Uptown Girl

First of all let me just apologize for the total downer post from last night haha I was having a "missing moment."

I'm in New York!! Wooohooo!!

Train from Philly to NYC (that is NOT all my stuff hahaha)

Cute brother face

Hauling my stuff from the subway

Home sweet home

All moved in

My building

The awesome park across from my building. There are always a ton of kids running around and a pretty cool museum on a hike up the hill in the center of it.

My door

Subway love

Candy fix

Serendipity fix

My L'Oreal lobby

Dad's a peacock!! He will be joining me in NYC part-time! Woohoo!!

30 ROCK.

Popbar. Gelato on a stick. I got Strawberry dipped in chocolate. Another fave was dad's chocolate dipped in orange cream. Genius.

First day at L'Oreal!

Little Italy

We had these eclairs FIVE whole years ago and tracked them down in Little Italy. Definitely worth the hunt!

YUM

Bryant Park

Beautiful

Mary Poppins on Broadway. SO good.

So it's kind of awesome here. I left Florida last friday night and flew up to Philly to meet up with Mom, Dad and Ty. The next day we caught the afternoon train up to Penn Station, got checked in to the fam's hotel and headed uptown to Washington Heights. It's about a 35-40 minute subway ride from there to work so it's not too bad.

My apartment is pretty good! I have my own room and it's actually big! I live in a cute little neighborhood with a lot of easily accessible shops and restaurants. I'm very close to the subway and extremely close to church too (probably about 2 minutes walk). My building is across the street from a huge park with water fountains and a ton of trees. I can see the sky out here!! Everything I brought with me fits perfectly in my room so that's a relief too. If the rest of the summer is anything like this first week though, I won't be spending too much time up here haha. For the rest of the weekend we ran around exploring some things, found my route to work, checked out the ward (wich is AWESOME and even has a couple of people I know from BYU in it!), ate some very yummy food including Popbar and loosely searched for apartments for Dad. Did I mention that he is awesome and got a very flattering offer to jump over from Comcast to NBC Universal to assist with the transition while the two merge (Comcast just recently acquired NBC)?? How cool is that. Way to go Dad!! And now he gets to be here with me part of the time! It also makes it easier for the rest of the family to visit. Yay!

On monday I had my first day at work. Let me just say that working in downtown New York is like nothing else. It is pretty amazing. My building is right on 5th Avenue and L'Oreal owns almost the entire building. It's very modern with customized floors to each of the brands that L'Oreal owns. They fed us breakfast and lunch and we got introduced to everything and the other interns (there were about 30ish of us starting. About the same number also started 2 weeks ago) and oriented with the company a little bit. We got name badges and our managers came and got us. I work on the 35th floor for Matrix haircare. Ummmm it's pretty much the coolest place ever. Our team has SOOOO much energy. They are all incredible nice and so excited for us to be there. There are 4 interns total for the US side of Matrix. They are all awesome too! We've already had a ton of fun together and are even being sent to Phoenix in July for their mid-year training (it's a big weekend event they do to educate their more than 400 hairdresser educators they have around the country. Its pretty much a huge party haha). Are you kidding me?!?! I'M AN INTERN. Sometimes I have to remind myself haha. We all have final projects that we're working on that we present to senior management at the end of the summer but other than that we go sit in on meetings, get fed (a lot, we even had a welcome interns lunch for everyone to come meet us and give us advice) and have inductions with all the separate divisions with in Matrix (i.e. I-Comms, Business Development, the creative team, a bunch of marketing groups, the DPI (global) side of Matrix, education, etc. etc. etc.). Seriously it has been such a fun week. We get out at 1:30 on fridays for New York's "summer hours" which makes the weekend feel nice and long every week. I really like it so far. I've also done some things with the intern class as a whole. We had a little party the other night to mingle and network and then all went to a karaoke bar afterwords. Hilarious. It's fun to have 3 other interns there from BYU too! Next week we get to go to New Jersey for a day to tour the production and testing facilities for all of L'Oreal USA. I am SO excited. We also have some fun volunteer days coming up at the end of the month. What an awesome and unique place to work. Seriously, I really love it. I also love New York so far. I have gone back and forth several times: I can live here, no I can't, I like it, I hate it, etc. Haha I guess it comes with getting used to a new place and schedule. For the most part though it's so fun. I've already gone some places I hadn't gone before and can't wait to do some more exploring! Manhattan seems SO much smaller than it has ever seemed to me before and I'm starting to really figure out my way around. As reflected in my previous post though, I miss Chris!! I'm tired of this whole apart thing. It sucks. At least I'm super busy now though...not like the end of school. And the end is in sight!!

Wow this post is super long haha I will definitely update more often to avoid turning all of my posts into novels. Thanks to everyone who has wished me good luck! Love you all!