Sam's.Meatpacking.District

It's 5.30am- I'd come home slightly less than an hour earlier from a night out in Manhattan's infamous Meatpacking District. Went to take a bath, so now my hair's wet, and I'm as awake as an energiser bunny.

My friend was on the guest list to this apparently very exclusive club called APT, where you had to know the spinning DJ in order to get admitted. And hey, it was Ursula 1000 (real name: Alex) who was spinning, and my friend knew him... Heck, she's even friends with Thievery Corporation!!!

It was just the culmination of a rather surreal night in general. My friend brought me to this really quaint South African bar/restaurant in the Brooklyn area near school, where I had my first LichiCosmo (lychee cosmopolitan- it's pronounced as "leechee" as I've discovered) that was magnificently yummilicious!

We then made our way down to another friend's place near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, a very nice neighbourhood to live in, probably due to the fact that the people here are wealthier and therefore the state of upkeep is generally good. The apartment was well furnished and the detailling was much better than any that I've seen thus far in NYC (ie not falling apart or gross). We chilled out, had drinks, smoked (non-ciggs), listened to music, and chatted about their very active sex lives and my non-existent one...

After midnight, we finally made our way down to Manhattan, down to APT. The music was good, but a tad too hiphoppish for my liking- I can't dance hiphop! The mix of crowd was very diverse indeed- you had the standard whites, blacks, a relatively high proportion of asians, some latinos, and many europeans I'm sure. (Italian men are so impeccably gorgeous!) It was okay, but not fantastic like Zouk back home is... It's just so small and intimate and exclusive and diverse and full of black dudes with the cool grooves and people trying to be blacks, that it kind of made it seem like Stanley Kubrick's film "Eyes Wide Shut", where everyone seems to be in a slow-mo trance-like state; that everything is somehow tinged with a layer of unreality.

The best part of the entire night HAD to be when we went out to the smoking area for a breath of fresh air. It was just this small inbetween space hemmed inbetween the structures of adjacent buildings, allowing a sliver of a glimpse of the night sky, and an encroaching darkness creeping in from the far distance and then fading back again. There, looking at the moon through the small gap, the verticality of the buildings creating a distinct claustrophobia, and knowing that this is the kind of incredible space that no architect can ever plan for, simply because it arose out of need and out of spontaneity, I felt this strange inner peace within myself. Until the guy standing a metre away from me puked loudly into the depths below that is. EEEWW.

Right. And I feel a wave of tiredness sweep over me now... High time it did. It's off to bed I go and hopefully I'll wake up at a decent enough hour tomorrow to get some proper schoolwork done. I simply love it how people play hard and work hard here. 5 days to LA!