ryan kennedy’s blog

I got into Chicago around 1pm local time. I have a few observations I’d like to share:

The nickname “The Windy City” has no effect whatsoever on airplanes landing in Chicago. No…effect…whatsoever. I totally didn’t fill a barf bag and then present it to the cockpit asking, “which one of you ordered my lunch?” I didn’t, actually…but it would have been kind of funny. Almost as funny as it was when the plane was only 10 feet off the ground with one side of the aircraft still decidedly higher than the other.

Chicago is an AT&T dead spot. I’m not saying Chicago has AT&T dead spots, I’m saying it is an AT&T dead spot. Couldn’t get a signal at Midway Airport. Can’t make calls from my hotel, even though I have a spacious view from my 28th floor hotel room. Data access on the iPhone is spotty as hell. Dear AT&T…where the fuck are all those “bars” you keep talking about?

The Hyatt Regency here has wired internet access, yay! They make you pay for it, boo! It’s slow as shit, boo! It’s like having only one coke dealer in the neighborhood and he sells stuff that’s 98% powdered sugar. Technically speaking, you don’t have to buy it. But you’ll still take 2% if the alternative is zero.

Speaking of hotels and charging for things…I ordered some nachos and a soda from room service. First off, yes…I know the food is heavily marked up. But $24 for nachos and a soda? They could have at least sprung for some real cheese and left the Velveeta for the stadium nachos.

Tomorrow I give my talk at 2pm local time (noon Pacific time). It should be cool. I have some tricks up my sleeve that some people won’t be expecting. I’ll also be doing my two sessions at AIR Park. I walked by that earlier today and it looks pretty sweet. Kind of an indoor park with the Adobe AIR bus parked nearby.

Oh, I also found out (not in time to avoid the disaster that was nachos for lunch) that there’s a White Castle less than a half mile walk from my hotel. That’s going to be trouble on Tuesday night.

The internet access at my hotel has been down since yesterday afternoon. This has been particularly upsetting since I use mail, IM and VoIP to maintain a connection back to the mothership in California. Today some coworkers and I are investigating alternative hotels, preferably ones that don’t suck. If you’ve been trying to get in touch with me, this is what’s going on.

If you know of nice, internet having hotels in the London area that don’t cost an arm and a leg…we’re all ears. We’re currently at the Holiday Inn at Camden Lock. The hotel is nice enough, but nice doesn’t overcome this lack of internet access when I need to get some stuff done for my presentation Saturday.

It might seem like a good idea. It’s so innocent, you can see the sign calling you from across the street. You could just pop in, place an order and walk out. I’m talking, of course, about fish ‘n chips. The quintessential British food or so movies would have you believe. I’ve eaten my share in the states and I’m quite smitten by the combination.

So…when in London…you must have the real deal…right? Yes. Well…sort of. There is one rule to abide by:

Under no circumstances should you ever purchase fish n’ chips from a place that appears to specialize in falafel’s…NO MATTER HOW HUNGRY YOU MAY BE.

I’m loving every minute of London, but holy crap it can do a number on you. Yesterday I did a ton of walking, hitting Regent’s Park and the London Zoo and then Hyde Park. Today I did more walking between riding a tour bus. I saw Westminster Abbey and Piccadilly Circus on foot, the rest I let the bus do the work. This evening I hung out with Chad and his wife at a nearby bar (I’m not sure it would qualify as a pub).

I want to do more detailed posts on the stuff I’m doing, but I wanted to let people know what I was up to. In lieu of that, for now, I give you my map of London photos taken so far.

I totally don’t have plans yet for tomorrow. I may head back down to Central London to check things out a little more closely. I didn’t really get to see Buckingham Palace very well from the bus. I’d also like to do a little bit of souvenir shopping for people back in the states. Thursday I think I’m doing my day trip. I haven’t for sure settled on where I’m going, but I’m leaning very heavily towards checking out Oxford.

I made the mistake of sleeping yesterday around 5pm. I figured I could take a short nap just to refresh my brain for the rest of the evening. Instead, I slept until 9pm…making it more difficult to go to sleep last night. So, today, I slept until noon. Not exactly how I wanted to spent my first full day in London.

I had it all planned out. I woke up early (5am) on Saturday so I could be sleepy partway into my flight. With luck I’d be sleeping on the plane around 7:30pm, giving me about 6 hours to sleep on the plane so I’d arrive in London at 10:30am feeling like I just woke up perfectly on London time. This approach worked well for me on my trip to India. I stayed awake the entire trip from the US to London and then slept the whole trip from London to Bangalore, arriving at around 4:30am. I arrived in perfect shape and had no problems going to sleep later that night.

So what was the difference? The airline. I flew British Airways in November and Virgin Atlantic yesterday. There are some unfair comparisons. The British Airways flight was’t full…the Virgin flight was packed. The British Airways flight had mostly courteous people on it…the Virgin flight was full of flatulent, cackling people who seemed to love using your seatback as their personal pull up bar. Maybe it was the people flying the airline more than the airline itself, but I think that has to be accounted for. Ultimately, Virgin has one more flight (my return to San Francisco in a week) to prove to me that flight was a fluke.

In any case, I’ve already slept away half of my first day in one of the greatest cities in civilization. Time to grab a shower, some food and hit the town.

After a very long flight where I didn’t get very much sleep and an equally long (okay, not really…but it felt that way) tube ride from Heathrow to Camden Town, I’m finally settled in London. Virgin Atlantic got a few things right on their airline, the interactive entertainment, for instance, is really nice. After flying British Airways to India back in November where they basically set up about a dozen VCR’s, all with poorly tuned tracking, the Virgin setup was really nice. All on-demand stuff including movies, television, music and games. Best of all, the video and sound quality was pretty good. British Airways should call up Virgin and find out who the vendor is for their system. Virgin also offers sending/receiving SMS messages from your seat…although it’s not free (bummer).

Of course, in flight entertainment will only get you so far. The seats were incredibly cramped. I had an aisle seat and was still entirely uncomfortable. The seat in front of me had some sort of box mounted beneath it, taking up about 50% of my legroom so I never really got a chance to stretch out. The person two seats to my left was one Happy Meal shy of 300 pounds, causing the guy one seat to my left to be squeezed over the armrest into my seat. The person in front of me could have had me shampoo his head since with his seat tilted all the way back, he was basically laying in my lap. The guy to my left tried to take out his laptop at one point. He put it on his tray and opened it only to find out that he couldn’t open it far enough to be able to read his screen well. Oh, and did I mention the seat backs are nearly straight up and down? Not comfortable at all. If I fly Virgin again, I think it’s going to have to be only under the condition that I’m upgraded out of “economy” class.

When we arrived in Heathrow, I expected the weather to be pleasant…in other words, I expected it to not be hot. Oddly enough, while working my way through customs and picking up my luggage, it was absolutely sweltering. I don’t think it had anything to do with the weather, I think those areas were either improperly ventilated or someone accidentally left the heater on. I had the same experience when I rode the London Underground. The trains were incredibly uncomfortable. I found myself wishing they’d pause a little longer at each station because the doors would open and the air outside actually felt pretty good. After about 45 minutes, I had finally made it from Heathrow to Kings Cross where I was informed (by the hotel’s directions) to catch the Northern line to Camden Town. Only one problem…I couldn’t because of construction. Instead, I had to hop the Victoria line down one station and pick up the Northern line there and head north two stations to Camden Town. I eventually got there, but between the heat and having to deal with the weekend construction work, I was exhausted by the time I reached Camden.

Camden, however, is neat. I came up to ground level from the Underground right smack into the middle of Camden Market. For those of you who don’t know anything about it, let me describe my first impression. Try to imagine what would happen if Hot Topic took over an entire street. There…you’re probably about 80% accurate with whatever you’ve imagined. I’m not complaining, I actually thought it was pretty cool. A whole bunch of “punk rock guys” handing out flyers to something (evidently my urbanite American threads didn’t impress them enough) while selling “The guy next to me loves cock” shirts. I saw the occasional goth shopping as well.

My hotel is nothing to write home about, but it’s adequate. The room is clean and looks over the lock. It’s Sunday and there’s a huge market in full effect. I’m trying to decide if I should shower and catch a quick nap or shower and then go check out the market. My body says nap…my world traveler self says market. I need to get some food anyway, so hitting the market may not be such a bad idea.

I haven’t decided what I’ll be doing tomorrow yet. Hopefully after a good night’s sleep I’ll be ready to go. I may stay pretty closeby tomorrow just so I can recover a little more. I’m also not sure what to expect on the Underground on a Monday. After that, however, I’m hoping to do at least one day trip outside of London to go see Stonehenge. I’ll be posting photos during the trip. I’ve got a Flickr photo set started for London.

Update: I said earlier that the ventilation may have been what was making things so warm earlier. I’m thinking now that it’s humidity. Yahoo! Weather for London is showing 68% humidity right now. It was clear skies when I arrived and now it’s pretty cloudy. I know rain was supposed to be on the way, so that might explain why it’s so muggy-ish here.

I returned from Bangalore on Monday. The trip was great, truly one of those experiences you never forget. I’ve added some extra photos from Friday and Saturday to the photo set.

Friday we left work early go visit Bannerghatta, a national park just outside of Bangalore. They have a mini safari where you can see tigers and lions. You ride in a small bus out to the fenced in area. Once there, the driver got us as close as possible to the wildlife so we could get plenty of pictures. At times he even took my camera so he could snap some pictures for me on his side of the bus (I was sitting on the other side). At times the animals were so close that I’d pull my hand back inside the window, not exactly wanting to leave behind a souvenir for them to chew on a while. There’s also a zoo that we started checking out until the rain started. The zoo is much larger than I had originally thought. I wish we had more time to look around.

Saturday we traveled to Mysore. It was a couple hours drive outside of Bangalore. While it was a long ride, I finally got to see some of the country. The highways are much different in India. There are speedbumps and occasional barricades set up to slow/stop traffic. This is because there are still many areas where pedestrians cross the roads. There’s a lot of livestock moving about as well, so you really have to be careful. The ride back seemed particularly perilous because it was night time. It was very dark out, there are no street lights and people walk on the side of the road without any sort of reflectors to stand out against the blackness.

Our first stop was at the Tipu Sultan’s summer palace. It’s a large plot of land with a decent sized palace in the center. We walked the grounds a little bit before going inside the palace. Photography is forbidden inside the palaces, so I didn’t get any pictures. It’s interesting, though, that the palace is very wide open. Unlike homes/buildings here in the US, the palace is completely open to the elements. I’m guessing this has a lot to do with the weather. I don’t think this part of India ever gets terribly cold and the open floorplan probably helps to cool the palace with a breeze when things get humid.

Afterwards, we went on to a local bird sanctuary. We actually weren’t expecting to stop at a bird sanctuary, so we didn’t stick around long. We actually saw more monkeys than birds, which I definitely wasn’t upset about (I have a thing for monkeys, I’m not sure why).

After the bird sancturary, we drove on to Mysore Palace. This is a very large palace, many tourists flock to it. We walked up and found someone willing to be our tour guide through the palace. After depositing our shoes (they’re not allowed inside the palace), our tour guide showed us around the interior of the palace. It’s amazingly beautiful, very ornate.

When we finished seeing the Mysore Palace, we were getting hungry for lunch. So we headed over to Lalita Mahal, a local palace that has been converted to a well known hotel. Lunch was pretty good, we had a buffet. There was actually a lasagna with a different kind of sauce. It wasn’t a marinara sauce, more of a local Indian sauce, which I thought was a nice change. We also had ice cream for dessert, which was wonderful. I’m not certain it was great ice cream, I just think it had been a really long time since I had something sweet to eat. We did a little shopping in Mysore. We tried finding a local government run shop, but instead went to an independent shop. I like the government shops better because you’re not hassled as much. I understand that people are just trying to make a living, but by American standards the people in the stores can be a bit aggressive. The drive back to Bangalore was painful. It took us a little over two hours to get to Mysore, it took more like 3-4 to get back. Traffic in Bangalore is awful. The roads are packed.

Sunday we did a ton of shopping. I picked up a lot of stuff to bring back, but not nearly as much as one of the women I was traveling with. She’s insane. There isn’t a store in India that she didn’t visit (or so it seemed). I tried to be a good sport, but after 7 hours of shopping I couldn’t take anymore.

I stayed up all night Sunday before my flight back Monday morning. My plan was to sleep the whole way from Bangalore to London, that way I’d be awake from London to San Francisco and arrive back in California already adjusted to the time. Well, the flight left Bangalore an hour late. The plane coming in was late, so that held us up. We arrived in London with not a lot of time to catch our connecting flight. Fortunately British Airways was on the ball. They met us at the plane with a van and moved us quickly to our terminal and then put us in the fast track security lane. We made it to our plane with about 15 minutes to spare before boarding. I definitely give British Air a thumbs up for that. After boarding, we had to sit a little longer. Evidently they swapped out one of the tires on our 747 but then couldn’t get the jack to go back down. I had a mental image of AAA showing up to fix a flat on a 747. We finally got off the ground in the rain and made the last leg of the flight. We got into San Francisco about 45 minutes late, which is more than I can say for my baggage. The shortened layover meant that the luggage couldn’t make the trip from terminal 4 to terminal 1 in time. They eventually got my bag to me, but it was a little annoying not to have my bag when I left the airport.

Overall, the trip was great. I’m glad for the experience, but happy to be home. The timing of my return was good, just in time for Thanksgiving. So I’ve already had one good American feast since getting back. I’ve definitely missed the variety of food available here in California.

I’ve been a little lax in posting just because I’ve been so busy. Lots of meetings with Bangalore engineers, sampling more of the local food and preparing for my Yahoo! Mail Web Service tech talk (which seemed to go really well).

Tuesday was another work day. We went out to dinner afterwards, an Indian restaurant at the top of a 13 story building. We had balcony seating, which gave us an amazing view of the city at night. I’ve got a picture of the whole team out at dinner up on flickr. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m the fat guy in the green shirt (I need to get back in the gym when I get back to the United States). On the way back, we caught a ride in an auto rickshaw. It’s like a motorcycle, only less safe. There are three wheels and it’s enclosed on the back, front and top. The sides are wide open with a driver seated up front and a bench seat in the back. We piled three of us in the back. Well, sort of “in”, anyway. I ended up with one leg hanging out the side. Anyway, the ride was exciting. Kind of like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, only you might die. It was basically the best cab ride ever. Rated right up there with riding in a New York cab. I managed to get 3 minutes of video, as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the part where we made a u-turn and almost got pasted by a small, white car. That would have been awesome to get on video.

Wednesday was more meetings. We went to a Chinese restaurant at the Oberoi. It was pretty good, a nice change of pace from all the Indian food we’ve been eating. I like the Indian food, but I miss the variety that I’m used to having back home.

Thursday was the tech talk. That went pretty well (I think). I had several questions afterwards and became quite popular afterwards. Several teams pulled me aside to talk a little about the web service and how they could use it. I also got to see a bad-ass hack using the web service that I hope will one day see the light outside the company. The people I’ve met are all really nice. I’ve never really known the people in the Bangalore office very well, so getting to come out and meet many of them has been a great experience. That night we went back to the Oberoi to hit up Rim Nam, the Thai restaurant. We’d been trying to go there since Monday without luck. We finally got in and the food was decent. Again, the change of food was nice.

That brings it to Friday. It’s only 9:45am here, so I haven’t done very much yet. I had a late night fighting fires at work, so I’m dragging a little bit. There’s not much in the way of meetings for me today, but we’re going to be leaving the office early to go check out Bannerghatta National Park. There’s a safari there where you get to ride through some of the 25,000 acres of wildland. From the reviews I’ve seen, there seems to be a decent variety of native animals to see. Really I’m just looking forward to getting outside the city limits. I’ve been confined to a pretty small area of Bangalore so it’s been hard to form any opinion of the city or of the rest of India. Seeing some countryside will be nice. I remember that being one of my favorite things about having a car in New Zealand, just being able to see so much of the open country between the cities.

Saturday we go to see Mysore. It’s a little bit of a drive to get there, but they have a large palace and other historical sites to go check out. It’ll be interesting to see another city to see how it compares to Bangalore. Aside from the shopping we did on Sunday, and the safari today, the trip to Mysore wil be one of the first tourist activities we’ve had since we arrived.

I’m not sure what all is on the agenda for Sunday. Probably some more shopping. I didn’t get very much on Sunday, so I need to get back out to find some more stuff to bring back.

Yesterday we went and did some shopping down on Commercial Street and MG Road. Shopping on Commercial Street is…interesting. The place is packed to the gills with people, cars and shops. We went into several stores. It’s interesting to note some differences between a couple of them. Some of the stores would leave you to shop, occasionally asking if you needed any help. Others would mob you once you got in asking how many of these you wanted and whether or not you wanted to also get some of those and maybe a couple of other things. It was annoying, really…but just part of the experience, I guess. I’m sure I had “tourist” tattooed on my head, so the shop owners figured I’d be willing to part with money. The shops are inexpensive, however. Shirts can be had for a couple bucks. Wood carved trinkets likewise.

Today was my first official work day in Bangalore. The Yahoo! office on MG Road is nice. I appreciated that they have air conditioning because the humidity and I don’t particularly agree down here. The humidity isn’t real bad, but it’s definitely noticeable. I got to meet the mail engineering team, which was cool. I see email from these guys and now I can put a face to the name. I also enjoyed the free lunch, although I must say, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to need Indian food for a while after this trip. Don’t get me wrong, I love the food. But I’ve probably had more Indian food in the past 2 days than I’ve had in the 10 years prior to that.

After the day’s meetings, we went out for dinner with Grishma, one of our designers. We were going to hit up a nice Thai restaurant, but it turns out that place wasn’t open on Mondays. Instead we went for, you guessed it, Indian. The place we went was pretty good. Nice kebabs with fish, chicken and lamb. We followed that up with some naan and two other vegetable dishes, the names of which completely escape me (yes, already).

We walked back to the hotel after that. I managed to snap a little video of the traffic on MG Road (this was probably around 9pm, maybe slightly later). I was trying to embed that video in this post, but WordPress is being a bitch and keeps stripping out my tag. So instead I’ll just have to link you to the video. If you listen to it, you’ll get a little taste of how much the horn gets used here.

The Ryan Kennedy road show has officially touched down in Bangalore, India. It was a long trip, but not too bad. I was expecting worse.

The plane ride from San Francisco to London was an hour shorter than originally scheduled. According to the captain we had a nice 200mph tailwind pushing us along. That was nice, getting off the plane earlier. Unfortunately, that just meant our layover in London was an extra hour. I couldn’t help wondering what on earth I was doing in an airport when London was nearby waiting. I’ll have to go back and stay a while next time.

The plane to Bangalore boarded late, but I think the pilot made up for it in the air because we didn’t get in late. I managed to sleep on that leg of the flight which positioned me well for being awake today. I got about 5-6 hours sleep on the plane and we arrived in the morning…so it was almost as if I’d had a night’s sleep when I arrived. Hopefully that will mean that I won’t have much difficulty adjusting to the time change (it’s a 13.5 hour difference).

Let me just say, the Bangalore luggage experience leaves much to be desired. There isn’t much conveyor space, so when the 777 lands loaded with baggage, there isn’t much room on the conveyors to hold luggage. So it frequently results in a traffic jam of sorts where luggage collides at choke points, preventing anything from getting through. Then, the area where the passengers congregate is probably 80% consumed by stupid hand carts for carrying out baggage. There’s no room to maneuver. The room is hot and humid from the collective body heat of everyone makes it a really unbearable place to stand for too long. I think it took an hour for all of the luggage to be offloaded. To top it off, they “misplaced” one of the luggage crates and didn’t get it there until well after all the other baggage had been claimed. We thought the luggage was lost and people were starting to fill out forms to get it delivered to them when it was found, but then they called and said they had located the crate.

The ride from the airport was exciting. The New York taxi drivers haven’t got anything on these guys. I’ve never heard more excessive use of the horn anywhere else. If you’re a pedestrian, scooter rider or autorichshaw operator, watch yourself. The drivers are very aggressive and won’t hesitate to show you how close they can get. It’s really quite impressive, but if the New York cab drivers make you uncomfortable…then this place won’t do wonders for you.

What I’ve seen of Bangalore so far is a pretty new experience to me. Many parts of town I saw appeared to be pretty old and in disrepair. Along one street we saw cattle on the sidewalk including one area where it appeared the cattle were being milked alongside the road. That’s just something you don’t really see much of in the US. Additionally, the air has a distinctive odor to it. At first I thought I was just inhaling a bunch of airline fumes at the airport. But when I got out of the car at our hotel I decided that it wasn’t just the airport that smelled that way. I know that pollution is a problem here, so I’m guessing that’s mostly what the smell is. It’s also loud as hell here. All of the street and construction noise reminds me of being in New York.

Anyway, I’m eager to go check things out a little bit. Find out where the Yahoo! office is and all. I’ve started up a flickr photostream so you can check out all the photos I post. I’ve got a couple of them up right now.

I’ll continue posting more here, so stay tuned.

I mentioned briefly in my last post that I’m heading to Bangalore. So this week I had to go and get myself some travel immunizations: Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B, Tetanus, Typhoid and Malaria. I’m not really anticipating any problems, but better safe than…sick.

The trip is coming fast, I leave a week from Friday (November 10th). I am looking forward to the trip, although the timing could be a little better. I’ve just finished up two extremely busy months, Thanksgiving is the week after I get back and, oh yeah, I’m in the middle of selling my house. But I’ll survive.

Anyway, if you’re in Bangalore between November 13 and November 17 (I’ll only be there a week) and want to talk about the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, let me know (just leave a comment and I’ll get in touch with you).

During the last day of our trip to New York, we paid a visit to the Empire State Building. We had actually dropped by the night before, but it was PACKED with tourists and the wait to go to the observation deck was at least 90 minutes. We went back the next morning and had virtually no wait.

You pay $14 for a trip to the observation deck. You have to go through a security check and then you have to make your way past all sorts of opportunities for employees to try and sell you crap you don’t want. But eventually you make it to the 86th floor and step outside. A word of warning…in November it’s windy as hell up there. You will want to wear something warm. Gloves and a beanie cap would both be good things to have with you (my ears and fingers wish I was thinking ahead).

Once you’re at the observation deck, the view is amazing. You can literally see just about all of Manhattan. Looking towards the south, you can see the Statue of Liberty. To the north you can see to the edge of Central Park. Off the northeast corner you can get a good look at the Chrysler Building, probably my favorite building in all of Manhattan.

While planning our trip to New York, we decided we would take in at least one sporting event. We purchased tickets to see the New York Rangers (hockey) play an afternoon game on Saturday. I’d only been to one other hockey game (the San Jose Sharks), so I was looking forward to seeing another. We ended up getting tickets in section 343. In most arenas, being in a section numbered that high means you probably ought to bring an oxygen tank with you. But the Garden isn’t like that. The lower section of the arena is a fairly flat, wide bowl that accomodates three rows of sections. Our seats were fantastic. Players still appeared large enough that I could read the names on the backs of their jerseys. I was expecting to be needing binoculars.

Anyway, we liked the seats so much that we checked for Knicks (basketball) tickets for the next day. They had a noon game against Portland and I managed to grab two seats in section 333. Again, the seats were great. I’m convinced that there really isn’t a bad seat in the house in the Garden. Even the last level above us looked like they had relatively decent seats.

I have pictures to put up at some point. I’d link to some now but flickr is having a massage at the moment.

Lisa and I spent Friday in the American Museum of Natural History. The place is immense. If you plan on going and want to just look at everything, give yourself at least half a day. We started out walking around the first floor, checking out all the dioramas of North American animals. That was pretty neat. There was also an area for underwater creatures (I’m pretty sure it was on the first floor) that has a gi-normous replica of a Blue Whale.

We also watched a video called Passport to the Universe in the Hayden Planetarium. In it, Tom Hanks narrarates the layout of the universe, showing us all what a vast expanse of space…space really is. After the video we did a quick tour of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. They do a nice timeline for the universe from the big bang (13 billion years ago) right up to life on Earth today.

When we finished in the Earth and Space area, we went back to the main part of the museum. We visited the second floor and saw some of the pieces they had from Native American, African, Latin American and Asian ancient civilizations. This was interesting, but it’s never really been enough to captivate my attention. So we made our way through there relatively quickly.

We went back down to the first floor to visit the rare gems and minerals collection. The bling was in full display down there. I’m surprised some rapper hasn’t bought the place up just to add to their already impressive collection of ice. Afterwards we went back up to the third floor to see the primate display to fulfill my unhealthy obsession with monkeys. The primate area was pretty small, so we were through there relatively quickly.

Lastly, we finally made it to the fourth floor for the big payoff…the dinosaurs. The museum has an incredibly impressive dinosaur collection. Rooms and rooms and rooms full of bones and fossils.

After we finished up at the museum, we took a walk through Central Park on our way back to the hotel, making a brief stop at Strawberry Fields along the way.

Thursday Lisa and I started the day by having lunch with my friend Pat. We met up down at the Silver Spurs, a nice little diner near 9th St. and Broadway. It was good seeing Pat again. I haven’t seen him since my days at EarthLink. Now we’re both on to better things and it would seem he’s as happy about his new job as I am about mine.

After my tasty BLT, Lisa and I walked down to the site of the World Trade Center. We walked by it the day before on our way back from the Statue of Liberty, but my camera battery was long gone by then so I wanted to go back. It’s an amazing place. To think that there used to be two towers, twice as tall as anything near them standing there at one point is difficult to grasp. Workers are still repairing damage to surrounding buildings and work is beginning on a major new transportation hub. We walked all the way around the site, seeing it from as many angles as possible. While the damage caused by the buildings was immense, it’s incredible to think that there are buildings not far from the towers that weren’t destroyed during the collapse.

Next, we made the walk over to Wall Street. We walked around a bit and took a quick tour of a coin collection at the Federal Reserve Bank. We were considering going on the tour there, but we found out that you have to make a reservation in advance.

Tired from all the walking, we made our way to a subway station and headed up towards the shopping on 5th Avenue. We visited Swarovski, Tiffany and Co. (holy crap…they have expensive stuff) and Louis Vitton (they, too, have incredibly expensive stuff). We rounded off the night with dinner at Mickey Mantle’s (mmm…ribs) and returned to our hotel room to get some rest.

Of course, no evening would be complete without a late night movie. So we caught the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

After our visit to the Statue of Liberty, we hopped the ferry to Ellis Island. For over 60 years it was a major gateway to the United States for immigrants.

We spent a lot of time walking around inside of the main building, checking out all the exhibits. There’s some neat stuff in there. A bunch of artifacts from when the island was still in operation, passports from immigrants who spent time on the island and an entire section of the museum showing various immigration statistics for the United States.

Today it’s a landmark, providing a view into the past. You can tour the museum in the main building, walk the grounds or look up relatives who may have immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island.

Lisa and I paid a visit to the Statue of Liberty earlier today. We took a nice subway ride followed by some wandering until we finally made our way to Battery Park. We bought a ticket for the ferry and had a nice, choppy boat ride to Liberty Island.

We did a lap around the island, taking a bunch of pictures. We didn’t get to go up to the observation deck because it was sold out for the day, but I don’t think we missed out on too much (I could be wrong). It would be different if we were able to go all the way up to the crown of the statue to look out, but they’ve had that locked down since 9/11. I actually thought she’d be a lot bigger than she really is. Don’t get me wrong, she is quite tall. But I was expecting colossal.

One nice thing about going out to Liberty Island is that you can get some great shots of the New York City skyline. When you’re in the city, you’re a little too close to everything to get a good picture. But the island is far enough away that you can get a good shot spanning from the Empire State Building all the way over to the Brooklyn Bridge.

After the show last night, Lisa and I hit Ellen’s Stardust Diner for some dessert. We shared a nice piece of apple pie with a scoop of homemade ice cream. The pie was good, the ice cream too. But that’s not what was really cool about the place.

Every person working in the diner has a voice, most of them have very good voices. Every once in a while, they kick on some tunes and sing a song for the patrons. One guy did a particularly good rendition of Man of La Mancha. The kicker, however, was the guy who did I Can Hear The Bells. The song is done in the play Hairspray by a woman, so it’s not easy to pull off as a dude. But he did a masterful job.

We’ve arrived in our hotel. We actually got into New York around 8:30am NY time, but we weren’t able to get into the room until almost 3:00pm. We ended up walking many…many miles to kill time. We walked from our hotel down to Times Square and back, with many trips down side streets along the way. We’re both very tired since we didn’t get a lot of sleep on the flight, but we’re otherwise doing well.

We’re resting up a little bit before we head out for dinner and a show (Wicked). Tomorrow we’ll take some pictures and put them up for everyone to see.

I’ll be leaving on the redeye Tuesday morning (12:30am) to take about a week vacation in New York with Lisa. We’ll be visiting the sights, hitting a show (Wicked), taking in a Rangers hockey game and more. I’ll post here as often as I can. I’m hoping to put up some daily pictures and give a quick recap of the day’s events.