Wherein our intrepid explorer braves stomach exploding Teriyaki and ponytails in Texas.
When you fly into New York at night you look down upon an organised circuit board of lights. Approaching San Antonio it looks as if some unholy Titan has vomited a pile of oozing fairly lights across the Texan plains. And where New York is tall, San Antonio seems wide. Wide spaces spanning wide streets bounded by the wide flat sandy buildings of this semi-historic frontier town. Not, I should add, as many wide load folks as I'd expected however.
By the time we'd landed after leaving Detroit's car park of an airport late my body clock had gone well and truly AWOL and it didn't help being woken at 2am the first morning with a public announcement telling us everything was ok?
Conference Hotels are funny places, hermetically sealed environments that tie you into to long days of indoor lighting and dual projector screens. Thankfully it turned out to be a good conference with interesting people met and many things learned. It was also the site of the worst pair of pants in the world - satin blue pyjama bottom style with a Stars and Stripes print - seen hanging off one of the attendees. For anyone who might think that the Yanks can be a badly dressed lot, then the image of this British casualty of sartorial disfunction would have certainly redressed the balance. Even the silver tailed cowboys with their guitar cases couldn't raise half the laugh that these terrible trousers did.
The Marriott backs onto the River Walk, a stretch of over sculpted Disney ride facade with a Mall at either end and the incessant sound of pan pipes playing 80s hits across the plasticised seating areas, occasionally drowned out by the teaming sparrows who seemed to have followed on down from the weekend. I don't even know if it's a real river or not. We did have some halfway decent food there on our last night at least, having decided to bypass the skin tight tops at Hooters, the ugly bloke who seemed to be the only staff member in Coyote Ugly and some English Bar whose staff looked like jailbait in tartan belts.
During our five days my colleagues shopped more than anyone I have ever seen shop; making use of the excellent exchange rate and half-packed suitcases. If I never see another pair of K-Swiss again I'll die a happy man.
If you check out my Flickr set you'll probably guess that the highlight was going to watch the NBA match where a pretty evenly matched San Antonio Spurs took on the Houston Rockets (and unfortunately lost). If nothing else San Antonians are a naturally friendly and welcoming bunch (the easiest way to strike up a conversation is to open your mouth) and the atmosphere was incredible. We even bumped into Big Willy the taxi driver on the way back who recognised us from the taxi queue at the hotel. If you're ever in San Antonio try and get a ride with Big Willy, most entertaining...
So despite seeing very little of the town, which I'm told isn't much, and there being no dedication to Ozzy on the Alamo, or that it rained on our first day, I enjoyed my 6am swims in the outdoor pool, didn't enjoy lunch passing through all too quickly, and was happy to participate in a conversation with some of the finest computing brains at Hewlett Packard during which it was agreed that all web 2.0 means is removing vowels from software names. So rest easy there technophobes, all is well with the www.
And now I'm back having spent far too many hours in airport waiting lounges, flown countless thousands of miles in over-sized Pringles cans at ridiculous speeds and absurd altitudes with nothing worth watching on the movie screens when they were there. I'm still knackered and my sleep patterns are only just returning to normal but there you go. Some people do this kind of thing willingly for a living. If you ever happen to meet them avoid them at all costs. They are insane. Stick to holidays when you can folks.
Tunes: The Rainmakers: Spend It On Love
...and span the length of the isle of Manhattan
I'd bring it to where you are
making a lake of the East River and Hudson
Death Cab For Cutie - Marching Bands of Manhattan
New York has to be one of my favourite places in the world. It has an intoxicating vibrancy combined with that certain knowing that New Yorkers seem to have. It's a mash up of contradictions and styles: from the steel of glass of mid-town and the financial districts to the avenues of gnarled trees that line Central Park, the stony opulence of the upper East and West Sides to the cosmopolitan bustle of the Village where thrift and chic walk hand in hand, while down the road garishly clad queens saunter past the Bowery bums or where the homless rest in Starbucks whilst chino clad students casually kick back in conversation. And it's big. It's a wonder more tourists aren't hospitalised from walking into roads whilst staring gormlessly upwards. Or perhaps that's more a testament to New York drivers' ability to stop on a dime.
Unhampered through not being there for work, although occasionally rendered useless by jet lag, rough plans were made and much wandering was done in the fresh bright cold (with occasional crippling blasts of Arctic wind). Of course so much of New York is burnt into the global psyche through the movies and you occasionally wonder whether this isn't just some giant Hollywood lot. So for me watching the subways rattle past in their aluminium-box way or walking across Brooklyn Bridge with its criss-crossed wires was like stepping into a brain dump of various cinema and tv screens.
The weekend was a host of pleasures and new experiences:
- getting lost in Central Park looking for the Dakota building,
- laughing at the ridiculous jackets some New Yorkers see fit to pimp their over-groomed primped up mop heads in,
- seeing a blue jay hop between the branches of one of the Park's beautiful twisted and tangled trees,
- eating Sushi down on the Lower East side,
- shopping for jeans and iPods,
- imagining Death's comforting laughter in Washington Park (that's one for the Neil Gaiman fans amongst you),
- gawping at the Bladerunner-esque vision of the city at night from the observation deck of the Empire State Building at night and getting terrible vertigo by looking up not down,
- the best Margaritas I've ever had in a bar where half the clientele looked as if they aught to have been famous,
- looking at giant perspex sperm at the Whitney museum after having run away from the enormous queues for the Annie Liebowitz exhibition at the Brookly Museum,
each one falling into place one after the other in the way that things do when you're just happy to go with the flow and do nothing more than enjoy yourself for no other reason than that to do anything else would be criminally stupid. And when you're just happy.
If there were any frustrations they were that I only had the weekend and all to soon had to face a man snapping on a pair of surgical gloves at JFK security. For a moment there... Thankfully, for it was still a longish flight on to Texas, he was just running a sample test on my bag.
When I look back on this trip I'll remember it for warmth and laughter, for all the reasons above and for many more that I care not to list here. And as long as no-one breaks the web there'll also be the pics I took over on Flickr
Next time: friendly Texans and the worst pants in the world.
Tunes: AC/DC: You Shook Me All Night Long
Click on the image for full size.
So here it is. My 2006 Christmas CD. The covers are finally done and slowly but slowly I'm getting them out. Unfortunately most of them are going to have to wait until I get back from my trip to New York / San Antonio.
One of my comments is not necessarily true.
100th post! Yay! for me...
Tunes: Death Cab For Cutie: Plans
So yesterday was one year on from my first post on this blog. I was listening to The Eighteenth Day Of May and had been watching Coots shag. 98 posts later and I've been at work writing new feature specifications and listening to a random selection of oddities otherwise known as my annual Christmas CD which is finally about to see the light of day. Just have to finish those damnable covers.
Tunes: My 2006 Christmas Compilation CD
I was reading the Guardian's review of the year on Saturday and other than being reminded that it's been a particularly depressing year in terms of world events, I was taken to wondering what my own review of the year would be.
And after some deliberation on the way to pick up a pizza this evening (sun dried tomato, goat's cheese and spinach fact hunters) it is thus:
The year has been 365 days long, some of which I've enjoyed and some of which I haven't. But at the end of each day, the sun has gone down and risen again the next. Which I for one think is a particularly good thing or we'd all be popsicles.
The New Year at least signals the end / beginning of another cycle which is important for us human beings in making sense of life, although it's probably no less arbitrary than celebrating the end of winter say instead. It reminds us at least that time is rolling on and life is out there to be enjoyed while it can.
Reading through the hideous chaos of the past 365 days showed that yet again 'while it can' wasn't very long for an untold number of people in a horribly terrible and wasteful way where in the land of a truly loving God of any description it would never have been. It's a little depressing to think that we can make something as cool as the X Box 360 and yet still feel the need to blow people into small pieces for reasons that just don't stand up in a sane and rational world. We really need to chill the fuck out for a while.
There was an incredible picture of the milky way taken from the Hubble Telescope which puts it all in perspective.
