I moved into my apartment on Tuesday. Many of you reading this have probably already been here, the rest should come by some time soon. It’s a gorgeous little place, perhaps seemingly better to me because of one fact: it’s mine. For at least a year. No moving out, no RCRs to fill out, no RAs. If the last few days of living in Tribeca have anything to say, the remaining 51 weeks will be a blast.

I went to the Taste of Tribeca festival today, in which 40+ neighborhood restaurants offered small samples of something from their restaurants. I had everything from Long Island duck wrapped around a French prune, to a pulled pork sandwich, to a delicious apple strudel by Blaue Gans (from the same people as one of my favorite cafes, Cafe Sabarsky; in fact, Blaue Gans inhabits the site of Le Zinc, a restaurant that closed a while ago that was by the owners of Chanterelle (winner of the 2007 James Beard Award, also where my parents and I dined this week) and was also rather good) and a good piece of Kobe beef. New this year, as I’m told, was the wine tent which sampled wines from various restaurants and wine stores nearby. I met the sommelier from Blaue Gans, Christopher, who was very nice to me. The problem with the wine tent was that no one really wanted to take your ticket as they wanted you to come back and enjoy the rest of their offerings. Consequently, there were lots of drunk Tribeca-ites (Tribecans? Tribecers? I’ll figure it out…).

Then, to end the afternoon, I went on a walking tour of my new neighborhood with history author Oliver E. Allen who has written several works on the history of Tribeca. It was amazing what I had missed when walking the streets in the last few days. The tour made me look even more forward to reading Andrew Dolkart’s “Texture of Tribeca” that I just bought yesterday for a coffee table that doesn’t yet exist.

It was made even nicer because I met a few neighborhood residents who were just really friendly to me.

I went out in search of food at midnight last night, thinking it would be a struggle to find open stores to purchase from. It turns out there is a whole underground culture around here, akin to the Meatpacking District, where clubs and bars (sometimes literally) emerge from the ground. I hadn’t a clue that there is a nightclub directly across the street from my building, viewable from my own window, until I walked by the queue of people waiting to gain admittance.

It’s almost a tease that I’m going home in a little over an hour. I had too few unimaginable days of enjoying the company of friends (with whom my relationships, by definition, are in slight limbo), then too few days of enjoying relative solitude with my new neighborhood. At least I’ve assured myself that coding, basketball, and golf (not to mention family and home-cooked meals) await me upstate.

My mother, however, contends that the food is better down here.