I may be biased, but when winter rears its ugly head in New York City, it’s not so much the proverbial vision of freezing, plain-faced disappointment you’d expect.

Rather, the whole place is transformed into the urban winter wonderland only your most filtered photographic imaginings could conjure up.

And even then, those fall short when held against the Real Deal.

Plummeting temperatures aside, there is something simultaneously stifling and refreshing about inhaling the cold winter’s air: a potent mix of energy, inspiration and wheezing in between momentary hallucinations of life as a real New Yorker.

It’s a tired cliché, I know, but there’s a lot to be said of the impressive work ethic and productivity brewing with every passing New York Minute.

It’s longer than usual, okay?

Returning to painterly Sydney, with its comforting avo smash and agreeable forecast, however, feels, and this is no doubt abetted by jet-lag, like a sporadically sleepless episode of life in slow motion.

It takes getting used to.

That and the oncoming headache approaching a next-day Monday morning university lecture with a 10AM start.

But with New York on the cards, we make such sacrifices.