Saturday, October 8, 2011 New York

8:00 am

The temperature is +12 C, with a high predicted of +21 C. Sunny for the next 5 days. Much above normal. Wonderful.

8:00 PM Life

After breakfast at a deli, we took the subway downtown. We were soon near the 9/11 memorial area but decided to restrict our viewing to watching the two new skyscrapers taking shape.

I ended up at the Barnes & Noble bookstore where I bought 11 books (3 fiction, 8 non-fiction). I spent some time with one of the clerks trying to determine why I was not able to download a nook reader app onto my iPad2. The woman took a genuine interest in the problem and made a number of phone calls to tech support and was finally able to determine that it was a problem with the iPad2 - B&N had not yet modified their website to suit that particular device. Since 11 books are too heavy to carry around we returned to the hotel and dropped them off.

We then walked back to Times Square to see about tickets for some plays but were surprised to find that there none available for 'wicked" until Tuesday when we would be leaving for Calgary.

I then spent some time in a small tourist trap shop looking at camera lens. The salesman tried to sell me a Bower 2x extender for my Canon Rebel 2Ti. This would double the focal length of my telephoto lens from 300mm to 600mm. He said it was worth about $700. I indicated that I was not aware of the device and wanted to check it out on the internet before buying it. He tried to make a quick sale by immediately dropping the price to $400. Hmm. I left. (Later that evening when I was back in the hotel I looked it up on the Web. It seems to be a fairly good product but the suggested price was only $100. Hmmm. I spent nothing and learned something. Not a bad deal.

Over hearing some comments and then checking "Columbus Day 2011" on Google when we returned to the hotel confirmed that we are in New York during an American long weekend. That explained the heavy crowds, the lack of broadway play tickets, and the parade. And some stores were closed for Yom Kippur.

I had my Panasonic DMC-ZS3 camera with me today.