New Zealand! Day 5 Aug 7

5am start – it got better every morning… My skin was quite tired by now, so my lovely makeup artist gave me a face massage, I wanted to stay there all day. While Jarred got a nice sleep in till about 9am we went halfway up the mountain and shot the sun rising behind me. Amazingly beautiful, but cold and too early. Then down again to do two more looks on a road with the mountains behind. 

Today's make-up.

9am hit, we picked Jarred up and went to another location the crew had found. The Methven B&B. Here we were to finish off what we started yesterday. More strange combinations of underwear and knit stuff. 

A bit of a Blurry shot at the B&B
Six shots later and then FINALLY Jarred had to do some work. Kazumi had sketched some little relationship scenarios she wanted us to act out. You know the ones in magazines that lead into ‘relationship problem’ stories? Them! I always wondered who shot them and when… Now it was me! Although slightly awkward it was quite fun. If there’s ever a time to act a fool I think Jarred and I are supreme candidates. So there we were, him hating me/me hating him, me loving him/him hating me, me slapping him, me not being interested and then pretending to be interested etc. Everyone had a good laugh!

Some of the couple shot outfits. Us being 'awkward'.

I liked this dress! It was by Moschino.

By the afternoon I was becoming quite hyperactive as the prospect of the end of day was getting closer and closer. We finished up in Methven and drove to Christchurch. On the way a herd of sheep ran into us! Quite amusing. 

The Japanese client wanted a picture of Jarred in front of the sign?! My hair looked funny so I wasn't allowed in!

We arrived in a sunny little town with beautifully kept streets and parks, quaint houses and greenery everywhere. I was completely impressed with Chirstchurch, proud to be half NZ (mums side!). Shoot blah shoot shoot blah blah… All I was worried about was finishing!!

 Finally we wrapped it up and then we drove to our home for the night at the Holiday Inn. We planned to meet back in an hour and go to dinner. We went to a great Korean restaurant – So fun! I hadn’t tried Korean before and I really liked it. I even had raw meat which was surprisingly nice.

Everyone in! L2R. Jun (Hair), Kazumi (editor), Moto (Photographer), Stylist, Coordinator, Yo (photo assistant), Jarred, Me, Kiri (Makeup)p.s. It was so hard to catch everyones Japanese names!! So some I never got a grasp of! Horrible I know...

Moto kept telling us this was very 'healthy' korean drink...

 Next we roamed around the town – A little festival was on with art instalments and an ice rink as well as some token Harry Christner singers that I joined for a dance! 

Around Christchurch - Cool little art installments everywhere.

Now I’m just on our flight back. 7am out – 4.30am wake up… But that wasn’t unusual.. I think I’ll be Jetlagged when I go back home from all the early starts! A 4.30am start in NZ is 2.30am in aus.

The end! 

Last few days mashed together!

28^th 29^th May 

Sorry for delay...

By now we felt we had seen all the main attractions that were completely nessesary so for today we thought we might just wonder and ponder and hope that we would find things we liked. We returned the bikes and also planned lunch with a friend of mine, Kate, who was in town. She told us to meet her and her friend around 2 so we pottered about our area then headed downtown to scout out where we were going to have lunch. There were quite a few beautiful home decorating/interior design shops in this area which was quite cool for us to look at as we are now trying to find our own taste in homey stuff. One shop in particular stood out. I don’t even think I know its name but the attention to detail and vast range of products were amazing. Mostly all of the pieces were independent designers and reworked vintage pieces. Very rare and interesting fabrics as well as inspiring ideas for window and shop displays. I took lots of pictures so have a look.

After we met up with Kate and her friend and had a lovely lunch. Sort of Middle eastern style. It was nice to hang out with other people, we had only been around our selves and strange American's all week! Kate gave us some local tips and told us about her model life in New York.

 

Think i got a little carried away with the chairs...

Downtown Broadway was our next destination. We wanted to have a look around at some of the clothes shops and I had one in mind that I thought Kaz might like. We got there and went straight into Topman and pretty much didn’t leave for about 2 hours! Kaz was in love. He walked around and around finding every single thing he liked. They had a great range of on trend guys clothes all in the same place, back home in Australia we’d have to shop around a fair bit to find such a range. Kaz tried on several shirts and blazers all different fabrics and colours and cuts. Everything looked great and there was so much he could have bought but in the end he cut it down to about 5 nice pieces. We then went upstairs to Topshop which is the original womens store which Topman is modelled off – I had a look around but the girls section wasn’t as exciting! 

After this we were feeling rather sleepy. We went back home around 6pm with the plan to catch up again with Kate and go out that night….. That didn’t happen! We konked out at about 8pm and slept till 6am the next morning.

Last day.

Waking up early has it’s benefits. We decided to make the most of our last day in New York, we were all ready and about to head out the door when I realised that I didn’t have my wallet in my bag. Kaz didn’t have it, it wasn’t in my suit case, no where in the room, nowhere to be seen at all… Uh-oh.. The next two hours were spent calling all the train stations and lost property's we could think of as well as the local police stations in 3 districts. No luck at all. I’m pretty sure that it had been knicked out of Kaz’s backpack when we were standing in peak hour on the train. They got pretty lucky, we had a bit of cash in there and all my cards for everything ASWELL as Kaz's.... After a small moment of crapping our pants we realised Kaz had left his credit card in the hotel room. It was only the day before when we needed to use a credit card for something that I rolled my eyes at him for not bringing his! Just as well he did leave it because we would have been in a right mess otherwise!

We didn’t want to let the thief dampen our spirits but it sort of did. We ended up getting out and walking around at about 11am, had a lazy long breakfast and then wondered down to the bottom edge of central park. We saw the school of Julliard and then walked allll the way up Amsterdam Ave because when we rode down the day before I thought it’d be nice to look in some of the shops.

They were quite beautiful. More interior stores, fashion shops and such. After a lot of bumbling around we had had enough and had to get back to get to the airport. We were advised to leave at 2pm to get on a 6.30 flight in case traffic was bad… I thought it was a bit unnecessary so we pushed it a little tighter and still ended up waiting at the airport for ages anyway.

Read it!

We were really sleepy by the time we finally got to San Francisco and were hoping to sleep the whole 16 hrs to Australia. We didn’t do too badly. But by the end we were happy to be off the plane and home!

Here it all ended. Such a special, busy, crazy, exciting week and 21^st birthday – And the best part, I got to share it all with the one I love! 

27th May 2009

This morning we woke up with the sorest butts in the whole of New York… But we got back on our bikes again and rode over to the Metropolitan Museum. It was quite close, about the same street just across the other side of the park…Central park of course isn’t quite the size of most Australian ones though, it took us around 15-20 minutes. About half way along the reasonably flat road I felt a little exhausted, Kaz zoomed passed me and as I pushed my legs round and round I thought, how come it’s so easy for him? We finally got there with me lagging behind a little and Kaz realised that one of my tires was flat… Great! At least I had an excuse! Not so great though as the bike place was back on the other side of the park – plus we were having some trouble with Kaz’s chain so it added to our frustration of paying so much for bikes that weren’t perfect!

I forgot to take one of The Met so I knicked this off another site! 

Anyway, we chained them up and decided to deal with it after we snooped round The Met. We walked up the stairs and into the beautiful entrance where only a week before The Met Costume Institute Gala was on. We had a quick look around some of the historical ‘stuff’, however, sorry to any historians who are appalled by reading this… to be honest we had seen enough in London and Paris and weren’t too keen on spending half our day wondering around! We quickly found the Café and got breakfast. I had my first NY bagel, which even the waiter suggested wasn’t the best in NY. It was average. Then we headed on up stairs to the Fashion Exhibition ‘The History of the Muse’. It was nice to be able to see this – the week before when I was in Sydney reading about the Costume Gala I had seen that the exhibition was on, at that point, New York was a world away and I had very little idea I would be right there! It turned out to be nothing we didn’t already know. Conde Naste (publisher of Vogue US) was a main sponsor which really annoyed me because every image was of course from Vogue. This also meant that they mostly focused on ‘Vogue’s’ models and excluded any models who were contracted to other magazines such as Harpers. The overall styling was also quite poor. It looked like yr 11 students from Goulbourn put it together. I understand they wouldn’t have had the biggest budget in history – but still… Anywhoo rant over. We were on to our next destination after this.



The bike store! We got out and remembered the silly tire was flat. We contemplated riding it back flat but thought we better pop it in a cab. This wasn’t too tricky. One cabbie was helpful, but both didn’t fit. So I jumped in and Kaz rode over by himself. When I got to the bike store I put my business face on to the little Hispanic lady at the counter. I said, bikes no good. Flat tire, chain broke. She said. You pay tire we fix chain. I said very expensive bikes, we take again today, you give discount. One free bike. She agreed! Woo. Kaz just got there at the end of my negotiations and they brought out two new bikes for us. These ones were uglier which was sad – we got over that and rode off down Columbus Ave. (Nice shops)

Ji Chen's

24th and 8th Ave (The novelty of actually using these street names still hadn’t warn off) was the next destination. Here we found a whole heard of galleries. This was to be expected – Mum and Dad had directed us here, as one of their artists (Ji Chen) at Paintbox was part of a group exhibition, also a friend Kate had noted to try and get to this area. You could walk into any building, press a button on the lift and you would be dropped off into a gallery space. Kind of annoying because you couldn’t window shop to see if you’d like to go in, you just had to hope! We found Ji Chen’s work amongst some other (inferior) Australian artists and also popped around to some other galleries. The staff at these places were ridiculously snobby. Sure, neither of us were about to buy something, however MAYBE ONE DAY WE WILL! Every time we would go into a new place I would try to make them respond to me in someway, it was like prodding dead cattle with a folk. I’d sing out Thank you when I left and smile, they would just keep their heads down and not even flinch. I did make one person talk to me. It was worthwhile too! I over heard them saying something about Art Basel, so I asked if they would be there. They said yes so I said ‘ooh well I might be too’ pre-empting the fact that Mum and Dad are looking at going, they said oh well here, have some tickets! SO there you go Mum and Dad I got you free passes!

This painting didn't really show up in the photo but was really interesting

Next I asked a random in the street which street in The West Village had the nicest Café’s (good street to ask in as I knew most people looking at art wouldn’t just send us to Starbucks). They were really nice and helped us a lot, turned out to be one of my favourite areas. We rode down to I think about 13th and 9th Ave where there were some really amazing boutiques. There was also a big film crew on the street along with paparazzi down the end, they took interest in us from afar and snapped away but as we were closer realised we were of no interest! I asked them what was being shot, they said it was Harrison Fords new film. We continued down a little to Gansevoort st. A quiet little area with a bundle of very sweet cafes, one quite well known one called Pastis. 2 people had told us to go there however we didn’t, we had decided not to over spend on breakfast and lunch and to go out to a nice dinner that night. So we went to a great Mexican place that was really yum. They had the best guacamole I think I’ve had! Here we also found a shop with a label called ‘Theory’ that we both liked.

Read it. 

Best bill board on Broadway

After lunch we rode top to tale of Bleeker St, a great shopping area with nice independent labels and concept stores. Then all the way uptown, to try go to the Empire State Building. We just looked up to it’s point and followed it to the base. When we got there it didn’t look too inviting so I went in and realised it was the Chrysler Building… Oops! Apparently a common mistake, The Empire was back 20 blocks so we couldn’t be bothered as it wasn’t something we felt we HAD to see. We were more interested in heading over the Broadway to get ourselves some tickets for a play that night. We found a guy offering advice and pamphlets with an English accent. We felt he was a little more reliable for an opinion as he would be a little more frank and not just tell us how fabulous every play was. We said we didn’t want to see a musical, anything lame or basic – possibly something a little funny. We chose ‘Reasons to be Pretty’ – a hack at America’s obsession with aesthetical beauty. It was about 5.30 and the play was at 8pm so we thought we’d try pop passed MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) and then head home, get ready, go. We got to MOMA (we had already been the day before but it was shut) and got upstairs only to find security guards to tell us they were shut again… So instead we went to the gift shop, which was amazing and bought some goodies. We then went home and foolishly decided to have nap, we woke up feeling horrid, but dragged ourselves off to the play. We both really enjoyed it. Kaz was really tired but he managed to not fall asleep! (rare). It was very comical, however still quite powerful. Only four actors and not a massive budget but a great script with very intense scenes. After I bought the script, quite interesting to read and think back to what choices the actors made. After this we were spent. We went back to 86th and slept while New York buzzed away.

Marc Jacobs on Bleeker

Knicked this off a site too. The middle two were in our cast the other two weren't

26th May 2009

After utilising the great NYC metro system at the early hours of the morning, 2am to be precise we fell quite into the dreamtime. I think the jet lag was definitely in effect because my mind was able to conjure up a great dream about Mr. Merrick wanting to resign me at the Victory (“Oh if only!”). After a well-deserved sleep in, we made our way towards Amsterdam Ave in search of a bicycle store offering bikes for hire. We realised that it was very common for people to hire bikes in the city and even after receiving a hint of caution we hired one each.

Before we set off on our bicycling adventures we had a lovely breakfast close to the bike store on Amsterdam Av. It was a popular franchise bakery/café that we later found right throughout New York called Le Pain Quotidien. We both ordered soft boiled eggs that was complimented with fresh pieces of their own breads and sat in the warm wooden décor surroundings. The Mocha was actually quite poor but came in a large bowl cup that made the experience all the better. We decided that it was one of our favourite places in the city.



We returned to the bicycle store to pick up the bikes with two helmets (yes Mum's, we wore helmets!) and a massive chain. We paid quite a hefty fee of US$100 for 24hrs of hire but later found it to be completely worth it. We began our journey next to the Hudson River travelling south along the footpath. We rode for around 40 blocks and made a left turn towards Timesquare, again hoping to get tickets to the Late Show with Letterman. No luck, taping was at a halt for the whole week so we decided that next time we were in the city it was a must see (we used to Letterman to put us to sleep in Melbourne!).



The streets were packed by now and it was somewhat refreshing compared to yesterday. We leisurely rode through lower Manhattan on 5th Ave and saw the true New York as we had ever so pictured it. There we were dodging on-coming traffic - as in people not cars mind you, right on the streets footpaths (too scared of road at this point). We were strongly informed once by a lady in her true New York accent to “Get awff the syde warrrrlk”. We didn’t, we just laughed and repeated the sentence in our best accents about 100 times and made our way to Washington Square, on the side warrrrlk.

A great corner building

Mystery building?!

Once we got to the Square we were again informed by an NYPD officer that we couldn’t ride the bicycles through the park. He had just served his city so proudly as all great NYPD officers do there. We obeyed and walked towards a group of musicians playing a great tune on one of the park benches. Their band consisted of a variety of instruments from an amazing silver lined guitar to a wooden boxed single stringed bass instrument. The occasional trumpet would blow some notes and we both took time to take in the nice music with our surroundings.

Stuck in time... They don't seemed to have had a revamp of their buses or police cars in years.

We decided to work our way toward the World Trade Centre site into the financial district of New York. I was pretty amazed at the fact that after the eight years proceeding 9-11 the site was still bare. I’m sure there is a great scientific reason for this but we both contemplated our reasoning and came up with nothing! Moving further south we came to the bottom of the island and found ourselves in Battery Park. From here we had a nice view of the Statue of Liberty and experienced our first New York hotdog. The guy was sneaky - he charged us $2 extra because silly me agreed to the bigger sausage. (They cost $1 each more but he didn't tell us that). Hopey wasn’t too happy but we soon moved on from that. A quick photo snap on the park bench and we were again off on the bikes.

World Trade Centre Site

This time we found Wall St and quickly scanned through the financial centre of the world. The security was quite immense I thought but I guess better safe than sorry. Trump Tower was right in the middle of it all as well. By this time hunger had set in and China Town was the next destination. We ordered wonton noodle soup at a restaurant that acclaimed to have the best noodles in the world. I wasn’t too certain of that but what they did have was the loudest Chinese waitress in the world. She would stand at the counter of the small rectangular shaped restaurant and scream out the orders from the customer straight to the kitchen from there. We happened to be sitting next to her!

Wall Street - Kaz didn't think the flag was big enough...

Another great corner building. We loved these.

Hmm... This was pointing to the Department of Police.

Bike Envy! - We saw so many amazing bikes, this one was one of the most original.

Our next destination was back uptown to the famed department store Macys. We didn’t stay there for too long and actually found the place very disappointing maybe on par with Myer, Parramatta. The weather started to change and once we got back outside to the bikes the rain began to set in. We dissembled the lock chain as fast as we could in a hurry to get out of the rain and found a nice little surprise. Someone had accidentally left their umbrella on the back of one of our bikes. We both thought it was such a nice gesture, someone really cared that we would have to ride in the rain!

And pose - This jacket was the only OK piece of clothing in the whole of Macys

We were quite tired by now from all the bike riding but thought it was best to tough it out and stay up. We found a rare café called Starbucks that happens to only be on every corner in NYC and settled in there while the rain passed. As the night moved by we had an urge to fulfil the child in the both of us and found ourselves at the Amazing Ripleys Believe It Or Not. Fairly expensive for the experience but we happened to amuse ourselves amongst the shrunken human heads and 8 foot 3 giant man. Our evening ended at a nice Japanese restaurant close to our hotel. We ordered a couple of dishes but a special mention has to be made to the fresh sushi they made. A must have if ever in New York.


Ripley's - They asked if they could preserve my brains.