Hola Amigos!

Hello everyone. 

I hope everyone's going well and getting ready for Chrissy!

Another busy week on the work front - the HR Directors from across the Region were all in town, so there were a lot of meetings and two days of training. 

On the personal side, I started looking for permanent places to live  - I found one really cool town called Hoboken in New Jersey on the other side of the river, and an easy commute, but hard to find the type of place I want, but not impossible (fingers crossed) - getting a backyard and a garage in NY is no easy feat.  I'm going back out there next Saturday to look at a couple more, which will hopefully fit the bill.  I also went yesterday out to Westchester County, north of the city, about 35 minute train ride from Grand Central Station, so also a pretty good commute.  Not too sure on this area though - it's a bit stepford wives... and wierdly it's really uncommon to have a fence - so basically there's all these houses on decent size 1/4 acre blocks, but they all just merge into one another.  I don't know where my little Jack would end up with those types of living conditions ;)  It's also very patriotic out there - Large American flags line the street from everyone's yards.  The real estate agent said it's more common to see all the flags out come election time.  The election is still 18 months away, though the campaigning is already going strong, so I can just imagine what it will be like as it gets closer.  Some Americans are funny (sorry aunty Barb for the generalisation!), but I'm travelling around with the real estate agent Barbara (not aunty Barb, another one) and I was mentioning how I had seen Santas in NY during the morning (I'll get onto that later), and she said... well, in America we celebrate Christmas on December 25.  I thought to myself, that's wierd, Barbara clearly thinks that America is the only country that celebrates Christmas and I must be so naive that I don't know why santa would be around at this time of year!  Several conversations later, I managed to educate Barbara about Christmas in Australia, and that although it's summer, yes we still do celebrate Christmas ;)

I flew last night to Madrid arriving this morning - strange for me because being used to travelling from Australia, countries are always behind us time wise (except for our friends over the ditch in NZ); whereas Madrid is 6 hours behind NY, so the jet lag has hit me pretty hard today.  I did the cardinal sin of travel - as soon as I arrived at the hotel I went back to bed and slept until midday.  Good thing is that I'm still tired, so hopefully it won't affect my sleep tonight.  I went out exploring this afternoon.  Went and saw the Plaza de Toros - a fair dinkum gladiator stadium.  Unfortunately it was closed though, but still an amazing building to see from the outside.  Also went and explored the shops.  The language barrier was lots of fun - I think I'll be booking in for spanish lessons when I get back to NY.  Let's just say the lessons I have been doing on my ipod don't quite cut the mustard!  Everyone from the region speaks Spanish, so it's an essential and apparently 70% (or so) of NY speaks spanish - that might explain why noone can understand me.  It's a beautiful city - amazing culture and architecture.The weather is cold here- around 6 degrees, but with the weather we've had in NY over the past few days, it wasn't such a shock.  In saying that, it was 18 degrees in NY earlier in the week and I was starting to believe that the 'cold' everyone was saying would eventually come, was just a big exageration.  Well, let's just say it's no exageration.  When I was out looking at houses yesterday, I was freezing my onions off!... and that was with a beanie, scarf, gloves and my coat.  I had jeans on and my legs were freezing - I think the next investment will be some thermals and a doona coat - the coat I have seems to already be redundant in this weather.... and this is without any snow yet!  Good thing is, in Brazil and Argentina it's summer at the moment, so I will get 1 week of defrosting next week before coming back to the big cold right in time for Christmas, for which I am hoping it does snow (but not too much that mum's flight can't make it in!).  I'm in Madrid until Friday and get back into NYC on Friday night, and then fly off to Sth America on Saturday night - my last continent to visit!

We had our work Christmas Party on Friday night - was a casino theme and they had all the gambling tables set up and they gave you money to gamble with that you could cash in for gifts- what better gambling is there!  Let's just say as a poker player, I'm a really good HR manager...  I got the chance to meet the CEO.  It was very funny, I was sitting down when I was introduced to him, so I stood up to be polite and formal.  Let's just say he is not a tall fella, and I had my heels on and was I was really towering over him.... he looked up and and said "it's okay, I think you should sit down again"...  was quite amusing. 

So, back to santa in NYC.  Yesterday (Saturday) morning I was making my way to Grand Central Station to go house hunting in Westchester and I started seeing a few santas out in the street, more within the station getting on trains, a few more getting off the trains.  I figured there was clearly a santa event in town.  So anyway, my first sightings were at around 9am, and then I arrived back in NYC at around 2pm, and the few santas had multiplied into hundreds.  It was very strange though as they were everywhere, all seemingly just randomly roaming the streets.  So, being resourceful, I went home and googled it, just to find that there was the annual "SantaCon" event.  On the NYC website SantaCon is described as "a non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and non-sensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason".  Well that explains it... apparently this happens all over the world, including in Adelaide of all places, and the idea is to come out dressed as Santa and basically go on a pub crawl.  There are very strict rules for said santas though, such as:

Santa is happy, so shouldn't get in fights
Santa should bring gifts for little children and not give them coal, for adults however it is another story
Santa should enjoy himself at the bar, but not end up being the one that needs to be carried home etc. etc. etc.

So, there are no photos this week as I don't have my camera cord with me, but instead I thought I'd share a sample of some ads from the US with you.

It may be my ears but I had to listen to the following ad about ten times before realizing that they weren't singing what I thought they were (let's just say, what I thought they were singing was not appropriate for prime time... interested to know if you hear the same thing as me!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fcYWGwQu2WI

The next one is also a Christmas one and I think it's adorable.  Makes me smile every time - I think the little ones will particularly like this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GzxkNRvujiw

Finally, this one is may favourite at the moment - Gotta love the hamster moves...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zJWA3Vo6TU&feature=player_embedded

Anyway, that's me signing off for another week!  The time is flying and 5 out of 104 weekends have already passed...  missing you all.

Take care everyone!
Michele