Monika Klinar: Making hard decisions in the evenings

Hi, today I'll continue where we have ended the last time. We did the "must haves" on the first date (I've got back info that I was a bit boring — you know who you are:), so for the second one, we have interests of passion on the agenda. NYC allows me to pursue a number of them, but I'll begin with the one that I can pursue simultaneously while writing this post.

In the last two weeks, the new seasons of my favorite TV shows started again - not to mention all the new ones, which I don't dare to start watching (well they got me for three already). This has made planning my evenings all about making decisions, which one to watch and which one to skip, as of course TV shows are overlapping. I am already thinking that maybe an investment in DVR would be a good one, as it would pretty much release me of making such hard decisions. This interest of passion (I wonder who would dare to write in his/her resume "I like watching TV series") started many years ago, but it especially grew in the days of Friends, Seinfeld (the cast reunites on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm on the October 4th!!) and Sex and the City.

So last week, when my girlfriends were visiting me, we (+ one brave friend) went on the Sex and the City bus tour, and we had so much fun! The first reason was that we had a professional actress for our guide and the second that the tour really explains the essence of the show. Namely, that the main roles are not played by the girls (Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie and Miranda), but by the City — New York City, as more than 80 percent of all the locations used in the show were real locations (e.g. Carrie's apartment is a set, as it is too huge for Manhattan standards). We experienced a number of trendy locations for going out and hanging out with friends, for eating, shopping and of course where to go to be seen. It was so much fun discovering Meatpacking District, Greenwich Village, SoHo, West Village and other parts of Manhattan, through scenes from the show — where Carrie was robbed of her Manolo Blahniks, where Samantha was kicked out of the private pool, where Steve and Aidan had their bar (yes, we had a cosmo), where Charlotte bought her first pet, where the girls were buying cupcakes (yes, also we also had cupcakes)... The official tour was finished after 3 hours, but the unofficial one has very much continued.

I have gone to Paris, an old movie theater located close to the famous Plaza Hotel (present in more than fifty films), to see a movie about Coco Chanel. I went running in Central Park, I did the free ride with the Staten Island ferry, I visited NY Public Library ... still a bunch of locations are left on the list for my DIY discoveries — but even if I ran out of the Sex and the City ones, there were so many other TV shows and movies set in the NYC. Think I'll just skip locations of The Sopranos and the other a bit more "challenging" ones.

Next time I'll take you on the ride of eating (or tasting, as some are a bit too much for my taste) food of the world. There are supposed to be more than 18,000 restaurants in the five boroughs of NYC.  Don't know how they all survive, but on the other hand, where would all the 8.3 million people plus tourists eat out?