Thursday night I was at the Dvir Gallery, visiting a friend who works there and sorting through some photos by Adi Nes (whom I interviewed today for an upcoming article), when a blast from my New York past walked in the door. It was Ashkan Sahihi, an Iranian-born, lapsed Bahai, Frankfurt raised, New York-based photographer. I hadn't seen Ashkan in nearly five years, not since Josh Harris's legendary "Quiet" party in Tribeca.

Those were the days when a thirtysomething dot.com millionaire could spend $2 million of his own money on a week-long happening in a five-story industrial space in lower Manahattan. There were video installations showing a loop of infamous disasters or destructive events (Chernobyl, the bombing of Hiroshima, Mt. St. Helens), a shooting gallery (with live ammunition), live fetish performances featuring many rolls of industrial plastic wrap and a rather uninhibited Argentinian, DJs from Twilo (then the hottest club in town), a room in which capsule-like bunk beds had been built for volunteers who lived 24/7 on camera - including showering and relieving themselves in a bizarre translucent installation set up in the middle of the room - for the duration of the party, there was unending free booze and unlimited catered food (poached salmon and wild rice, anyone?).

The fact that the party was only for those who knew the password that got one past the forbidding 150 kg security guards sitting at the unmarked entrance made us all feel like hyper-cool beings, of course.

And then there was the holy-of-holies - the VIP room. It was there that I met Ashkan, whose Drug Series portraits lined the walls, providing an endless source of conversation. Drinks in the VIP room consisted of innocuously sweet but deadly marijuana and opium infusions, served by some young women who were dressed in black leather fetish outfits. They made everyone in the room very, very mellow.

For me, Quiet absolutely symbolizes the insane decadence of the final months of the dot.com boom. Within a year a fair chunk of the people at that party were unemployed; Josh and his ex-girlfriend Tanya were dissecting the failure of his company and their relationship on a long (long) and bitter (so bitter) thread on a site called fuckedcompany.com; and the World Trade Center was a heap of rubble. Today Josh lives on a farm in upstate New York, where he grows apples, and most of the people he'd hung out with when he was the high tech "it" guy turned out to be fair-weather friends (such a surprise!).

It turned out that Ashkan - who, by the way, is a delightful, warm and hyper-intelligent guy - was in Israel at the invitation of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to promote his Women of the Israeli Defense Forces series. We sat in the gallery and talked for awhile, and reminisced about those crazy last years of the 1990s. So much had happened since then, that it was almost impossible to digest it all. I'd left New York for India just as the dot.com bubble burst and arrived in Israel about three weeks before the Al Aqsa Intifada began. Was there really a time when practically anyone with a university degree could get a cool job with a good salary; when Israelis believed that it was only a matter of months before it would be possible to drive to Turkey through Syria, stopping on the way to eat lunch in Damascus; when peace with the Palestinians seemed like a done deal; when hardly anyone had heard of Al Qaida?

After awhile my friend closed the gallery for the day, and the three of us walked and talked our way up Dizengoff Street. Ashkan told me that he'd first visited Israel in 1969, when his parents brought him from Iran to visit the Bahai temple in Haifa. Evidently it was love at first sight for Ashkan. Since then he's been to Israel many times, and he has a thing for Tel Aviv - which he described as a perfect mix of third world and Europe.

At one point he said to me, "You seem very different here."

"Yeah," I said jokingly, "I'm a lot less neurotic."

Ashkan laughed and said, "Neurotic. Is there anyone in New York who's not neurotic?"

I lived in New York for 10 years, but I really don't miss much about it. Except the Strand bookstore. Once I loved it, I had a great time, I knew a lot of people, I had a rent-controlled apartment and a good income. And then, suddenly, I realized that I did not want to grow old there. I didn't know anyone who was happy. I hated the winters. Most of my Israeli friends, many of whom had lived in the city for years, had moved back home. They told me I should come and see how great it was - the warm social life, the wonderful weather, the cafe and cultural life.

So I came. And stayed.