Trip to Manhattan - Introduction
Note: Images were lost in a previous blog transfer.
I spent the week in Manhattan last week teaching .NET 2.0, C#, and Visual Studio .NET 2005 to some brilliant Java developers. It was an awesome week, and they were a great team. While I was there, circumstances actually required that I spend a significant amount of time customizing the experience for the client, but it was well worth it. In the end, they were happy with the course and I went home knowing that I transferred knowledge that they could use to succeed with their first .NET project. However, that meant that I didn’t have nearly as much time to explore the city as I had originally planned.
I did manage to take a few pictures, and I’ll post them up a few at a time.
The first image is a picture of the small room that we used all week. We actually had five people crammed into this room and five laptop computers on the table. I ended up turning the projector to the right of where it is in the picture so that it projected on the wall behind me to avoid the glare.
The second picture is of the street behind the hotel at the Southeastern tip of the SOHO neighborhood (between SOHO, Little Italy, and Chinatown).
The third picture is of the tip of a fire hydrant. Not really sure why I took it, but it seemed the right thing to do at the moment.
In general, I really enjoyed the trip. Everything that I knew about New York I learned from the movies and TV, which I knew was silliness. The town was great and the people were really friendly. Sure, they mostly kept to themselves, but no one ever bumped into anyone else, everyone was able to walk along the crowded sidewalk and avoid negative interaction. When a person did pass too close, I always heard a muffled apology or a quick “excuse me”. They seemed to be “awake”. There were conversations within conversations and their speech was quick and to the point.
In New York, garlic bread has garlic on it and the worst bagel you can buy is superior to the best bagel I’ve had in Atlanta.
What scares me is that everyone I met had the same source of information about what the Southern United States is like…everything they know about the South comes from TV and the movies. They asked me if I ate fried chicken and grits every day.
I hope that I helped them understand that real Atlanta is like TV Atlanta in the same way that real Manhattan is like TV Manhattan. It really isn’t the “dirty South” that some have made it out to be. Nor is it the “land of Dixie” (you have to drive a few minutes outside of the city to see that). It’s an international city full of every kind of person you can think of. I will admit that our rats are smaller, but I’m sure we win the mosquito contest.