 weeks with excellent food, we're keeping it low key and celebrate at our favorite diner Remedy Diner.

NYC Marathon 2009: She did it!

Congratulations to Hillary, who finished the marathon with a smile on her face.

Let the US Open begin!

 

September is when Elke and I are caught by the tennis fever. This year we double the effort and are out to Flushing, Queens for four times. Tomorrow and Thursday for the evening matches at Arthur Ashe Stadium and with a day pass on Saturday and next Tuesday. Of course we hope seeing the top players, but unfortunately that cannot be planned.

We will Tweet on @elkenyc and @oliverbo and post pictures here, on Elke's and my Fotolog, on Flickr and probably on Posterous and whatever other site comes along during the next days.

New Music Discovery: Masolit EP

This could fall as well under the re-discovery category as this band has been already around 1998 under the almost non-Googleable name Market. That was when MP3 was new and everybody was drooling about the fact that high-quality music can be delivered over the Internet. There was a site mp3.com, which had a brilliant idea: offering musicians a platform to offer some MP3s tracks for free to get exposure without a label. The music industry quickly saw the danger of this, bought the site and converted it to one of the useless click-here-to-buy-music aggregation sites. But that's a different story.

Anyway, I did a few downloads from mp3.com, six tracks from Market among them. They delivered a the quintessential New York feeling to me: a hot summer night, an elegant lounge, fancy people and an eclectic band playing trip-hop sound. When we moved to the city, 3 years later, I still loved to listen to those tracks and finally understand more and more of the references in the lyrics, such as M6 being a bus line in Manhattan.

Another 8 years later, it is a hot summer night (the first one this year), there is an elegant lounge (the White Rabbit on Houston) and Market's key members, renamed as Masolit, are playing live. We don't say trip-hop anymore these days and Masolit has updated their sound by removing the scratching and adding a guitar line. But Margaret Jameson's voice is still riveting and the feeling transported remains very much same.

Recommended for:

Hot summer nights

My Favorite songs on this album:

It's only an EP, but so far it's NSA.

Reminds me of:

A bit of Portishead

Website:

http://www.masolit.net

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=94702321886

Twitter

Unknown

My iTunes Rating

4 star

Album Release date:

July 16th, 2009

Where I saw them live:

White Rabbit

Happy Fourth of July

Today we're celebrating Independence day for the ninth time in New York City (seventh to be correct: one time was in McMinville, Oregon and one time in the Catskills). I save a full review with pictures from all past occasions for the 10th anniversary next year and post here only a fireworks shot taken on July 4th 2005, when we were invited to celebrate with friends on the New Jersey side.

Today, we'll have our friend Lesly over for a BBQ with steaks. Later we hope to catch a glimpse of the fireworks from our rooftop. There may be actually a chance as it has been moved to the Hudson this year, in order to honor Henry Hudson's expedition 400 years ago.

Anyway, happy holiday for everybody in the U.S. and happy Saturday for the rest of the world.

And if I Can Make it Here: 8 Years Anniversary of Living in New York City

To the day, it’s exactly 8 years ago that Oliver and I hoped on a plane with stop in London to eventually arrive in New York City. From JFK airport we hailed a cab which took us to the Lower East Side's Orchard Street where we entered the sublet studio which we've never seen before. This was April 7th 2001. Digital photography was still in its very early stage and publishing photos on the Internet or sharing them via social networking sites was not yet possible and via email not common. Rarely people had digital cameras.

So we didn't know that the small studio would be really tiny and totally run down with a rusty shower, a tiny hotel mini-bar fridge, and a wodden plate over 2 - not functionining - stereo boxes. While this would matter today, it didn't back then! All was fresh and new and exciting.

Hey, we were in New York City, the greatest city on earth! And if you can make it here... but why make it anywhere else?

I fell in LOVE with the Lower East Side – and in love with this town and its people!

 If you read German, or if you’re  up for using a translation tool then check out the early version of our site. From 2001 we kept a diary.

You'll also find a special page about how we experienced September 11th 2001 - we just moved Downtown, in a very pretty building on September 2nd, with view of the World  Trade Center towers... 

We’re still around, so all good!

Later, we changed the format of our site a bit and were writing less diary than blog, still at a time where "blogs" were hardly existing! Remember, we've created the whole page long before there were typepad, wordpress, blogger, etc., etc. All hand coded HTML - I am glad though for no longer having to do this because I much rather focus on the things that I actually enjoy doing!

 Recently, we accquired the .com domain of nydiscovery and we're blogging in English since 2004 and are still trying a few different formats but are quite happy with the one we currently have. What do YOU think?

For more pictures, visit us on Flickr "nydiscovery". To remain updated subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter: @nydiscovery or @oliverbo or @elkenyc

As for New York City - my love for this town is still strong and I can’t see myself living anywhere else. I enjoy leaving the city every once in a while but coming back, is lifting my spirits and my heart.

 We’d love to hear from you – leave us a comment if you’re reading this. Thanks so much.

 -- Elke xoxo

 

Exchanging Buz Luhrman's "Australia" with Trueba's "Belle Epoque"

Buz Luhrman's AUSTRALIA opened the weekend I boarded the Queen Mary 2 to go on my anniversary cruise together with Oliver. Despite considering myself a huge "Huge Jackman fan", I didn't manage to watch the movie while it was still running in the theaters. Having read enough negative reviews, my desire to sit through it for 3 hours simply wasn't big enough. So I waited for the DVD release and 2 weeks ago, Netflix sent me the awaited DVD. But I still didn't watch it immediately but waited 2 more weekes to eventually sit down and play the disc.

Yesterday though seemed to be the perfect evening to see AUSTRALIA. We even bought Australian red wine to go with it which would not have been my first choice since I prefer Italian, Spanish or American wines. Not this time. The wine was an excellent choice but the movie was not!

I won't be able to say if there's a turn to the better or if there's anything of interest happening in the movie at all because it lost me, or better yet, never got me, right at its opening credits. 5 minutes in, we stopped the movie and agreed that we can't stand neither the female nor the male lead which both were introduced in an excessive matter that was very hard to believe. Everything seemed like coming straight from a rag. What has beautifully worked in MOULIN ROUGE didn't work at all in AUSTRALIA. Not even Hugh Jackman's build up body, half nacked, could save me from absolutely hating the movie. We gave up! After the "tent scene" we removed the disc, put it back in it's Netflix envelope and still couldn't believe what we were just trying to watch.

What has happened Buz Luhrman? Why?

In for a quiet evening - for a change - we then decided to watch the other DVD that Netflix has sent us. I've decided on a Spanish language movie, to support our Spanish learning experience: Belle Epoque by Fernando Trueba. What a different experience! The movie didn't want to be anything but a romantic romp and it succeeded on every level. There's a reason why in 1993 it won an Oscar as Best Foreign Film. After having seen this joyful movie, I was happy again with the evening's turnout which hasn't started promising at all.

-- Elke