My Summer in the City...thus far.

Thank goodness my blackberry has a great camera on it, because looking through some of my stored photos tonight, I realized I've got a few cool ones on here that I should show you from my adventures around the city this summer.

One of our fave summer hot spots:  The Frying Pan.  It's a boat that actually sank to the bottom of the Hudson and was left there until someone hauled it to the surface again 100 years later.  Now, it sits docked at W. 23rd Street and the Westside Highway and is a restaurant and bar that serves great American cookout food (hamburgers, hot dogs, etc.) with a gorgeous view of New Jersey and the Hudson River.  They serve beers in buckets, so as you can imagine, people tend to get a little toasted here.  The land that you can see across the water is indeed New Jersey, and check out that huge barge in the river that I got in the picture!

I stayed in the city for July 4th again this year, and when I ventured through Union Square that morning (around 11 am), this is the sight I was greeted with.  It was an absolute ghost town, which is so weird, because this is usually a busy part of the city.  During the summer, all the smart city folk (read: not me) manage to get out of town as many weekends as they can to get a break from the stifling heat.  Trust me though, I'm slowly catching on, and next year, you can bet I won't be weekending in Manhattan as frequently as I have this year.

This is the super cool view from my new office window.  For those of you who don't know, that's the Empire State Building (think: Sleepless in Seattle, where little Jonah goes to meet Meg Ryan's character).  The only downside of being so close to the Empire State Building is the massive amount of tourists that flock to the sidewalks right outside my office building.

Speaking of tourists, check out this tourist group that I managed to snap a picture of on 38th Street and Fifth Avenue.  All of them wearing purple shirts, and all of them under the age of 16.  This is the epitome of a New Yorker's worst tourist nightmare.

Sometimes we have a little thirst for a quick tourist peek ourselves, hence finding ourselves in Times Square one evening (generally somewhat of a No Man's Land for New Yorkers).  See in the top center of the photo just to the right?  That's the New Year's Eve Ball.  It actually stays up year-round.

And there are certainly the not-so-pretty sides of living in a city of millions, one of them being the piles of trash.  I was walking when I took this shot, so I didn't even get the entire length of the trash wall, but I can definitely say it isn't the biggest I've seen.  Not by a long shot.  (And just imagine the stench...)  I remember when I used to come to New York for work before I moved here, and I'd pull into the city in my taxi, taking in all of the surroundings, and one time I specifically thought to myself how gross we can be as people to create so much trash.  And now here I am, adding my own garbage to those piles...

But then there are the beautiful days.  The days of laying in the grass in Central Park on a Saturday afternoon with a couple of your best girlfriends, drinking champagne from plastic safe-for-public-park cups, and catching up on the most important things: the latest fashion, newest bar finds, and latest guy gossip.  (C'mon, you totally know you do it too.)

And I loved the night that my friend Kevin and I came across this scene.  We were hanging out in the East Village, this was E 10th Street between Avenues A and B, I think, and apparently these neighborhood kids had just had it up to here with the heat.  So what did they do?  Oh yanno, they just popped the cap off of a fire hydrant and had a little water block party!  Kevin and I were gung-ho about making sure to walk down this block to catch all the action first-hand, and when the kids saw me coming, they apparently thought a girl would be a great target and tried to deflect the water to drench me.  I was a little too quick for them fortunately, and even though Kevin + I found the entire thing hilarious, a few of the kids' moms that had discovered the ruckus were not so amused.  It was a total "hot child, summer in the city" moment though.

I wish I had some cool new photos to share with you from this weekend, but I actually spent about 48 hours straight in bed trying to sleep off this sinus/allergy situation.  I think I'm almost through it, so I'm hoping to feel so much better by morning.  Thank you so much for all of your well wishes and text messages - they totally made me smile!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!  

xo,