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“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”  When Harry Met Sally... (1989) In the midst of a global pandemic, when the future was so uncertain, we knew that it wouldn’t be a traditional wedding.  Our wedding planning all started months ago in our small Upper West Side studio apartment. We began planning our wedding together the day after we got engaged (but if you know anything about Mia, you would know that she had really been planning her wedding day since she was a little girl). Without all the answers and with a lot of moments of “wait..., what!?”, we began planning the day that would mark the beginning of our lives together. And like in the movie quote, we both agreed that we wanted that day to start as soon as possible, before the situation with COVID-19 in New York, and in the world, got worse. Truth be told, the process was anything other than what we expected wedding planning w...

I was a guest at WBA Holding podcasts during the COVID-19 crisis in New York City in May 2020. I was interviewed by my friend Mirka who lives in Slovakia. The podcast is in Slovak and you can find it on these podcast services: Apple Podcasts ; Spotify ; Audiolibrix ; Anchor ;

As of today, New York’s total death toll rose to nearly 3,000, double what it was only three days earlier. The total confirmed cases in the world is 1,141,190 and more than 57,000 of those are in New York City alone. The news is full of sad stories. My family and friends are asking me about the situation in the city on a daily basis. It must be shocking for them to watch the news aboutNew York. But, in fact, how is my life in the Upper West Side? My last day of work before this lockdown period was March 16th. That day, I gave some data to my colleague, packed my desktop computer in my hiking backpack and walked the 20 blocks home. A lucky move, because a few days later, our institute officially closed their doors. Since then, Mia and I have lived and worked together in my/our apartment, which is around 20 square meters large (200 square feet), in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Since Mia and I started dating, we had a rule to live together only after our engagement. We both wante...

Vacation time! On August 14th, Martin and I packed our luggage and camping gear to head out on our first camping trip to the Adirondack Mountains in Wilmington, New York (close to Lake Placid). We decided to come here based on a recommendation from Martin's friends, Michal and Liz. The only problem was that we didn’t yet have a tent or a sleeping pad, but Martin placed an order on Amazon and within a few days (the evening before we were planning on leaving) our budget-friendly tent arrived! We used luggage to pack our gear and everything we would need for our 3 night/4day camping trip! The plan was to pack as much as we could the evening before until we couldn’t anymore, and then wake up bright and early the next day to finish what we didn’t get to. Most helpful to our packing was that a few days before we created a packing list together to ensure we brought everything we needed! The weather was forcasted to be cloudy and rainy, so we packed for both rain and sunshine. ...