Let's hear it for New York

So where do you begin blogging about a trip that was in a word 'incredible'? In New York of course.

I'll upload pictures of my whole trip as I go, but I'll start with a day where I had a 60 minute Park Avenue discussion with a Private Equity fund's president and owner. So here is this Zimbabwean born, South African kid pitching an African business idea to an A-list, hardnosed, Jewish, New Yorker, and he actually liked it. We spent the next hour talking about his investment philosphy, Africa, and the general US economy. The investment wasn't for him, but we exchanged cards and I fairly bounded out of his office, having held my own with one of New York's big wigs for a whole hour.

My enthusiasm was of course tempered by the two hour car parking charge of $42. I will never again complain about a R10 or R20 parking charge in Durban. (By the way I paid $69 on another occasion).

I exited the offending parking garage, turned the navigator on and started following the directions. "Turn left", "turn right", oops too late "recalculating". Happens very often in New York because of signal issues with the sky scrapers, one way streets and less than gracious, yellow taxi cabs everywhere. Finally I started making headway, I turned into a street and there as one might expect...in the Middle of Manhattan, a US Navy aircraft carrier directly in front of me. I looked up onto the deck and saw the very familiar twin tailfins of.....could it be.... THE SR 71 Blackbird. They were built during the cold war, and are the fastest aircraft on the planet, though they have been retired from active service (3200km/hour, Approx 3x the speed of sound) powered by Two Pratt and Whitney J-58 axial-flow turbojets with afterburners, each producing 32,500 pounds of thrust. I never thought I would ever see one, but here are the pics to remember.

So, to a mechanical engineer who likes business, this was a pretty good day, perhaps in my top 200.