New York

OK, so it's been a life goal of mine to avoid New York City. I'm just a country boy and New York isn't the country. But I got sent to NY on business, so I sort of had to go. In addition to the meeting, we got a chance to walk around (while testing some technology, of course), and eat some pretty good food.

My co-worker Tad and I arrived Monday night at Laguardia at about 6:30pm. After experiencing the thrill of riding with a crazy New York cabbie, we made it to our hotel in amazing time. The Mansfield is an older hotel just a few blocks off Times Square on W 44th. It turns out that I got a fairly nice suite - the Mansfield is on the Intel approved list and apparently they fix a price and give you whatever rooms they have available. I lucked out! I was a bit confused about the air conditioner however - it was behind a grill that I had to pry off to get access to the controls. It was only the next day that I discovered the remote control for the A/C on my nightstand. Oops. this makes it much easier than prying off the grill!

We had dinner at a decent Italian restaurant about a block from our hotel. I had a wonderful tortellini soup and penne pasta bolognese. Tad doesn't particularly like wine, and ordered an Italian beer that he later wished he hadn't. I'm sure it was fine, but I think he forgot that he's used to the Pacific Northwest: the microbrew capital of the world. I had a glass of passable Nero D'Avola.

After dinner we walked up to Times Square. Wow, what a weird and wonderful place. It's really quite the tourist trap and reminds me a little of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They've blocked off parts of the street and set up hundreds of chairs in the street where tourists just sit and soak in the ambiance. It's an amazingly bright place - I'm not sure you could even see the moon if you looked up. Anyway, it was quite an experience.

6:30 came very early the next morning, especially since my body is still in the Pacific time zone. Even though our meeting wasn't until 1pm, Tad wanted to get an early start. We met for breakfast in the hotel at 8am and were ready to head out by 9:00. We had several pieces of technology to test on the streets of New York, so we walked around like tourists for several hours.

We walked by Rockefeller Center and I saw the plaza that they flood for the ice rink in the winter, and all of the NBC NY studios. In fact, they were just breaking down the set for an outdoor segment of Good Morning America was we walked by. We walked by Radio City Music Hall, and the old Ed Sullivan Theater. It seems that there's a landmark every block or 2: Morgan Stanley, Time Life, UBS, etc. We headed toward Central Park and saw St. Patrick's Cathedral and across the street, the statue of Atlas that was one of Dava Sobel's inspirations to research the history of Longitude. About this time we were getting thirsty, so we popped into Trump Tower and went downstairs to the public café and had a couple of Snapples. In case you're wondering - yes, there is a gift shop with all sorts of Trump merchandise including T-shirts that say "You're Fired." The Donald himself never made an appearance, however.

We then walked through Central Park for a while and sat and watched a softball game until it was time to head to our meeting, which was in a building a couple blocks south of Central Park. The meeting went fine, except that my demo failed miserably. I had just tested it in the hotel room that morning, but I just couldn't make it work at the meeting. I later realized that changing my computer's time zone to eastern messed things up. I wish I'd realized this during the meeting, because as soon as I set it back to pacific time, everything worked. Rats!

After the meeting we walked back to the hotel, dropped off our bags and set out again. This time we headed southeast. So here's a trivia question: how many trains per day pass through Grand Central Station? The answer: none. Grand Central Station is a post office; the train station is called Grand Central Terminal. I have seen pictures of the ceiling painted with the constellations of the zodiac, so it was very cool to see it for real. We then headed out and went to the Chrysler building - the tallest building in the world from its completion in 1930 until the Empire State Building surpassed it in 1931. The art deco lobby has been referenced many times in popular culture and it was very cool to see the original.

We then walked past the amazing New York Public Library building and into Bryce Park behind it. There's a big drive-in movie screen set up in the park and every Monday night during the summer they show an old movie for people sitting in the park. At this point, we decided it was time to head back to the hotel and think about dinner. Our hotel is in the same block as chef Daniel Boulud's new restaurant db Bistro Moderne - "a modern French-American restaurant where traditional French cuisine meets the flavors of the American Market. db is Daniel Boulud's renowned contemporary interpretation of the Parisian classic" according to their web site. We dropped in at about 5:10 to see if they could get us in at 6pm. We were told "no, but we have an opening at 5:45." OK, works for us. We headed back to the hotel (just down the block) to get cleaned up a bit. Little did we know that nature was going to help us out. We'd been hearing thunder for a few minutes and just as we stepped out into the street the sky just opened up and poured, and I mean a downpour. Everyone who didn't have an umbrella (including us) ducked into the nearest doorway. Tad and I figured that we were tough northwesterners who weren't going to be deterred by a little rain. We could see our hotel about 200 feet down the street and decided to make a run for it. I guess we didn't really understand how hard the rain was because 30 seconds later as we entered out hotel lobby we were drenched from head to toe. I got up to my room and changed my clothes and dried off. Good thing I brought an extra dress shirt! We got back to the restaurant about 20 minutes later and were promptly seated.

Tad left the wine ordering to me, after assuring me that it was legitimate to expense it. They had a lot of very nice wines on the wine list, but I figured I'd better go easy with Intel footing the bill. I found a very nice 2006 Vacqueyras that was reasonably priced. It turned out to be very nice, but not as nice as the one that Rachel and I had in Lincoln City. Both Tad and I ordered from the pre-theater prix fixe menu. I had a wonderful artichoke velouté with basil oil and garlic as my first course, a very well prepared flank steak with grilled zucchini (sound familiar?) with pommes frites for my main course, and a very strange but wonderful creme brulee sundae for desert. The food was perfectly prepared, but not as interesting as I'd hoped. Well worth going, however.

New York wasn't as scary as I'd thought, but I'll be glad to get home tomorrow.