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After many Sunday afternoons tramping around Manhattan, three unsuccessful bidding wars, and guessing games with slightly sketchy selling brokers, we finally nailed one down and are In Contract. You would think a recession would take a bit of the pep out of a real estate market, and maybe it has - two of the places we lost out on only had one other bidder, maybe in better times there’d be 3 or 4, but all it takes is one shmuck with more money than you and bye-bye charming brownstone apartment.

It actually looks like this, no retouching…

Now the fun begins - the co-op board. Let’s see your finances. What about your health records? How are your teeth? Can you provide us a family tree? Five generations back will suffice, though we’d prefer 10. Any pets? They’ll have to submit to a psychological exam, to make sure they’re stable and won’t growl at the neighbors. Ahh the dream of home ownership…

The power has not gone out in the last 24 hours. I woke up this morning without any new bug bites. I went to the gym, because I could, because there’s a gym here. I bought a coffee on my way home, because the stores actually sell coffee. Now I’m web surfing, and pages load almost immediately. I’m listening to music, and it’s not reggae.

¿Dónde está Whole Foods?

Hanging out on a Caribbean island was not a bad way to spend a week, especially when the diving’s as good as it was in Roatan. Sunny and warm weather every day didn’t suck. Neither did walking down the beach to get to town. But it’s definitely a one-dimensional experience. After a week, even sitting on a beach eating lobster tails and drinking rum punch every day starts to get old. Really, it does.

Wrting this blog post on an iPhone, while sitting on the tarmac waiting for our flight to take off, feels both very modern and very last-century. The iPhone itself rocks, but waiting 60 seconds for each page refresh is so 1996 dialup era. And while I love being able to jet between Tokyo and New York, after 2 hours on the tarmac waiting for air traffic control to let us take off.. I’m imagining passengers in horse-drawn carriages stuck in traffic jams on the streets of ancient Rome didn’t feel much different.

Don’t drink the water at O’Hare

My first blog post finds me in Japan, newly arrived, and my brain is starting to feel slightly addled from the mix of slowly-fading junmai daiginjo sake and the ambien I just took. Lost in Translation was a great movie.. uncanny how well it captures the feeling of being a westerner jetlagged in Japan.

The thing that always strikes me about Japan is how everything feels so familiar, even though the Japanese aesthetic (not to mention the signage) is clearly different.. after dinner today, we found a little back-alley basement bar called Bar Jinn, a couple of blocks off the main drag in Ginza.. it was the classic neighborhood bar transplanted to Tokyo - the owner/bartender made every drink himself, cracked jokes (mostly bad) with all the customers, and did his best to make sure everyone was having a good time. We did.

I say I’m starting a blog about as often as most people resolve to go on a diet. Let’s hope it sticks this time.