In less than 3 weeks, a bunch of friends from Romania are coming to New York to visit me, and I couldn’t be happier. Earlier this year I had my parents over for a month or so, and while it was nice seeing them – and showing them I can handle my new life just fine, thank you very much – it still made me wish it had been someone closer to my age & interests. After all, there’s one New York you show to your parents, and quite another to your childhood buddies.

I already have a long list of places to take them to, from touristy spots to places I found and fell in love with. NY has so many of them! I’ll take them see a Broadway show – which I guess is a must for a first-time visit here – and while it won’t be my first choice (Avenue Q, which sadly will close its doors before they get here) it’ll still be one of the more successful ones (it’s Chicago, btw). We have set a trip to Six Flags – one of my favorite spots – and a one-day trip to Washington D.C. We’ll fill the rest with as much NY exploring as possible, strolling the city around the day and sampling it’s nightlife afterwards. At least that’s my plan, we’ll see how much they will want to hold on to it.

I also plan on stuffing them like turkeys, since I’ve been compiling a list of all the awesome food, dessert & drinks places I have found in the past 4 years and I want them to try as many of them as possible. This city is a melting pot of cuisines and it will be a pity to miss on many of them.

Yay, can’t wait!

This is the third time I get to sit down and try to write about my life. First time it was in 2005 – shortly after I moved to New York – when I started writing on Blogger about my experiences in America. Everything was new and interesting and I was happy to talk about it. It lasted about a year.

Second time it was just after I got my own domain, when I set up a WordPress on this URL and took things a bit further. Things became more detailed, I was writing about movies I’ve seen and food I’ve tried and posted lots and lots of pictures. The audience was still just my friends back home – all the posts were written in Romanian – since everybody here already knew what I was up from Facebook or, more recently, Twitter.

And yet, in time, I started slacking again. The writing became a chore. Some posts took me hours to write, since my OCD need for “perfection” had me typing with Romanian diacritics and writing HTML code for each image in order to display them just right in the blog’s layout. And a few months down the line, when I found a different theme or layout, all this was wasted.

I lost my patience. I feel the need to write – well, sometimes – and I love the feeling that I know my friends still check up on me from time to time. But I had to make things easier, which is why you’re staring at a brand new blog instead of just a new theme. I also decided to write in English – much to the dismay of some of my readers who were reminded of me just by my style of “speaking” – but hopefully this will let me share this with more people.

Welcome to the third coming. It will be better this time.