August was a sad month for me, but I am still grateful for the many moments filled with laughter and love, and some of my favourite people in the world. A few days after I got back to New York City from Greece, my grandmother passed away. I flew to Brisbane, Australia, to be with my family and help prepare for the funeral. It’s too big of a loss for me to bundle up into a few paragraphs, and to be honest, more than a month later I’m still in the rollercoaster ride of slow-burning grief. I like to share a bit of my life here on the Internet, but overall I’m a pretty private person so I’ll instead focus on the time I got to spend with my family at home – I spent two weeks in Brisbane, and while it wasn’t long enough, it was still so nice to have this much time with my family and friends.

Since I moved from Melbourne to New York in April 2019, I’ve started writing a series of monthly blog posts, NYC Life, to capture the the big and little moments that have shaped this move. It’s easy in hindsight to forgot the everyday joys, struggles and frustrations of life in a new city, so I wanted a place to for it all to live on the blog. I round up the most fun things I did, saw and ate near the end. For more specific New York City tips, check out my New York City Travel Guide.

Highlights

• Spending two weeks with my family in Brisbane
• My friend Casey’s visit to New York
• Visiting Chen Rezig with my parents, a zen meditation centre on the Sunshine Coast
• Dinner at Gramercy Tavern
• Seeing “Is It Camp?” at The Met
• Checking out some East Village institutions on a date night

Brisbane

Visiting in August reminded me how glorious Brisbane winters are. Some days, it was still 27 degrees! Most days were mild, with clear blue skies and I didn’t need anything more than a light jumper. Being home for two weeks was so nice, I haven’t spent this much time in Brisbane since I moved away! I had so much more time to spend with my family, collectively and one-on-one with my parents and siblings, and I loved feeling like I lived there again – having time for multiple coffee dates with friends, meeting my sister’s friends for drinks, going shopping with my brother and also my aunt, catching up with my godmother and having the time to spend most of the day with my grandparents.

Check out my Brisbane Travel Guide for the best things to see and do in my hometown.

Casey’s visit

My good friend and former colleague, Casey, was visiting in August, which was a huge highlight! It was so great to catch up and so much fun showing her around New York on her first visit to the city. We ate bagels from Barney Greengrass in Central Park, admired the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library, walked the High Line, visited The Met, wandered through West Village, Nolita, Little Italy and SoHo and waited for an hour in line at Westlight in Brooklyn – New York in a nutshell!

Casey hooked us up with a VIP pass to Brooklyn Brewery, through some of her work contacts, and it was SO much fun. I actually am not a beer drinker, but I drank my first beer here – and liked it! Admittedly, it was a sour beer so close in flavour to an Aperol Spritz that it is called The Spritz, but I also tried a purple sour which tasted a lot like a cocktail, and quite enjoyed that too. We had a private tour of the brewery, and got seats at the bar which meant we didn’t have to join the enormous queue for a drink.

Prospect Park

Prospect Park is Brooklyn’s answer to Central Park, and I’ve been meaning to visit for months! We visited at the end of August, and enjoyed the last of the beautiful summer weather and some fresh air. Prospect Park, for the most part, is less developed than Central Park so I can see why it gets less tourists, but it is teeming with locals. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is adjacent to the park, on the north side, and I’d love to go back soon to check that out.

August blog posts

In August, I was so excited to finally publish my New York City Travel Guide, as well as a recap of my two-week trip to Greece and my Paros travel guide. I’ve got guides to the other two islands I visited, Sifnos and Milos, coming up soon as well as some itinerary ideas for your first trip to Greece.

• Travel Guide: Paros, Greece
• Highlights from 2 Weeks in Greece
• New York City Travel Guide
• NYC Life: July 2019
• In Photos: West Village

Restaurants & bars

While Casey was in town, we planned one special dinner, at Gramercy Tavern. It’s part of Danny Meyer’s renowned Union Square Hospitality Group, and the restaurant is regarded as one of the best in the business. Naturally, the food and service was outstanding. It’s a true classic, and it has that New York institution atmosphere that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else. Beyond the incredible food, I love just watching the workings of a top notch operation like Gramercy Tavern – the way more than twenty servers moved around the dining room looked perfectly choreographed, and I can only imagine how the kitchen would run. I could watch restaurants work all night! Probably why I work in hospitality.

Read more: The Best Bars in New York City

We also checked out The Dead Rabbit, an Irish pub in the Financial District which opened in 2015 to much fanfare, including winning The Best Bar of the Year award in 2015. It’s reportedly serves the best Guinness in New York, and many of our hospo colleagues had recommended that we visit. The service was friendly, and the vibes were very much a classic, nice old Irish pub, but I have to admit I think I missed what everyone is raving about. Certainly a solid option in the FiDi, but I wouldn’t say you have to go there.

One other new find was Corkbuzz, a small wine bar in Chelsea Market. We had a rose flight and some share plates, and I’ll definitely keep this up my sleeve for a “nice” spot to eat in the market.

While Casey was in town, we also went to some of my favourite spots which I think are a must-visit for your first trip to New York – The Campbell cocktail bar and Grand Central Oyster Bar inside Grand Central Station, Westlight in Williamsburg for the best views in New York, and my favourite brunch spot – Jack’s Wife Freda!

Right after we got back from Greece, one of David’s friends from university was in town, so we met him for a drink at The Broken Shaker rooftop bar at the Freehand Hotel, in the Flatiron District. The Broken Shaker is a rare New York import – it was born in Miami, and has found success in New York too. It’s a James Beard finalist and is one of Manhattan’s most popular rooftop bars with people who live here – as opposed to 230 Fifth and Refinery Rooftop, which are largely populated by tourists. I really like it, but you’ll need to be patient in the multiples lines that will be required for you to get in the building, up the elevator, to a table, and to a drink.

Near the end of the month, I decided to implement a fortnightly “date night” which we could plan ahead and look forward to. We want to cut down how much we mindlessly eat or drink out in New York (it’s crazy easy to do) and instead mindfully choose our experiences by planning to go to places that are on our wish-lists for ages. I thought a fun way to do this without breaking the bank would to make it a “high-low” date night. The idea is that one element of the date is “fancy” (ish) and the other is cheap (ish – for New York City). For example, for our first date we went to East Village, and we started with beautiful cocktails at Angels Share, an East Village institution for more than a decade, followed by a cheap and cheerful dinner at Ukrainian 24-hour diner, Veselka, which has been serving the East Village since the 1970s. It was so fun!

Reading

I read a lot in August! Mostly due to spending about 30 hours flying. I’ve been trying to read some classics – the books you always mean to read but never quite get around to. I finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which was a behemoth but I really enjoyed, and Edith Wharton’s high society drama set in New York’s Gilded Age, The Age of Innocence. Compared to the language of Middlemarch, I found the latter a really easy and zippy read.

I also read a few non-fiction books this month, including Buddhist teacher Orgyen Chowang’s Our Pristine Mind, which is one of the best books I have ever read and a must-read if you’re a fan of Eckhart Tolle. I found this book confirmed many of Tolle’s teachings but perhaps took them even a little further. My mum found this one at Chen Rezig, and I quickly read it before I returned to New York. Ever since seeing the Brene Brown Netflix special, I’ve been meaning to get my hands on her books. I started with The Gifts of Imperfection, which she recommends as a good place to start. It’s a nice easy read and has lots of great life advice for living authentically in the 21st century.

I also read most of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life  on the plane from Australia to the US, but tired out of the many long and detailed forays in the Christian bible. He wasn’t so much preaching as just exploring the psychology behind the stories in the Bible, but regardless, I got tired of it. I’ll pick it up again and finish off the last four chapters soon. He’s stirred up a lot of controversy, and has been accused of being feminist. I was curious to see what the fuss was about, after having seen other arguments of his be misconstrued in the media (the age of outrage is a precarious one!). I found it a little frustrating as a female reader that I felt like he talks to men in his book, but about women, or almost as if men are universal and women are an other or an afterthought, but I think this might also be because many of his arguments and pieces of advice are directed mainly at men, or traditionally male challenges/shortcomings. To be fair, I read LOTS of non-fiction self-help kinda books aimed pretty clearly at women, so I don’t think this is something to pick up a pitchfork about.

At the Sydney airport, I picked up the buzzy debut novel from Lisa Taddeo, Three Women. I enjoyed the deep dive into the lives of three very different American women, but wasn’t as completely hooked as I expected from the rave reviews. In saying that, I’ve thought often of the women featured in the stories since (real women, names changed), so perhaps its one of those books that stays with you rather than glues you to the pages.

I also read Dear Wife by Kimberley Belle for a book club, I sped through it in about 2 hours when I was up with jetlag in the middle of the night. It was a gripping read, and an easy read, but it’s not something that I’d strongly recommend unless you’re looking for a page-turning beach read. Not the kinda book that will change my life or stay with me, or that I’d usually go for, but perfectly entertaining.