Three trips to New York City in a year are at least two too many. I especially feel that way when all three were for work. This one was the hardest of the three, not least because I slept the worst this time. The buildings seemed to press down on me even more too. I also don’t really have the disposition to be successful over long stretches of a conference with lots of ambient noise and background conversations. It isn’t playing to my strengths. Even though I push through when called upon for conferences like this, it is draining to do so. This conference was at least more like two meeting sprints each day rather than two marathons. We almost never attend content sessions at conferences; that’s not the reason we’re here. Conferences like this one are all about 1:1 (or 1:2 as the case may be) meetings making and deepening connections with potential clients and partners. And we won’t really know if it was a success for at least a few months.

I tried to keep things positive. I continued my practice of exploring the New York food scene on this visit. We had two dinners, so I chose one exotic place and one more traditional. Last night’s Bolognese was very good at the Midtown Italian restaurant that was our more traditional NYC dinner. It was also a shorter walk from our hotel, but I preferred the Cambodian restaurant on the Upper East Side where we had dinner on Monday as it offered something I cannot quite get at home. While it was a far cry from sitting on a brightly colored little plastic stool on the street eating frog legs in Siem Reap, not least because it was air conditioned, the food was all very good. We had beef skewers with a peanut sauce for an appetizer and I ordered duck breast in a tamarind sauce, a tangy sauce that paired well with the duck fat and didn’t overpower the rice. The Angkor artwork adorning the walls was also a nice touch. Then I had passionfruit gelato on the walk back to add some Latin sour into the culinary mix for the evening.