This time I am not going to talk about the practicality of being in New York, hopefully you all read my past summary of being in New York for a few days. Instead I want to pick briefly on a few specifics I have come across today. Infact, at the time of typing this the list is 4 things.

1) Slate Bar barman: what a nice chap. I had to wait around to talk to their boss, so went for a pint at the bar. Within a few minutes of sitting there, at an empty bar on my tod the chap came over and asked where in England I was from. We started chatting about the cliche English things, London, Oxford university, Radiohead etc. My favourite bit was when he said it was now happy hour and the Stella was now only $4. We talked tourist stuff, he recommended a Mexican place for me to go for lunch/dinner just around the corner and also wrote down a cool bar to go to. The Mexican was awesome (Chipotle), the bar, hopefully see it tomorrow night. I left, hopefully the guy will be working on Thurs too.

2) After returning to the hotel I fancied some dinner, so popped down to the bar. A quick glance at my laptop clock shows me it is 2.30am my time and after only getting an hours kip before the flight I kinda think I’m doing ok. In the bar I order myself a G & T and sit back and enjoy, a bit of Jaiku and Twitter and emails. Wings, I want WINGS, so I order Wings, out of stock, as are the chips and wedges. Hmmmm only other thing on the menu I can face is the Pizza. It shows up, by Pizza they mean cheese on burnt toast, rip off!

3) Sitting in bar waiting for food there is a very weird situation building next to me. A 50 yr old chap has met with a mid 20s girl. They start talking fashion, clearly its a business meeting. Nothing too weird, other than the age difference. The bloke’s fashion business is basically to buy shit clothes and modify them, add frills and embroidery. Fruit of the Loom? However, see this Tweet and the situation gets a lot more interesting. The latest thing to happen is that the girl had ordered a diet coke, she has just walked out without taking a single sip. Blokey is still sitting here nursing his finished whiskey. Just heard him on the phone say “I just wanted to touch base with you” and “you’ll know me when you see me” also “we’ll have a good time” I think this guy is some sort of throw back and someone needs to tell him to leave it!… hero!

4) Couple at the bar selected fish and chips from the menu. It has just arrived… the English will know what I mean by a Sundae, it looks like that, but its the newspaper that its served in thats shaped in that way. Genius. How stereotypical!

5) I didn’t want to go this far, but a new amazing one just walked in… two cute girls sitting next to me, bloke walks in and gets introduced to one of them. Clearly this is some sort of setup for the other. The guy basically seems like a social recluse, not comfortable in anyway etc. His first story involved a high school prank, bad start. Now talking work and how they have a car showroom at the bottom of their office block. Ladies, is that sexy? He better not get lucky!

Ok I know I’m cheating a little bit by combiningthe two days, but day 5 really does only include landing, getting off plane and driving back to the office. Nothing really of interest! So back to day 4… Day 4 and the final day in NYC. Got up, went for breakfast with Horsy and bossman. Swiftly back upstairs to get on with more work. Rushed around NYC trying to find the Fedex depot, finally found it and made friends with the girl who worked in there! You have to try extra hard to be nice to people when you need perfect strangers to do weird things for you! When reading the last sentence, please remove any sexual innuendos you are thinking of!

Once all this was sorted, it was time to go look at some pubs! My how tough hey? Well yes actually, ended up walking about 6 miles. One place was right by Grand Central Terminal, one the far side of Times Square, and a fair few between. One of which I was more than slightly suspicious of being a strip club. Whilst walking through Times Square, I noticed a gathering in the middle of the road so thought I best find out what was going on. It was live Guitar Hero (computer game) going on. People were putting their name down and going up to play on the massive screen. A funny combination of absolutely useless people and some really good people. After all this excitement I ended up back at the hotel to collect the bags and get a taxi to the airport. Where the carnage basically began…

So what happened at the airport I hear you asking… to be honest, at the airport not a lot. Got checked straight in, got boarding passes, got through security with no problems. Went to duty free, bought some Whiskey and pressies. Boarding was delayed by 10 mins because the plane came in slightly late, but no real problem there. Got on the plane, settled down, it was really quiet on there so Horsy went to sit on the other side of the gangway so we could both spreadout. How conciderate.

Next we hear the Pilot come over the PA system, telling us the bad news that there is a delay in getting a spot on the runway, there would be approximately an hours delay before we could take off. This was of course disappointing, not as disappointing as when the Pilot came on again about 20 mins later to say that one (of two) runways had been closed. Meaning there were 80 planes queued waiting to take off, and the same amount in the air waiting to land, approximately 2 hour wait. I guess it goes without saying that the ones waiting to land get a slight priority over us. I kinda feel that this was my fault, there was a point whislt waiting at the airport where I thought to myself: “I don’t know why people always complain about punctuality of flights, I’ve never had any problems”. The cabin crew put the inflight entertainment on early an fed us drinks earlier than normal so wasn’t too bad. I did notice a couple of things though which got me thinking. First off I thought it was weird that the runway ran over the top of a road with public cars on. A tunnel underneath a runway with aeroplanes on? I’ll go around thanks! We also had to taxi past the Americans Airlines terminal, I wonder if they were delayed as well, conspiracy theory states that they will have been flying all their flights out on time to make other airlines look inferior!

We finally got our spot to take off, we taxi’ed to the end of the runway where it was possible to look back along where we’d come from. Strange to see a line of 15 planes (majority of them big transatlantic planes like ours) lined up. Like you would expect to see in car form queuing for a car park or something similar. Taking the Britains love of queuing to another level! Other than few problems with the inflight entertainment there is little else exciting which happened. Had a little kip on the plane, but no where near long enough to not be totally jet lagged today 🙁

More pictures to come asap!

What’s happened today then, I only have ten mins to write this or “today” will no longer be accurate.

Was up again stupidly early, I blame Visser for the this as he Twittered, which sms alerted me. As the timezones are screwy it woke me up. Started working around 6, got angry at my alarm for going off at 9, suggesting I should be just waking up. Whereas I’d been at it for hours already.

Donut for breakfast, then we popped (Horsy cantered) down to Dunkin again for smoothies and stuff… Busy day working after this, nothing really interesting! Watched the Liverpool game on my TV in my room, great result! Wont say tooo much about it.

Tonight, I went out on my own, walked down to Times Square where I was meeting up with Giggedy and the mate he was travelling with. Quick beer in the ESPNzone bar, then onto Hard Rock Cafe for dinner! Great food, had a Beef Brisket (yes I had to ask the waitress wtf that meant), was very very nice! Popped into a recommended Irish bar after this for a final pint and a rather oversized Tanqueray 10. Wondered back on my own (slightly hesitant) but was fine. Strange that here they collect rubbish in the evening. Meaning that the only vehicles around were taxis and bin men.

Lazy strikes, not got time to post a special post about pictures from day 2. I will update the facebook album here asap.

What have I got up to today then… weird night sleep, woke up after about 2 hours of sleep, then from there on in I was kinda awake and kinda asleep. That dozey state where you don’t know what state you are in!

At around 7 I gave up and got up and started working… breakfast via room service at 9ish, American breakfast to be exact. Eggs bacon Roast potatoes, go figure. Bad cup of tea! Pretty much straight after breakfast we had to run over to Smartfusion offices to collect some devices for work, this was cool, again got to see some more of NYC. Taxi back got lost, when we said we wanted 70 Park Avenue, he tried to take us to 70th and Park Ave. This is approximately 40 blocks away from where we wanted to be. The guy got to about 58th before Horsey realised and turned him around. Strangly only added about 2 quid to the fare.

Work in the room all afternoon, broken up by a trip to Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. My first Mocha, not bad to be honest! Tasted of hot chocolate, and I didn’t need to fall asleep all afternoon. I will probably need another couple tomorrow to stop this again though.

Evening, chilled out from around 7-7.30, watched some Fam Guy, call it a break! Then back to work, got a call that the bosses were expecting me in the bar to talk business (instead of meeting up with a mate for drinks). Sat there talking business until they threw us out at 11. Went upstairs, bath, work, now sat in bed writing this before passing out and sleep! Can’t wait!

Gunna watch some of the Conan O’Brian show and fall asleep, pictures of today tomorrow, not so many today. But will bulk it out with some room pictures!

Ciao

Find a write-up of the days incidents here.

Here are the promised pictures… Well my favourites anyway. The full set of pictures can be found on Facebook.

I am absolutely exhausted! At the time of writing this it is 10.40pm NYC time… which is 3.40am UK time and I’ve been up and at work from 9, travelling since 12. Shattered.

The flight was fine, my first long haul trip and I was very well behaved. Too lazy to get laptop down or anything, read lots of Richard Hammonds autobiography (more on this later posts I guess), watched some of the inflight entertainment, watched the strange people on the plane, the usual! Took loads of beautiful pictures from the plane of the clouds etc, will post them up tomorrow. Couldn’t take many pictures once I got into town tonight because my phone (=camera) battery is dead. Will sort it in the morning and get them up.

Went out for dinner tonight with Horsy, went to a really friendly little pub. Had a G&T to start with, the dude free poured a 50/50 Gin/Tonic. My type of pub! Had a Bud Light next, very nice actually! The food… tasted great, but was big, Horsy and I both felt kinda sick from the plane still and really didn’t eat much at all. Feel bad because it was by no means a statement of the food quality that we didn’t eat it, imagine trying to eat a massive dinner at 2.30 in the morning!

Hotel is nice, they have someone that opens the door for me! Front door, not bedroom door, that would be weird. Will take pictures around the place tomorrow. There was some confusion at first though… I get given my room cards and we get in the lift. Look at my room number, is that 415 or 418?? Shit, well there’s room 415, I’ll try that. Card let me in, good sign, walk in radio is already playing, weird. Look around everything seems to be in order, ewww complimentary bottle of wine in an ice cooler, ace, little welcome card too. “Welcome Ms Lowe” WTF? I head straight to reception to find out whats going on, apparently she cancelled her stay last night, and therefore they left the complimentary stuff she was offered in the room for me. Can’t complain I guess, definitely locking the door tonight on the off chance she tries to show up (keep Horsy out too). Means I get to choose if she shares this huge bed *wink*

Ciao for now!

I’m off to New York tomorrow 😀

Its a work trip, but any trip is a trip it has to be said. What will I be doing… work wise it will be the normal stuff, social wise it will be a world of difference! Drinking American beers in American bars in an American city. Sounds good to me! The sights, I’ll be staying right next to the Empire State building, Madison Square Gardens and maybe even the good lady!

On realising that this post was really going anywhere I thought I best at least lead it to somewhere, so will hopefully get a good photo update going on whilst there. (If data charges don’t rape me too hard).