Marc's Public Blog

Quick report on the office: it is nicely located in Manhattan's Chelsea district. Google bought an entire city block, which still has existing tenants. The decors and work put into those buildings are quite nice, they beat MTV in some ways.

Here are a few chosen pictures:

They definitely won on the meeting room front. I love the Harry Potter rooms:

They also have really cool legos:

One of the cafes had an ice cream truck that had been lifted up there:

SREs have a tough job, and it leads to drinking :)

and I'll finish with their nice local computer history museum:

All in all, it was quite nice, I wouldn't mind working there.

Daniel and I went to visit the local Brooklyn Transit Museum, History Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The transit museum had the history of subways in Manhattan, and that was pretty cool.

the old ads were fun to see

We went to see the Brooklyn Bridge at night

I then worked at the Google office for the beginning of the week while Jennifer was in DC and we met up and used the rest of the week to visit Manhattan after she was done working. One evening before she got there, I went to see the new show from Blue Man Group: the new show was a nice refresh although it was significantly shorter than the old one I saw in 2004...

On thursday, Jennifer and I went for our touring. We did midtown first

Grand Central Terminal

Radio City Music Hall

St Patrick's Cathedral nearby

Steve Jobs had just died

We had a nice dinner at Buddakan that evening and went to see Spiderman which was entertaining.

The next day, with clear forecasts of rain, we went to visit the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Museum (each of which take more than a full day to see entirely).
The Natural History Museum has an insane amount of things to see. Along with the special expositions, it's tough to do it in one day, never mind half a day, but we got the highlights:

who knew that birds come from dinosaures?

We then crossed Central Park to get to the MET. The MET is another insane place that is impossible to see well enough in one day, never mind half a day, but we did the best we could and at least saw their impressive Greek and Egyptian collections:

They had plenty of other things though:

That evening, we had a really good tasting menu at Boulet:

The next morning, we went to the Southern Tip (Battery Garden, Wall Street, and World Trade Center) but we started with Union Square Market:

and then went down to Battery Park:

line of people going to the statue of liberty

We are the 99% were still demonstrating at Zuccotti Park

And we went to see the new WTC being built

After that, we moved on to Central Park where we rented bikes and went around:

Cathedral of St John the Devine

It's huge inside

Columbia University

That evening we had dinner at Asiate Restaurant, which was supposed to have a great view of Central Park, but due to a strict dress code that wasn't clear to us, they "nicely" seated us far away from where we could see anything and the food on its own was between average to disappointing depending on the dishes and considering the view-less price.

That evening, we went to see Addams Family at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. It was entertaining, and we walked around Broadway after that:

The next morning, we went to walk on the new High Line park. It's a nice elevated walk between buildings.

After that, we went to the Rock to enjoy a nice panoramic view since the weather had finally lifted and cleared up for nice views:

I tried a couple of panoramas with my ICS phone

While I'm at it, a couple of other pictures I took from the google buildings:

After the Rock, we went to Greenwich, Little Italy, and Chinatown

This looks like a practical car for NYC

So is this one

the old St Patrick's

Little Italy is still there next to Chinatown

... and it was time to go back to the airport and go home. Despite the so so weather, we had a good visit.