After a crazy day yesterday (spent running all over Manhattan in high heeled boots) it was my turn to organize date night last night. Oi vey…when all I wanted to do was head home and lift the feet up for a couple of solid hours of nothingness. But a deal is a deal, so I grabbed our social bible (aka Time Out Magazine) and rummaged through the tons of social must-do’s that New York has to offer. It had to be fun, special and couldn’t be a movie and dinner as John already did that last week. Ugh!

So in the end my bruised feet had to withstand another two hours of walking around, but it was well worth it. We went art gallery hopping in Chelsea! There was a special digital art show on, hosted in large containers parked in the street – weird concept – and everywhere you looked these weird artsy-fartsy types were hanging around, sipping too-strong G&T’s, smoking cigarettes and getting not-so-elegantly wasted. It was great. We climbed stairs (ouch, poor feet) down into basement art galleries and took elevators to top floor galleries and saw amazing and mediocre art. But that’s the thing about art…how do you know whether it’s really good? It’s only based on a feeling you get when you look at it, right? (I know my new boss would probably disagree with this statement, but for me, a non-art-afficionado, it’s very, very true!)

Afterwards, I dragged my bruised feet onto a cab and we went to dinner at one of our favourite restaurants – 44 & X. Again, fabulous gay waiter, great food (if you ever come to visit, PROMISE to let me take you for Mac & Cheese here…) and naturally the best company New York has to offer.

Date Night round two? Successful.

In this crazy city time seems to mold itself into one long continuum and it is super easy to loose track of the basic important stuff. With the job and the apartment hunt combination, John and I quickly found ourselves spending a lot of time together, without any real quality time – searching the internet for apartment availabilities, working on new job plans, etc. So we decided to commit to QT…Enter Date Night!

Every Thursday we are banned from watching TV or using the computer. So this past Thursday we had our first trial run. We cheated a little by first going to see an apartment straight after work, then heading down to SOHO to see another one (super cheating), but by 6.30pm we were in full date mode. John treated me to dinner at a wonderful fusion restaurant and then we went to see ‘Married Life’ at the cinema. It was great. Yay for Date Night!

We followed up on a perfect Thursday night by going to see the first screening of a new documentary on John’s favourite topic…Hip Hop culture! He had convinced Sam and Annie to join us and we headed back to Thursday night’s theater for a screening of PLANET B-BOY – an insight into the life of break-dancers. Super enjoyable as we had the director in theater with us afterwards to answer questions from viewers. Here’s a sneak preview for you to enjoy as well:

We followed this movie by dinner at another great East Village restaurant where being South African earned us a free bottle of champagne. Don’t ask!

Last night we had another great dinner in the East Village with John’s friends from Sweden and my ex flatmate from Namibia, Belinda and her husband. Great conversation, great food – what more could you ask for? Perhaps just a perfect Sunday. We met Annie for brunch (more eating), looked at four apartments and then John and I went for a Baskin Robins ice cream, just in case we hadn’t eaten enough this weekend!

Now if only we could find that perfect apartment, life would be truly good in the big smoke.

When you live on an island as tightly packed with cranes, buildings, people, cars, dogs, shops, banks, Starbucks outlets, hotdog stands and all the other things that make life in New York what we know it to be, you soon realize that privacy is not something to be taken for granted. And you usually manage to find that little haven of peace amidst the lack of privacy which makes life bearable.

The way this lack of privacy affects me goes from being downright annoying to hilariously funny. There is nothing worse than having to take a slow elevator ride up to our apartment on the 27th floor while listening to the phone conversation one of my neighbors are having about the latest break-up/work-stress/hook-up/fight/drama in her life. (Interesting how it’s usually the girls, hardly ever the guys participating in this type of annoyance…I sometimes have to stop myself from making a rude comment or offering the number to a good psychiatrist in the city.)

But somehow there’s this unspoken rule about not interfering. Pedestrians kindly look the other way when a homeless man is relieving himself on the street or when someone is having a little vomit session on the way to work. Similarly you just walk by the guy yelling at his girlfriend or the girl bawling her eyes out to a friend. So while we all share this space, we keep our personal bubbles packed tightly with our own affairs.

John and I started off feeling quite self conscious of having an apartment block across the way with a full view into our apartment, but after a year of life in the ‘public eye’, our prying neighbors have faded into the background, along with the sirens, helicopters landing on the helipad three blocks up and the constant hum of traffic and blaring hooters. You just learn to focus on other things.

Sometimes someone does get involved, and it’s usually refreshing. This morning I had to go out for my morning coffee and had forgotten my umbrella upstairs in the office. It was pouring and I was debating whether to run back up to the 10th floor to get it, or chance ruining my hairstyle when the security guard offered me the use of her dry umbrella – without taking me up on the offer to buy her a gratitude coffee.

And on Sunday I was feeling completely homesick and frustrated with the house hunt and the stresses of having a new job when I walked into the grocery store around 8.30pm to buy dinner. At the vegetable counter was a guy packing vegetables and we somehow got talking about Africa and life in New York. He said to me, “You know what my favorite holiday in the US is? It’s Thanksgiving! It’s even bigger for me than my birthday.” When I asked him what made Thanksgiving such a great holiday, he said, “’Cause it reminds me to be thankful for what I have – and sometimes we don’t always remember. This way I am forced to remember to focus on all the good things I have at least once a year.” True words – and it made me feel very selfish for being sad and down when the only things getting me down was not finding a bigger apartment and feeling slightly inadequate and overwhelmed in my new fantastic job.

Nothing quite like a wise old vegetable packer to put things back into perspective, right?

On Monday I started my new in-house PR position at one of New York’s most successful interior design firms. This position is a dream come true for me on many levels and, while thoroughly challenged on many levels over the past week, I am very happy I decided to move in-house, thus far!

Getting used to early mornings and full days of concentration again is proving to be more difficult than I initially thought and I find myself thinking back to those days at school after a long summer vacation. I arrived at home every evening this past week in a state of utter exhaustion – ready to collapse into bed/floor/sofa! Information overload combined with a long day of thinking is taking its toll on this vacation-loving blonde. That said, it’s great to be challenged and in this brand new environment where everything is new, different and absolutely gorgeous. I also got a bit of a strange introduction to the job…

On Monday morning I went onto a construction site to attend a photo shoot for a model apartment that my new boss had designed and decorated. Standing in this $6million 2-bedroom apartment, my jaw literally dropped. Every fitting and decoration was breathtakingly beautiful. Of course the heating hadn’t yet been installed (the site still being a real construction site), so after about 4 hours of standing around in my ‘new job’ outfit, I was quite ready to throw in the towel and get into the beautifully staged bed with a cup of hot chocolate. Luckily I managed to keep my chattering teeth mostly to myself and made my way out of the building, still wearing my pointy high heeled shoes, and down the construction elevator without messing up too badly!

The rest of the week has been pretty crazy, getting my head around a new industry and brand and keeping up with ideas and plans while ‘hitting the ground running’ in a very real sense. Before I knew it we had hit Saturday… Phew!

Today I went wedding dress shopping with Lirize, a friend of a friend from South Africa. As I haven’t yet gotten to do this for myself, it was such fun browsing through all the different options and seeing how each dress would completely change the theme of the entire wedding! After many hours of dress shopping, a late night last night and a week filled with brain-freeze and information overload, this Manhattan girl is a serious contender for a Saturday night at home. I know…how boring. But just for tonight, I don’t care!

Today one year ago I touched down at JFK International for what has been a life-changing experience. A part of me cannot believe that a year has passed – it feels like yesterday that I was standing in line at the US Embassy in Cape Town, trying to convince them to give me a visa, feeling confused about my decision to follow John to this strange land, leaving my home, my cat, my car, my stuff, my friends, my work…for love! On the other hand it feels like a whole lifetime has passed since I left Cape Town for two days in Dubai and a year in New York.

Looking back over the past year it seems impossible that everything that has happened has occurred in the span of 366 days. Highlights of the past year? Phew, where would I start?

- Committing to our relationship and the decision to move here by heading down to City Hall
- Getting to know John more and more every day
- Getting to know myself by pushing the limits of what I previously thought of as ‘standard’ and ‘normal’
- Traveling to Stockholm, Gothenburg, San Francisco, Texas, Cape Town, Dubai and many other exotic, undiscovered places
- Getting to know new fabulous friends – Annie, Justin, Rose, Laurel, Karen and other amazing people without whom my life would be emptier
- Finding a new job in a new country – proving to myself that I am just as good as these Americans
- Getting to know John’s family and being accepted as part of theirs
- ‘Making it’ in this big, tough city. Because, after all, if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere!

So how do you celebrate surviving this city for a year? Maybe I’ll head down to a trendy area and have a celebratory Starbucks, or perhaps I’ll go window-shopping in the West Village or SOHO, maybe I’ll browse the MoMA or the Met, or maybe I’ll meet some friends for dinner. Who knows? In this city, the next experience is always just around the corner – all you can do is to be open to it.

Here’s to the first year – and to many more!

Yesterday afternoon while roaming the quant shopping streets in the trendy SOHO, I rounded a bend and pretty much ran into a mob of middle-aged men with various sized lenses on different types of cameras around the necks. My first thought was pure confusion, but then I figured that they must be paparazzi (they had that somewhat sleazy air about them). I’ll be the first to admit, I felt honoured. I mean…sure, if they really wanted to photograph me I’d be happy to oblige, but there were so many of them.

True’s bob, the next minute they all started calling to me to ‘Gimme a smile’, ‘Please, look here’ and ‘Show us your teeth’ and I tried to keep them happy, but there were so many flashing lights that I didn’t know where to look. Next minute this big burly bouncer stepped in front of me and just as I was about to thank him for saving me from the paps, he stepped away again to close the door of a very big black jeep, with black-tinted windows. Then it dawned on me…they weren’t there for me.

I had just witnessed a short 15-seconds in the life of Lindsay Lohan, who then proceeded to wind down the window and wave from inside at the paparazzi and stunned people on the sidewalk before her driver whisked her down the road, leaving us mere mortals behind in a cloud of diesel fumes. To be honest, all I really saw of her was peroxide blonde hair and oversized sunglasses.

That got me thinking about being famous. It would suck. Yes, sure, you’d get many great things for free, get invited to the hottest parties and get to meet other famous people, but imagine what you’d be giving up. Privacy, real life and the freedom to come and go as you want. With that I shrugged my handbag higher up on my shoulder, lifted my sunglasses higher on my nose and thanked my lucky stars that I’m not famous.

The worst part about living in New York is finding the right place to live. The house hunt is officially underway again after I promised myself never to do it again last year this time. Ugh…it’s probably one of the most painful experiences (of course not counting those that actually involve real pain) in New York because the murky waters of the property market is filled with broker-sharks and wolf-like apartments posing as fluffy, big, sunny and ‘cozy’ sheep. It is the lot of the unfortunate to pound the pavement, see a minimum of 40 apartments and finally settle for something that is not quite what you were hoping to get, but will do for now. Of course it leaves you wondering why you ended up paying so much more than your original budget for something that’s so far from what you wanted. But the flipside of settling is that you end up living in the greatest city in the world.

Explaining the role of a broker to a broker-virgin is quite a mission as it is truly hard to comprehend how any one person could so blatantly be out to rip unsuspecting people off as our friends the brokers are. Yet, in a weird way, the broker plays an important role. If you’re working a 10-hour day, where will you find the time to pound said pavements and search and search and search for that almost-perfect place? For the benefit of having a broker do that on your behalf, you pay only 15% of your annual rent in a once-off ‘finders fee’. As most things in this city, any service can be bought – even the pavement-pounding one!

With me being free during the days at the moment, the pavement pounding has fallen squarely in my lap and I am enjoying the challenge – even though I do only grudgingly admit this. It’s less fun when you’re actually pounding in the snow, rain and freezing cold. But the feeling of relief when you walk into something great is so good. It gives hope that something good will actually come your way and that you may indeed, possibly, run the risk of living happily ever after in this great city. I hope.

And then of course you occasionally still do have the run-ins with the feared broker…like I had today. There is a great online listing service here called Craig’s List where you can buy anything, sell anything, find anything and even meet people. It is, without a doubt, the best place for house hunting – almost like the Sunday newspaper’s classifieds, without the actual paper, and constantly updated. It’s great. Now one of the services allows you to search for apartments with no fee – meaning you’d be renting the apartment directly from the owner or the building manager. This means no broker, and thus no fee. Easy enough, right? These sneaky shark-like brokers even manage to wangle their way into these postings. I ended up with a broker to see an apartment today and when she was 20 minutes late I decided not to wait for her (outside in the cold) anymore. The response to this? A snooty voice message on my cellphone telling me that she’s very busy, and if this was my attitude, she didn’t want to work with me! That was me…totally floored. When did paying someone almost $5000 for pounding the pavement with or for you become an honor? Needless to say that I didn’t warrant her voice message with a response.

So tomorrow it’ll just be me, my worn-in leather boots and the pavement again. And maybe we’ll have some rain or snow to accompany us on the long road to finding the perfect place to call home.