This past weekend I made my first trip to NYC and it was an adventure. Those of you who know me know that I am a city person, so let me just say that it was everything I expected. We didn't really do a whole lot of touristy stuff, although we did go to (and get lost in) Central Park. We went to the New York Public Library which was fascinating, wandered around the city, met a friend at Columbia University and then had dinner with some people in her graduate program. After dinner we went to a music venue to check out a local jazz/experimental ensemble that I like. The concert was amazing Steven Bernstein and Friends brought the house down. Bernstein is the band leader and he plays the slide trumpet, along with the slide trumpet there was an amazing bassist, drums, saxophone, and electric guitar. There were two continous sets in which the rythm section laid down an incredible groove and the trumpet and sax soloed and improvised on everything from the Beatles to Prince. It was an incredibly good time. After the concert we headed over to Brooklyn to spend the night with a friend. This is when we ran into problems. The New York City subways are old and sometimes they need work, and obviously the best time to work on them is at night and on the weekends. We hadn't had the foresight to check the internet and see if anything was going on, so we didn't know that the whole lower east side metro system was shutting down for the weekend at midnight. We got to the station at 12:05 and what normally would have been a 20 minute trip ended up taking 2 hours, but we finally made it to our friends house, and spent the next morning with him before heading back to Jersey.
