On Wednesday I had another conference to attend, this time at the IBM building. The event started off okay, with a presentation on content marketing – but quickly devolved from there with panel after panel of uninteresting marketing discussion. The irony is that a week before the event they’d asked me to be on one of those panels.

In the early afternoon Sam and I took the 2 up to Harlem and checked into our next AirBnB, which turned out to be very nice.

We dropped our bags and took the subway back down to midtown to visit times square and Macy’s.

I’d walked by the new flagship Citizen store in Times Square the last two days and finally now had a chance to go in. To my surprise, a new watch model had come out that was nearly the exact thing I’d been looking for a year and a half ago when I lost my old Citizen – but NOBODY sold anything like it at the time. Apparently my taste is ahead of the market and it’s now catching up. When we went to Macy’s they had the same watch on a deep discount because of holiday sales, but we didn’t buy it as the only one left was the floor model.

UPDATE: Sam has since ordered the watch for me online as an early birthday present!

We walked around times square and then headed to Rockefeller Center for the tree lighting ceremony. We arrived about two hours early, but the crowds were already so packed that there was no way we’d get to see anything. Remember, New York is a city of very narrow streets, so a free concert can only really fit a few thousand people in front of the stage, otherwise you’re just listening to echoes bouncing off the buildings and carried by the cold wind.

We headed back up to Harlem a little early to do some grocery shopping and plan our next day.  I also had quite a lot of work email to catch up on since the conference wifi had been unsecured – KP laptops refuse to connect to unsecured wifi networks.