Bonjour, New York !

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Paysage - Manhattan Skyscraper -

Are you aware of the opportunity to see the georgeous view of Manhattan from the Hamilton Park in Jersey City, NJ?

Location: JF Kennedy BOULEVARD EAST & ELDORADO PL
How to reach: around 10 minutes bus ride from the Port Authority (check the Trip Planner).

You can visit here around 8:00 PM (up to you) after driving to:

  1. The Rockefeller Look Out
  2. Harriman State Park with the view of Bear Mountain, West point
  3. Alpine -- the chic, upper-class and very modern planned community of New Jersey
  4. MITSUWA to purchase prestigeous Japanese Sake
  5. Then Hamilton Park

Monday, October 30, 2006

La chute du feuillage #2 - The Harriman State Park -

You should go to see such a marvelous fall folliage even after Nor'easter in the end of October or otherwise -- Harriman State Park is the second largest state park, following the Adirondacks, in New York. Located in Rockland and Orange counties 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City, it is a haven for hikers with over 200 miles (320 km) of hiking trails.
- from Wikipedia

It' just 30-40 minutes drive from Manhattan and one of my friends, she lives here for 28 years, hikes the trails once a week, which is awesome!

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Heureux Halloween - Halloween AFTER PARTY! -


As eveyone is excited, Halloween is coming up!

NYC PARADE AFTERPARTY will take place at Webster Hall starting 8:00PM on Tues, 31OCT as well as VILLAGE HALLOWEEN PARADE!

Le Guide De L'Initié - DAILY CANDY NEW YORK -

DailyCandy, a free daily e-mail newsletter and website, is the ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered — from fashion and style to gadgets and travel.
- from the Daily Candy website

Anyway, please take a look at this site.
You can find fabulous information such as fabric sales, every event in NY or else.

Daily Candy also has other are editions: Chicago, Miami, Boston, et cetera, and even London.
Hope it will provide Spanish, Sao paulo, Buenos Aires, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo edition also!

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Meubles - Furniture rental companies -


If you need to rental furniture, some furniture rental companies I can recommend include:


  1. Churchill Furniture Rental
    245 West 17th Street 3rd Floor (bet. 7th and 8th ave.)
  2. CORT Furniture Rental (You can get a discount coupon online.)
    711 Third Avenue Lower Level (bet. 44th and 45th st.)
They have a pretty good selection of any type of furniture you wouldneed with varying prices according to a new yorker, who lives in Manhattan long time and recommended to me. Eventually my unit is furnished though.

Magasin - ELLE DECOR -

Most of my Chicago-friends' houses are like the scenes of ELL DECOR. I really have to make my place like them -- actually it's my excuse that the unit is too small to make elegant!

As a matter of fact, the magazine cost $4.50- each but, we can get the 10 issues for only $13- (including postage and handling per subscription) if subscribed to. It's true to other major magazines such as Vouge or so on. Consequently, you had better subscribe if you stay in the U.S. for at least three or four months!

L'odeur d'espresso - W Hotel, Roger Federer, and Jura-Capresso -

To tell the truth, I'm fan of Roger Federer - not so big fan - since I like playing tennis. OF COURSE, I went to the Ashe Arthur Stadium to see the game between Federer and Blake from Tampa, FL at the 2006 US Open.

And the reason why I pick the espresso machine Jura-Capresso is that, they chose Roger Federer as a spokesman of "The IMPRESSA Z5"! -- Unfortunately, I couldn't find the advertising on web, so please see ELLE DECOR, NOVEMBER 2006.

One of my Spanish friends, actually he's already gone back Spain though, recommended another brand's espresso machine (don't remember the brand name exactly...). But maybe I'm a typical target audience of the Jura-Capresso marketing team.. ha ha


Anyway, the night after he clinched third US Open Title on Sep. 10, apparently he enjoyed a drink at the VIP lounge of W Hotel near the Bryant Park, with his long longtime girlfriend, Miroslava 'Mirka' Vavrinec and Anna Wintour.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Telephone - the New AT&T and "NTT"-

AT&T Inc. - not "AT&T" which is abbreviation of the preceding company, "AT&T" began trading on December 1, 2005.

Headquarters: San Antonio, Texas, USA
Industry: Telecommunications
Products: Telephone, Internet, Television

AT&T Inc. is the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, wireless service (Cingular), and DSL internet access in the United States. The current company was formed by SBC Communications' purchase of its former parent company, AT&T Corp. As a part of the merger, SBC shed its name and took on the iconic AT&T moniker and the T stock-trading symbol (for "telephone").

  1. January 31, 2005: SBC announced that it would purchase AT&T for more than $16 billion. The announcement came almost 8 years after SBC and AT&T called off their first merger talks and nearly a year after initial merger talks between AT&T and BellSouth fell apart.
  2. June 30, 2005: AT&T stockholders, meeting in Denver, approved the merger
  3. October 27, 2005: The U.S. Department of Justice (USDJ) cleared the merger.
  4. October 31, 2005: The Federal Communications Commission approved it.
  5. November 18, 2005: The merger was finalized.

SBC announced that the name of the merged company will be AT&T, Inc., and it adopted an updated logo. The merger is ironic in the fact that one of the "Baby Bells" grew to the strength to buy out "Ma Bell" AT&T. A further irony is that the government, which mandated the breakup of the original monopoly AT&T in the first place, gave the go-ahead to allow AT&T to reconstitute much of itself in this merger.
- from Wikipedia, AT&T

As you know, there are talks to merge with BellSouth from March 5, 2006. The acquisition of BellSouth has already received approval from the USDJ, and FCC is having the vote on November 3.
It'd been nine months from the announcement to receive approval from the USDJ to start the new AT&T. On the contrary, it seems the takeover of BellSouth Corp is processing considerably fast; it took seven months to the approval from the USDJ.

The reason why I trace AT&T every now and then is that I used to work at one of NTT's subsidiaries. The history of NTT is similar to AT&T's (of course we can find some difference though):

  1. NTT was a goverment-owned Japanese telecommunications company.
  2. It had a monopoly over IT services to Japan nationwide and was then privatized in 1985 to encourage competition in the telecom market.
  3. NTT then formed the holding company and several subsidiaries in 1999 so as not to be dogmatic.

The preceding AT&T split completely in 1984, and the new combined company forms a holding company, which is the same hierarchy as current NTT. I will still check the U.S. telecom industry such as the NOV 3, 2006!

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

La chute du feuillage - The Cloisters -


Probably I will go to the Cloisters in the Fort Tryon Park in a few weeks, which is a branch of the Met devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe, for one thing I cannot seem to go to the Catskill Park this fall.

How to reach the Cloisters:
Just take the "A" train to 190 th Street, and walk for 10 minutes/transfer to the M4 bus to one stop north.

I would like to go to both the Cloisters and the Catskill Park, but the thing is we need a car to get to the Catskill Park. So, if you want to enjoy the fall foliage without car, the Cloisters can be included in your choise.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Parc d'État de Catskill - Catskill State Park -


To tell the truth, I would like to see the Kaaterskill Falls - the picture above - in Catskill State Park in NY.

The Catskill State Park, also called Catskill Park, is in the Catskill Mountains in New York in the United States. It consists of 700,000 acres (2,800 km²) of land inside a Blue Line in four counties: Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, and Ulster. As of 2005 there are 287,514 acres (1,150 km²), or 41 percent of the land within, owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve; it is managed by the Department of Environmental Conversation (DEC). Another 5% is owned by New York City to protect four of the city’s reservoirs in the region that lie partially within the park and their respective watersheds.
Being the smaller and less well-known of New York’s two Forest Preserves, residents of and advocates for the Park often feel that it gets neglected by the state government in Albany. A popular saying in the region is that the DEC Commissioner's chair faces north (i.e., toward the Adirondacks).
- from Wikipedia, Catskill State Park

In One Way or Another, the right after seeing the American landscape painting, "A Gorge in the Mountains" - the photo above - by Sanford Robinson Gifford at the Met, I got the urge to see the real view!
According to some blogs, we can reach the park only 1-2 hours drive from Manhatten. Besides, we must be able to enjoy the fall foliage also if going there around this season! Hence, nowadays I have always dreamed of visiting the Catskill State Park♪

P.S. Gifford spent his childhood in Hudson, New York.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Supplément - Eye Candy -


"Hmmmmm, he is a good Eye Candy."

- One day I went to a beach along the Lake Michigan with some friends. And one of my friends said to me like above.

According to the friend, who is originally from Michigan and has been in Chicago for more than 15 years, here in America we normally say so when we found a looking-cool or -nice person. As a matter of fact, in Japan, we usually say, "Eye Supplement" -- Me no Hoyou.

And I found a store named "EYE CANDY" near SOHO. I'm not sure what kind of goods they provides, though.

Anyway, is it easy for you to find a good Eye Candy in New York City?

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Sélection de livres - Brand Hijack -

FROM UNDERRATED TECHNOLOGY TO TEEN MUST-HAVE

Hijacked brands do not necessariy have to be great products. It's all about the killer experience.
The author is talking about the rise of SMS text messaging in Europe and Asia and the subsequent failure of the WAP (wireless application protocol) technology.
Finland. 1991. Nokia and a consortium of other telecom companies had just finished creating GSM, a new protocol that would allow customers of the various wireless carriers to communicate with each other. As a minor part of the protocol, they included a simple technology for text messaging. SMS, for short message service, was developed primarily as a sales tool.
However, within a decade, teenagers took over. And once teen established this new habit, older consumers copied them. Text messaging became a social connector for busy European and Asian professionals, just as Instant Messaging has entered the American workplace.
-from Brand Hijack

It's true that Japanese teens type so fast on text or SMS messaging or e-mail using mobile phone. In fact, since1999 we Japanese teens and young people normally have had three kinds of e-mail address: business, home (i.e. hotmail, gmail, yahoo, and other ISPs), and mobile. Interms of mobile e-mail address, the mobile phone service providers such as NTT DoCoMo "FOMA", Verizon, Vordafone, and KDDI give us one e-mail address on each mobile phone, and we can e-mail to every business or home address. Subsequantly, the mobile e-mail address have become a byproduct of a commuter culture; I used to go to my workplace with 30 minutes subway and used to spend the time on communicating with my family, relatives, and friends since I used to come home around midnight.

But one thing is, that I couldn't use that Japanese mobile all over the wolrd; I needed to apply another service when I had business trips abroad.
So, I'm interested in whether I can use BlackBerry worldwide, which is distributed to many business people in NYC and both in the U.S. and Europe and in fact, introduced to Japan last September.

The first picture on this post is one of the handsets NTT DoCoMo provides nowadays since their primary target audience is young early adopters.
And images of the handsets in 1998 are here.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Le concepteur - Diane von Furstenberg -

The Belgian woman, Diane von Furstenberg, aged fifty nine, speaks to each of her two children at least five times a day, and to her husband, Barry Diller, the media magnate, at least five times a day, and to her many close friends very frequently.
She was tanned a nineteen-seventies Brazil-nut shade of brown, from sitting outside at Cloudwalk, her estate in Connecticut, and from lying on her yacht. Her face was almost bare. She had considered cosmetic surgery but had so far decided to remain natural. Through yoga and hiking and eating carefully, she had maintained her figure. Her business the second time around was going evenbetter than she had hoped - a hundred and twenty million dollars in wholesale this year, her clothes in Barneys and so on around the world. Soon she would open a new boutique in Saint-Tropez (and one in Tokyo in September, 2006). In August, 2006 she would visit her children at the hunting lodge in Austria that they had inherited from their father. She had three grandchildren. She felt wonderful.
(Although she was born in Belgium, she is, in fact, somewhat Oriental in that sense: both her parents are Jewish; her mother was born in Salonika, in Greece, her father was born in Bessarabia and behaved like a Middle European - a loud singer of songs, a breaker of glasses.)
- from THE NEW YORKER, SEPT. 25, 2006

I'm married with no children. I seldom call to my Mom even in this marital status. I usually keep in touch with my friends several times a week over the E-MAIL, NOT over the phone. I'm serious. I'm not goofing around; why can she make her time to speak to her significant others so much?
She's experienced a collapse of her company in 1978 after the fad of her brand fabrics. However, twenty years later, her brad has become fashion again. (Tower Record completely collapsed after the first collapse, though.)


According to a marketing course I attend, three most important things to gain and keep the audience are:
  1. consistency
  2. authenticity
  3. uniqueness
And the reason why her brand recovered is apparently she kept those three things, I suppose..

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Cinema - World Trade Center -

Rushing downtown on the morning of September 11, 2001, a group of Port Authority cops, including Sergearnt John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage; right) and the rookie will Jimeno (Michael Pena), encounter a hallucinatowers. Later, tory storm of paper drifting down from the Twin Towers. Later, trapped in the rubble of the collapsing buildings, McLoughlin and Jimeno provide each other with whatever support and consolation they are capable of, while, at home, their families respond to the catastrophe and their uncertainty about the men with convincing degrees of fear, bravado, panic, and rage. Oliver Stone's aesthetically conservative 9/11 movie is a work of considerable power that captures the oppressive physical strangeness and exhausting emotional demands of that day.
- from THE NEW YORKER, SEPT. 25, 2006


The film was good. I could know the struggles, hardships and the panic the people faced in the WTC, 2001. I do however, think this movie is still controversial. Because the rest of John McLoughlin's team members were died. I wonder how their families would feel to see this film. I was a senior student when I first visited the Twin Tower observatory. Since then I'd been fascinated to see the entrance of the Windows on the World Restaurant.


The cost for the entire rebuilding is estimated range from $9 billion to $13 billion, it is said.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Musee - The Metropolitan Museum of Art -

It could take days, even weeks, to cover the Met's two million square feet of gallery space, so it's best to ve selective. There are excellent collections of African, Oceanic and Islamic art, along with more than 3,000 European paintings from the Middle Ages up through the 'fin de siecle' period, including major works by Titian, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Goya and Degas. Egyptology fans should head straight for the glass-walled atrium housing the Temple of Dendur.
The American Wing Courtyard, which borders Central Park, has benches, a trickling fountain, trees, ivy and stunning examples of Tiffany stained glass.
-from Time Out Guides, New York 14th Edition

According to the Time Out Guides, "if you'd like to grab a drink or a snack in less-than-hectic surroundings, try the American Wing Cafe." ...to tell the truth, we need to be in a line around for 20 minutes before having seats on weekend.
But Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are great, European paintings and Agyptian Arts are fabulous as always, and particularly I love American paintings such as "A Gorge in the Mountains," "The Teton Range" and "Washington Crossing the Delaware" as well as Tiffany glasses.

To be a Sponsor of the Museum (i.e. an exhibition), we need $50,000/month totaling $150,000-$250,000, which depends on the period of the exhibition.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Bonjour


"Bonjour, New York !" is a weblog about sightseeing place both indoor and outdoor in New York.
In 1998, I stayed in NY only for two months for my first time and was promptly enamored of Manhattan. Then I've got a chance to move to New York City in August of 2006 by way of 1-year stay in Chicago.

Through one year stay in the U.S, I found there were differences among contries in terms of "what's hot" such as restaurants, clubs, and outdoor places.

So, while remembering my sweet Chicago under the same "Azur," I will introduce popular places in NY based on my friends information and my perspective.

Will you side with me? Otherwise you can compare with your favorites!