Thursday, October 25, 2007

New York - Day 4

Today the conference was in full swing - starting with a regional group breakfast at 7:30 a.m. (which is 6:30 a.m. back home), so I was at it bright and early. The news promised lessening rain, but as I set out on my trek to the conference hotel with a planned stop at the coffee supplier, it was raining harder than at any point since I'd been in the city.

My small umbrella was not doing the trick at all, so I took the route I could find with the most overhead scaffolding and managed to reach the conference only a bit damp and ahead of the chickens who took a cab.

The sessions I attended were good, but didn't really address needs I had. I tried to pick carefully, but found in many of these sessions, my organization is far ahead of these doing the presenting. I should be doing more than one presentation at this conference. Actually, so far, I could have presented the entire conference.

After the conference I went to meet up with Southern Boy, his bf, and a good friend of his for dinner at S'mac. He's written about going there several times and as much as I don't like mac and cheese, I just had to try a restaurant where that is the only thing served. I had the Brie with roasted figs and shitake mushrooms. It brought an entirely new horizon to my idea of mac and cheese and completely removed the image of the blue box from association forever. The friend and the bf were both generous and gave me bites of theirs to eat. Each was unique and good in its own way.

After the experience with the PB & J French Toast of a couple weeks ago, I'm definitely going to have to experiment with the mac and cheese theme next.

Grilled cheese wont' be far behind.

After dinner we wandered around East Village for a while and went to Porto Rico Importing Company and bought coffee in bulk - which means I'm going to have to leave something in New York since my suitcases were already over-stuffed coming here. I bought two half-pounds of beans. Can't wait to get home and pull out the grinder.

We then headed over to Veniero's Pastry Shop for coffee and dessert. The incredibly creamy cheesecake weighed down any chance of the coffee keeping me up tonight.

I would definitely go back to the East Village for food again. And now I'm back at the hotel at 10:00 to review the powerpoint for tomorrow.

1 comment:

Rebel Yankee said...

mm-hmm! That was a night of fooood!

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