I arrived home safely from New York on Friday morning, my flight was slightly delayed due to a traffic jam on the runway at Newark Airport but the pilot seemed to make up the delay fairly quickly once we were in the air. I flew back to Dublin on Continental which was far ahead of Aer Lingus in terms of the flight experience, however both of them still fall well below the standard set by Air New Zealand!
The remainder of my time in New York went very quickly, even though I only really had evenings available for sightseeing I managed to see most of the “big name” sights. On Tuesday night I ventured on a huge expedition around the city, starting at my apartment and then moving on to to Central Park, the Lincoln Centre, Grand Central Station, Downtown, Ground Zero and finally back to a bar/bistro near Madison Square Garden for dinner around 10:30pm before heading to bed with very tired feet.
The highlight on Wednesday was a free trip up to the top of the Empire State Building during our lunch break, courtesy of the training company whose rooms we were using for the course. The best bit of this was that the ‘tenant’ passes let you skip the huge queues (1-2 hours) in the lobby of the building and go straight up the elevator to the 80th floor (65 seconds). We still had to queue for 30 or 40 minutes to get up to the actual viewing deck on the 86th floor but all in all we got a pretty sweet deal. The weather was beautiful and we got a great view of Manhattan, Queens and New Jersey.
I had a quieter evening on Wednesday, I hung around the Googleplex (photos here – not mine) again and spent some time getting to know some of my New York colleagues before venturing over the 24/7 Apple Store on 5th Avenue to purchase an iPod for Kat. I figured we may as make use of the American Dollar being so low at the moment. I discovered however that Apple have a cunning strategy to try and extract more money from you. I wanted to buy a 2GB iPod Nano, preferably in a bright colour, but to get the bright colours you have to purchase the more expensive 4GB model! A subtle, but no doubt effective distinction between the products. Sadly for Apple bright colours weren’t worth an extra $50 in my opinion, and 2GB is plenty of space for a good selection of music.
Thursday was the last day of the course, and I headed to the airport pretty much straight after it wrapped up. I spent Friday afternoon in Dublin chasing up incompetent Irish banks (we’re switching to Halifax as Bank of Ireland managed to completely loose all the paperwork they made us fill out to change our address and add Kat to the account) and then first thing on Saturday morning it was off to Cambridge on Ryan Air to attend my Friend Sam’s wedding. Kat will fill you in on the details of this before too long.
Comment from Gill on 2007-07-31
Having just been in NY myself, great to hear and see your perspectives. Disappointed no photo of the naked cowboy and his stand-in!!