Empire State of Mind: Day One

I arrived by bus at NYC from Washington, DC. The total trip was a little over four hours. I slept most of the way. I took the subway to get to my hotel at the Wall Street Inn. The rooms were nice, and most importantly it was close to the ferries where I’d be departing to Staten Island.

From there I went to the Expo. I brought the wrong documentation to pick up my packet. Apparently they didn’t want to know that I was accepted to run the NYC Marathon, they

wanted to know my race number. Well shoot. They should know better than to trust me with reading details. It wasn’t a problem, as I had to wait in another line. Issue Resolved.

The Expo was sufficient, but a little underwhelming. It wasn’t huge like DC, Boston, or even Philadelphia. I wanted something a little bit more like Boston (re: more booths), minus the horrible overcrowding. There were a lot of foreign people, which made it fun and international. I wanted to buy everything there, but I settled on an Asics NYC Marathon singlet and a Nike t-shirt.

Then I went over to my buddy’s apartment. Cody is in graduate studies at Columbia because he’s smart and wants to do something important with his life. We went to get dinner, and I started with the sweet potato soup because it’s a super food. He later showed me around the campus and didn’t know the significance of the majority of statues.

Later that night I saw “I Love New York” because “Paris, Je T’aime” was phenomenal. I was sorely disappointed. As one gentleman in the theaters declared, it was “rubbish.”