Day 5 (!!! Feels like I've been here for ages)

I can hear cars going past and from the splashy sounds that accompany them, I think the snow must be melting.

Friday night is party night.

As planned I went to Tribeca, and back to my old friend Duane Park. Sadly Marisa wasn't there so I couldn't catch up with her, but the host Billy remembered me and welcomed me in. I ended up sitting at a table with a music lawyer who's worked with Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Lauryn Hill etc and his friends - Chicava, a burlesque dancer and Ricky Gordon aka Dirty Red, a musician who plays old-school blue grass, slave roots music and jazz and has played with Spike Lee and, randomly, just wrote song for Snoop Dog(g?). So a really interesting bunch with good stories and cool jobs! The place was packed out so how, of all the tables in there, I managed to end up on that one I do not know.

The Brian Newman jazz trio played and the Friday night burlesque show was on, so I enjoyed some quality entertainment and then was very happy to catch up with Patrick, one of the very friendly waiters I met last time I was there. It was really fun to be back there and see familiar faces and not have to worry about being ID'd.

So then I walked back to Chambers St to catch the subway home, about 1am. It turned into a very long journey because the trains run so infrequently late at night, but when I eventually did make it back to Loftstel I was greeted by another party in full swing. Renata, a Brazilian girl from the floor below, is leaving today so in honour of her last night the Loftstel staff let us ignore the 'on weekends the quiet hour starts at 12am' notices and make lots of noise drinking cheap beer and playin a really odd combination of music. It ran the gamut of genre from Taio Cruz and other top party hits that all the kids listen to these days, to some insane Spanish song chosen by Hector the Mexican (who proceeded to grab Wave and sping her round the floor very fast for the entire 5-minute song) to a really dodgy techno-y electronica-y/traditional south American thing courtesy of Fernando...followed by some mellow gutair music and then a dirty grime/dub/techno (I know, hard to imagine) that repeated the word 'evil' over and over. This is what happens when you have an international house and only one British person to fly the flag of good music... reason just goes out the window.

Here's a list of the names I've grasped so far:
Kait
Wave
Camilla
Tuan
Joe
Gabriel
Fernando
Rick
Arnaud
Renata (now gone)
Abi
Velvet
Ugur
Joseph who likes to be known by his middle name but I've forgotten it
Staff:
Daniela
Agustina
Kenso
Susan
Then there's about 6 other people I can think of off the top of my head whose names I just cannot remember, and about 6 other people on top of that who I haven't really met yet. And there's names that I can't put to faces. And there's me, and there's our new roommate, March from Holland who does not snore and is therefore allowed to stay in our room.

Didn't go to bed til v.v.late hence it is 2.30pm and I'm still in my PJs. Have had my uber-healthy blueberry and yoghurt breakfast though. Hmmm also my brain is like marshmallows.

Time to go for waffles with Kait, who keeps mentioning 'biscuits and gravy' and I'm really curious to find out what these may be.

Hope England is treating my nearest and dearest as well as America's treating me, P&Lxxxxxxxxxxxxx