This is a page for people who haven't got enough going on in their lives, to help you get out, find things to do, and make friends in New York City.
There are many, many clubs of a wide variety of types listed on http://meetup.com/. Just enter you
zip code, and up
will pop a whole bunch of categories of "meetup groups" organized on
the
website. Most of the groups are open to anyone who wants to join,
a few you have to
apply to and be accepted. There are hundreds of meetup groups in
NYC, and most of
them are free. Once you have joined several meetups, you can
easily look over the
list of them, sorted by which ones are having upcoming events
soonest. It's easier
to meet people through a club than through a 1-shot activity, because
you keep going back
and seeing them again.
People have "profiles" on meetup, where most of them
post a
pictures of themselves and list the groups they belong to. You
can traverse the
group affiliations of like-minded people who belong to groups that
interest you to find
and join more groups.
One thing about meetup - if you sign up with a lot
of groups, you will
get a lot of email informing you of upcoming events for each
group. See "Being
Net-Savvy" below.
There are many groups listed on Craigslist under
http://newyork.craigslist.org/grp/, but they're nowhere near as well organized as meetup.com, there's no mechanism in place to prevent people putting up totally inappropriate posts, so you have to look for a long time to find a group you like.If you're outdoorsy, there's the Appalachian Mountain Club. I belong, but since most of their events involve getting up early on weekends, I haven't made it yet: http://www.outdoors.org/ they have many, many events.
Once you have already met someone and want to find something to do, there's City Search at http://newyork.citysearch.com/ and Timeout Magazine at http://www.timeout.com/newyork/ , but when they talk about "clubs" they mean night clubs. Most social organizations don't have the money to advertise in these venues. They talk a lot about restaurants, movies, and live entertainment. One thing about Timeout Magazine is that if you subscribe to it, it doesn't show up in the mail until Wednesday or Thursday, which is often too late - you will have made your plans by then, and a lot of the shows will be sold out.
There's an organization that organizes singles activities,
http://www.meetmarketadventures.com/events , they charge, like $20 - $30 per event, mostly people in their 20's show up.Most deals where you get email accounts are either a) free, like from http://hotmail.com, or b) you get several email addresses. It is a good idea to have at least 2 email addresses - one you give to friends and people you want to hear from who are unlikely to spam you, and one you give to corporations and organizations like meetup.com, for your junk mail. That way, your important email won't be lost in a pile of junk.
If you have any suggestions for websites and clubs that should be
added to this list, please let me know - send mail to getalife@ccjj.info. I'm especially
interested in hearing about things for couples to meet other couples.