October 23, 2000

New York City?!?
   by stacy <pfftnet@stacy.pfft.net>

Last week was great. Well, mostly, but I'll get to that in a minute. Astute readers might have noticed there wasn't a new editorial for more than a week, and I offer profound apologies. I spent last week in New York City, officially because of a class I was taking for work, but I wondered around playing tourist a lot too. It was great.

I saw the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center (it's really really high!), the world-renowned subway (complete with homeless people and graffiti), and Times Square. The latter was really something, too. I've never seen a stock ticker the size of a building before, and the one there covers several floors of a high building, right on Broadway. There are some huge billboards in there too. I guess they replaced all the strip clubs and porno shops with Calvin Klein when they cleaned it up, but I like it better this way.

The worst part about the week was the first day of the class, when I was downstairs in the seminar room at 7am. You see, I called the night before to find out where the class was meeting and what time it started, and the gentleman on the phone told me 7:00. Unfortunately, when I showed up at 7:00, I was told that it didn't start until 8:30. NYC is an hour ahead of my normal time zone anyway, so losing that sleep was twice as expensive. On the upside, the hotel catered breakfast and lunch for us, and it was really quite good.

Oh, and New Yorkers aren't as rude as everybody makes them out to be. Not that I saw too many New Yorkers in Times Square and at the hotel, since they were all travelers and tourists like me. PFFT! to all those little brochures and maps that made us stick out like sore thumbs!

Published: October 23, 2000
Editor: stacy