I will apologize in advance for the brevity of this post, but we are anxious to go start exploring the city again. For those of you that don’t know, Jes and I were both independently sent by our companies to the greater NYC area on Thursday so we decided to take the company sponsored flights and make a weekend out of it. So far it has not disappointed.
Thursday evening after each getting done with our clients we met up at Penn Station in Manhattan and despite everyone’s concerns, it was not difficult to find each other. We were able to get settled into our hotel for the evening and went out on our first New York adventure: joining the debate about the best pizza in town. One of the names that always comes up in these debates is Lombardi’s, so that’s where we headed. I would say the pizza was very good, but we may not be that into New York style pizza. The one thing that was amazing about it was the price, for being one of the “go to” places to get New York pizza, it was not overly priced at all. After pizza we had reservations at one of the many comedy clubs, this one called Comedy Cellar. From what I was able to read online, Comedy Cellar is a tiny venue where both big and small names go to test out their new material. They post a lineup of who they expect to be performing that night earlier in the week, but reserve the right to make substitutions. Before I get any further, one thing Comedy Cellar is known for is having really big name comedians just drop in without notice and take the stage, names such as Chris Rock and Ray Ramano are not uncommon. With that in mind, the announced lineup was nothing spectacular, neither of us had heard of any of the proposed comedians, but we were just excited to see the show and it did not disappoint. The run of small time comedians produced a few very good acts and a couple of clunkers, but the highlight of the night was that not just one big name comedian stopped by, but two, as Howie Mandell and Aziz Ansari all stopped by to do a set. Needless to say they did not dissappoint and we left the comedy show extremely happy and headed back to the hotel around 1:00 AM.
Yesterday morning we decided to get our feet wet in midtown Manhattan with The Grand Tour. It was a very interesting tour for about the first hour, but we lost interest after that. There was a good deal of history about how New York City existed entirely on the southern tip of Manhattan for most of its existence which I found very interesting. Before bailing on the tour, we were taken inside The Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal and learned about the history of each. After the tour we walked up to Central Park, stopping at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the way, and relaxed in the park for a bit before coming back to the hotel to get ready for dinner and a show. Dinner was at a tiny restaurant (appropriately named Tiny’s) that was recommended to us by one of Jes’ friends and both the food and drinks were delicious. After dinner it was back up to the Theater District to catch our first real Broadway performance. The show we chose is called First Date and is actually still in “Preview” mode, as it doesn’t officially open until later this week. The show was excellent at times and kind of dragged through others so I don’t think it will be winning any Tony’s, but it was still an amazing experience.
The plan for today is to head to downtown Manhattan and go to the 9/11 Memorial and enjoy some of the outdoor festivities that the South Street Seaport has to offer. We have a very early flight tomorrow morning so we will probably take it easy at night, but I can’t express how much fun we’ve packed into two days so far. I know I said this would be brief, but I guess I had more to say than I thought, so if you made it this far, I applaud you. Until next week.