Our first stop in New York City is the Upper West Side. We want to visit very dear French friends who live and work in the city for a while together with their two little children.
We therefore stay in the area for two nights, at a lovely and unique little B&B apartment together with our host Odette Noble, a charming lady who welcomes us with a smile in a bright blue Moroccan gown and offers us cold drinks, fruit salad, banana bread and plenty of stories of America.
Here we are, right in the middle of our adventure, immediately talking about the real stuff. The history of American families, the frontier, the Trump administration, capitalism, art. Her kitchen becomes a meeting point for the next 48 hours, where we share our thoughts on what makes America great and what doesn’t.
We feel very much at home and at the same time, as if we were part of a Woody Allan Story (maybe that’s why). It therefore comes as almost no surprise that this house served as a setting in a Woody Allan movie. Apparently, Charlize Theron who plays one of the main characters, at the moment her male counterpart opens the door to his apartment, says: ‘I know you would live in a sleazy little hovel’. Tells us our host who has been living here for nearly 50 years, and she laughs.
We love the place and its proximity to Central Park which is the perfect place to hang out or to go for a run on a first jet-lagged day, and on the second one, too. As we have been to New York many times before, we do not have to drive through the city and its sites with full speed and in search for the next even more incredible site, but are happy to let the children set the pace. We realize that it makes it more enjoyable for us as well.
Our French friends welcome us on our first night with all their hospitality and we stay up late, drowning that jet-lag in wine while catching up on the last couple of years.
