New York, New York!

Yesterday and today have been whirlwinds. My wife and I arrived at Newark airport about 2:40 pm yesterday, grabbed a cab, and made our way to our hotel in Times Square in New York. Times Square is a garish place, awash in neon and flashing lights that pay homage to excess and indulgence and the prurience of materialism taken to extremes. As quickly as we could, we put away our clothes and began behaving as tourists. We walked south and west...and walked and walked and walked. We soaked in as much as we could outdoors on a beautiful blue day, then waited in endless lines to ride the elevators to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. We paid extra to go to the 102nd floor...that was a waste. The view from the outdoor viewing platform was magnificent, though, and we were glad we did the touristy thing. This, despite the fact that the TSA stand-ins who run the security checkpoint lost my belt.

Yep, they lost my leather belt, the little brown thing that holds my pants up. And I thought TSA hired incompetents. This dream-staff at the Empire State Building was beyond belief! Oh, well. I needed a new belt.

Then we walked more...and more. We finally got back to our room late in the afternoon, then took another walk, this one to 9th Avenue, north of 42nd Street. The streets were loaded with restaurants, the night life was bursting at the seams. We ate at a Thai restaurant, then drifted a bit and went back to our room, where we finally got to bed rather late.

Today, we "popped up" after 9:00 am, had a continental breakfast in the club lounge, then bought subway/bus passes and caught a series of buses to the Guggenheim museum. More on that in a later post. We ate lunch on the upper west side, in a little Greek restaurant called Nikko's, just off Broadway and 75th. More busing, then a brief stop at the hotel, then busing and walking to Greenich Village (with a brief pub stop at Peculier Pub on Bleecker Street) and walking on to Soho, where we met up with a couple of friends and a couple of their friends for a fine dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant called Genthe (I think), then four of the original six went for drinks at a Soho bar, then taxied back to our respective hotels.

Quite a day. This, all the while I was participating in various phone calls with lawyers and others concerning a huge blow-up with an ethics complaint filed against a member of a client group.

But what a day!