Friday, June 30, 2006

Yesterday I woke up in the city that doesn't sleep...

and went to sleep in the city that's in a perpetual coma.

I'm back again!

No pictures yet because my computer isn't cooperating. Maybe K will be kind enough to let me upload them to his computer and post them from there. I'm sure something can be worked out somehow.

Let's see...where to begin?

The other chick that was supposed to go didn't go because there was a death in her family. So it was just me and 4 guys that I work with. Our plane from Chicago to NY sat on the ground for 1 hour before they would let us take off, so we were late getting in. This put the guys in a time crunch to get to the Yankees game, so they all gave me their luggage and put me in a cab to the hotel and they took a cab to the game. I didn't really do much that night. I walked down Madison Ave. a little bit until I found a promising looking place to eat and then pretty much just went back to the hotel. In retrospect, I probably should have just struck out on my own, but oh well.

Then we had meetings all day the next day. I don't know how they get anything done with the view they have. We were on the 50th floor in the Long Island City building and were facing Manhattan.

That night, we all (customers and all) went out. After two hours of walking and asking people where the heck we were going (because our customer changed his mind about where we were going and didn't realize how far it was from where we were), we ended up at this place called Slate and watched people get ridiculously drunk and make fools of themselves. Oh, I took pictures! Sobriety has its privileges sometimes (I had taken migraine medicine that day and didn't want to totally pass out by adding alcohol to the mix, so I was the only one of the whole group that wasn't drinking heavily). I plan to make money from the pictures. :) Those will NOT be posted, btw!

After a period of time, one of the guys and I left everyone else there and struck out to see some sights. I got to go to Times Square and Broadway. I think I want to live in the Toys 'R Us in Times square. It's crazy. Two story life-size Barbie doll house? Heck yeah! I could live in that. It would be obvious that I wasn't Barbie though and they'd probably kick me out for loitering.

Saw a lot of cool stuff along the way: Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center/Plaza, the Today Show studio, NBC and ABC studios, some huge Hershey's building...I really should have investigated more closely...it was probably a huge candy store which would have enjoyed my patronage, as would I. We could have had a symbiotic relationship, but it was not to be.

Rode the Subway for the first time ever. It's a huge, smelly, hot, humid, germ incubator.

Crawled between two homeless people at the public library to take a picture of the huge stone lions that I'm told came alive in Ghostbusters. I can't remember anything that happened in Ghostbusters.

Homeless people everywhere. It's really sad. I really wished I would have thought to share my dinner with some of them or something. Richest country in the world and there are people who dig through the mounds and mounds of garbage on every sidewalk to get the last few soggy French fries from someone's discarded McDonald's Happy Meal. Every day.

New York just a different world. An assault on the senses. A different kind of stench. But still, it's captivating and mesmerizing.

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