Things I love, things I don't

I love eating in this city -- we've had great Vietnamese, Indian and Mexican, we bought yummy cheese and bread and veggies to eat at home. My taste buds love it here.

My nose is less happy. Our apartment smells alternately like a litter box or natural gas. If we keep the windows open to air it out, it's not bad, but if we close up to leave, it's noxious when we return.
The cold winter air helps, but some streets smell horrific. It's not just trash on the curb bad -- it's like years of accumulated vomit and urine or something.

I love walking around. There's always something to look at -- interesting store windows, great people watching, people who look just like their dogs.

Riding the subway is less great. Sometimes it's fine, but today I was 15 minutes late for a breakfast meeting because a broken rail shut down the train I needed. Not knowing how to formulate a plan B on the fly, and without hope of getting a cab during the morning rush, I hoofed it about a mile.

The local markets are fun. Tiny little shops with curious selections and colorful guys (and it is almost always guys) working the counter. The Italian shop on our corner in particular is fast becoming a favorite stop.

FreshDirect and Food Emporium are dreadful. FreshDirect is the mega-marketed online grocer, and when they botched my order and left out a loaf of bread, it became a major challenge to get a refund for it. They wouldn't just deliver my bread, which is what I wanted, or refund my credit card, which I'd have accepted. They wanted to give me a store credit. With past-their-prime mushrooms and no packing slip to check against, I don't want a store credit! Food Emporium, meanwhile, is the big-ish neighborhood grocer, with high prices, limited selection and painfully bad customer service.

Thankfully, there's a Whole Foods in Columbus Circle (where we were last night to see Dan Akroyd and John Belushi's widow).

I'm especially peeved with UPS right now.
We shipped ourselves two big boxes last week to avoid having to schlep too much stuff on the plane. They were to arrive either Friday or Monday, but didn't. Today I tracked them online and found they'd entered the address wrong: E. 80th instead of E. 89th. Now here's the great part: they have my phone number on file, but when they discovered the address was wrong, did they call? No. Instead, get this -- they send a postcard to the recipient. That's right. They send a postcard to an address they know doesn't work to resolve the issue of an address that doesn't work. Not a call to the sender, not a postcard to the sender, not even Googling the recipient to see if they can find a problem with the address.
It's ridiculous. Isn't a phone call faster and cheaper, and more likely to get results?

Overall, though, we're having a great time.
People are almost without exception friendly and helpful. Pull out a map and you're all but certain to have a stranger offer to help you find your destination.
We've gotten lots of help making the whole thing work, from our neighbor down the hall helping us when we had stuff to move in, to our vet calling in a prescription for Haley's food to the vet across the street.