Back From New York
Pearlin and I are now home from our trip at the New York Charter Schools Conference.
We arrived on Thursday morning on a red eye Jet Blue flight. When we finally arrived at our host's home, we quickly collapsed for a few hours of quality sleeping. Pearlin's good friend Ellie has a place in Brooklyn Heights, so we very conveniently were staying only about half a mile away from the Marriott, where the conference was being held. For lunch, we went to Katz's deli and ate quite possibly the best pastrami sandwiches in the world! We went there on the recommendation of somebody who grew up in New York, and Katz's clearly did not disappoint. For fun, I made my wife and I sit at the exact spot where the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally was filmed. Pearlin looked at me funny when I chose to sit there, but that is where we ate :-) Oh, and their matzo ball soup was delicious! In the evening, we attended the welcome reception, and Mayor Bloomberg was there. It turns out that he is a major proponent of charter schools in New York State. One of his pledges to the charter school community is to raise the cap on the number of allowable charter schools. At any rate, he gave a good speech, so I got a positive impression of him. The welcome reception was pretty fancy, featuring an open bar and hor douvres (chicken satay was yummy!).
Friday was the first of two days of exhibiting. The Chief Program Officer of the New York Charter Schools Association dropped by. Her name is Susie Barker and she is the reason why I came out to the conference in the first place. Caleb Offley, part of the Hoover Institution (affiliated with Stanford), had introduced me to Susie in the first place, and he also dropped by our booth. The exciting thing is that both Caleb and Susie brought some prospects to our booth and they got interested :-)
On Friday evening, we had dinner with my long lost friend James Destro. We hadn't seen each other in about 8 years, and the only way I got a hold of him was through an Internet white pages search and a hopeful phone call. We ate at Metro Cafe, which was pretty decent. Afterward, we got an overdose of chocolate at Chocolate Bar, and Pearlin and I also visited Magnolia Bakery to buy cupcakes. Apparently, Magnolia Bakery was featured in Sex and the City.
On Saturday, traffic at our booth was better than on Friday, but a lot of the traffic was from parents rather than teachers. We kept our booth up until the bitter end. A lot of exhibitors were breaking down their booths well before they should have, which really looks unprofessional and hurts everybody else. The good news is that we were rewarded for staying. We got two qualified leads after every other booth in the whole exhibit hall had closed down. When I was doing a demo for somebody, the company in charge of the furniture literally asked me to swap our rented chairs with some generic hotel chairs. In addition to that, the barriers that divide booths were being removed from my booth during my demo! It was kind of funny, but at least the teacher was interested in my product!
Afteward, we ate dessert at Chikalicious, which is famous despite being only a few years old. They only have seating for about 16 people and parties of only 4 or less. Apparently, Chika (pronounced "Cheeka") changes some of the items on her menu 2 or 3 times per week. The desserts are very small, but they taste good and won't interfere with your dinner appetitie. We showed up at about 4pm, and had to wait 15 minutes to get seated. We ate with Sharon and Ishi, friends from California who happened to be in New York at the same time. By complete coincidence, Ishi sat next to us on our flight to New York!
For dinner, we ate with Ellie and Adrien (our hosts) at Patsy's, a very famous Italian restaurant in New York. This is one of those restaurants that every famous person seems to visit, as evidenced by the huge array of photos on the walls (Katz's is no different in that respect). The food was good and worth returning for another meal, although I'm not able to give it huge accolades.
Unfortunately, Pearlin caught a cold so we took it easy for the rest of the trip. I was worn out anyway, so I ended up sleeping a ton. On Sunday afternoon, I ate pizza with Gary Culliss, a good friend of mine and also the founder of Direct Hit. I joined Gary's team for the MIT $50K Competition in 1998, and that company really put me on the right foot. Monty's is a very tasty, clean pizza joint on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Gary's comment was that Monty's was "California clean". Apparently, Montague Street is cleaner than most streets in Manhattan, and Monty's was unusually clean. Gary also said that Montague Street reminds him of Boston, and I certainly agree.
Finally, on Monday, we slept in, had a small lunch, took a cab to JFK airport, and made the journey home.
We arrived on Thursday morning on a red eye Jet Blue flight. When we finally arrived at our host's home, we quickly collapsed for a few hours of quality sleeping. Pearlin's good friend Ellie has a place in Brooklyn Heights, so we very conveniently were staying only about half a mile away from the Marriott, where the conference was being held. For lunch, we went to Katz's deli and ate quite possibly the best pastrami sandwiches in the world! We went there on the recommendation of somebody who grew up in New York, and Katz's clearly did not disappoint. For fun, I made my wife and I sit at the exact spot where the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally was filmed. Pearlin looked at me funny when I chose to sit there, but that is where we ate :-) Oh, and their matzo ball soup was delicious! In the evening, we attended the welcome reception, and Mayor Bloomberg was there. It turns out that he is a major proponent of charter schools in New York State. One of his pledges to the charter school community is to raise the cap on the number of allowable charter schools. At any rate, he gave a good speech, so I got a positive impression of him. The welcome reception was pretty fancy, featuring an open bar and hor douvres (chicken satay was yummy!).
Friday was the first of two days of exhibiting. The Chief Program Officer of the New York Charter Schools Association dropped by. Her name is Susie Barker and she is the reason why I came out to the conference in the first place. Caleb Offley, part of the Hoover Institution (affiliated with Stanford), had introduced me to Susie in the first place, and he also dropped by our booth. The exciting thing is that both Caleb and Susie brought some prospects to our booth and they got interested :-)
On Friday evening, we had dinner with my long lost friend James Destro. We hadn't seen each other in about 8 years, and the only way I got a hold of him was through an Internet white pages search and a hopeful phone call. We ate at Metro Cafe, which was pretty decent. Afterward, we got an overdose of chocolate at Chocolate Bar, and Pearlin and I also visited Magnolia Bakery to buy cupcakes. Apparently, Magnolia Bakery was featured in Sex and the City.
On Saturday, traffic at our booth was better than on Friday, but a lot of the traffic was from parents rather than teachers. We kept our booth up until the bitter end. A lot of exhibitors were breaking down their booths well before they should have, which really looks unprofessional and hurts everybody else. The good news is that we were rewarded for staying. We got two qualified leads after every other booth in the whole exhibit hall had closed down. When I was doing a demo for somebody, the company in charge of the furniture literally asked me to swap our rented chairs with some generic hotel chairs. In addition to that, the barriers that divide booths were being removed from my booth during my demo! It was kind of funny, but at least the teacher was interested in my product!
Afteward, we ate dessert at Chikalicious, which is famous despite being only a few years old. They only have seating for about 16 people and parties of only 4 or less. Apparently, Chika (pronounced "Cheeka") changes some of the items on her menu 2 or 3 times per week. The desserts are very small, but they taste good and won't interfere with your dinner appetitie. We showed up at about 4pm, and had to wait 15 minutes to get seated. We ate with Sharon and Ishi, friends from California who happened to be in New York at the same time. By complete coincidence, Ishi sat next to us on our flight to New York!
For dinner, we ate with Ellie and Adrien (our hosts) at Patsy's, a very famous Italian restaurant in New York. This is one of those restaurants that every famous person seems to visit, as evidenced by the huge array of photos on the walls (Katz's is no different in that respect). The food was good and worth returning for another meal, although I'm not able to give it huge accolades.
Unfortunately, Pearlin caught a cold so we took it easy for the rest of the trip. I was worn out anyway, so I ended up sleeping a ton. On Sunday afternoon, I ate pizza with Gary Culliss, a good friend of mine and also the founder of Direct Hit. I joined Gary's team for the MIT $50K Competition in 1998, and that company really put me on the right foot. Monty's is a very tasty, clean pizza joint on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Gary's comment was that Monty's was "California clean". Apparently, Montague Street is cleaner than most streets in Manhattan, and Monty's was unusually clean. Gary also said that Montague Street reminds him of Boston, and I certainly agree.
Finally, on Monday, we slept in, had a small lunch, took a cab to JFK airport, and made the journey home.
posted by Steven | 10:42 AM
1 Comments:
The "bitter end" really wasn't that bitter...more bitterSWEET!
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