one night on broadway

Greetings from Times Square in New York City. As usual, my sleep is off, which is unfortunate. It looks like I'll only get about five hours of sleep total, since I'm being driven to New Jersey in an hour and 45 minutes.

This has been an interesting "business" trip thus far. Several colleagues and I landed at JFK at 1:30 yesterday afternoon, and were picked up by a limo at the airport. I was a bit surprised, but it was kind of fun. I haven't been in a stretch limo since I was asked by a girl at church to her senior prom. I still feel kind of bad when I think about how her mom arranged for us to have this nice stretch limo all to ourselves (What was she thinking???), and I fell asleep promptly after we got in the car, but I digress...Anyway, I had gotten a bit of motion sickness during our landing, and thought I was going to puke in the limo. The driver's driving was all over the place, and he got lost once or twice (come on--how do you get lost going to a hotel right next to Times Square?), so there was a fair amount of jerky movement in the car.

By the time we got to our hotel and got settled, it was 3:30. The rest of the group was hungry, so we decided to go get "lunch". We went to a small diner down the street, and I ordered a monte cristo. It sucked, but in typical Steve fashion, I ate it all. I shouldn't have ordered anything, but then, I didn't realize that we'd be having dinner an hour and a half later. Oops.

This was the view looking down the street from Ruby Foo's, the Chinese/sushi joint we ate at:

That's Times Square, in case you can't tell. Somehow, my awesome camera phone just doesn't capture the grandeur of the lights and billboards and such. Imagine that. Anyway, the food was pretty good, but if you know me pretty well, you know what I think of Chinese places that don't have any Chinese people working in them. Anyway, as is typical of any business dinner, we ordered and ate too much (and drank too much--me with my 10 glasses of water, everyone else with wine).

After dinner, we were taken to see a Broadway musical called "Jersey Boys". Again, if you know me, then you know I hate musicals. "Hate" isn't a strong enough word to describe the way I feel about the idea of a story being told primarily with music. This might sound strange coming from a guy who actually sang in musical-type productions in high school and who loves music so much, so I'll just say this: it's a lot more fun when you're doing the singing yourself. Anyway, a member of the group had requested that our vendor take us to this, which I thought was pretty low class in and of itself. One of my other colleagues and I tried to get out of it, but no such luck.

It turned out to not be as bad as I was expecting, but that's not tough when you have zero positive expectations. It tells the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and since I'm familiar with a lot of their hits, I could at least get into the music a bit.

This was our after-musical activity:

A lot of my business trips are like this. It will go like this:

Colleague 1: Hey, do you guys want to go (out for drinks/to happy hour/to a bar)?

Steve: No, not really.

Everyone else: Yeah!!!

Colleague 1: OK, we're going.

Of course, I have to play along and be a good sport, but man, do I hate bars. Sipping a water or lemonade while else imbibes just isn't that exciting, and since I have very limited experience in bars, I'm not very comfortable in them. I doubt I ever will be.

We didn't end up getting back to our hotel until midnight, but at least everything was within walking distance. It was a day of new experiences, and even if the activities weren't my first choice, it's always nice to see and/or try something new.

I'll be flying out of Newark this afternoon, after meetings and a factory visit. The dream lives on...