From busy New York to D.C., the ghost town

We visit the Apollo Theater in Harlem after dinner.

The excitement that generated in the newsroom when our boss gave us our tickets for our trip to New York was one that cannot be explained. For some of my colleagues, it was a homecoming and for others, a dream trip come true.
It was the College Media Association Spring National Convention. Our boss had sorted our everything from transport, hotel accommodation, conference registration and, of course, per diem.

It was one of the coolest train rides for me that Saturday as I Facebooked, Tweeted and listened to some very good highlife music from Kojo Antwi, Kwabena Kwabena and Youssour N’dour on my laptop. There was wifi access for the three-hour trip, thanks to Amtrak. We arrived in the afternoon, and after checking in our hotel room, we toured the city.
My colleague, Matt Nelson, and I ended up at the 9/11 Memorial site. For me, it was a humbling experience to see this, and I shed tears. I watched the 9/11 attacks almost 12 years ago on CNN in a friend’s house, and my visit to the site coincided with his birthday. I will never forget the experience.

At Times Square

Then my friend and colleague Selase Kove gave me a tour of his school, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, after which we went to a Ghanaian restaurant. There, I enjoyed some Ghanaian wakye and took some banku and tilapia to enjoy in my hotel room.
The conference started on Sunday, and I enjoyed some sessions. The showcase on Design: From Page 1 to the Digital Space with CNN’s Kyle Ellis was a masterpiece. Sunday’s keynote session with NBC’s Willie Geist was very instructive and interesting. I really learned a lot and will carry most of the things I learned into my career. I made a few friends as well.
My colleagues and I also had a nice evening in Times Square. Another interesting moment was our dinner at Sylvia’s Queen of Soul Food Restaurant in Harlem where fried chicken and shrimp and grits were popular orders.

The trip to Columbia to meet the dean of student affairs with my colleagues, Amer Taleb, Ian Kullgren and Jasmine Aguilera also made me hungrier to go to Columbia to do graduate studies in journalism.

Inside the World Room @ Columbia Journalism School

The pizza Matt introduced me to and the walk past the New York Times building at night summed up one of the nicest experiences.
Alas, our days at New York were over, and we had to head back to D.C. Kojo Antwi, as usual, kept me company until the end of the trip.
One thing I was told when I was coming to D.C. was that it was a very busy place with a lot of people who go about their duties mostly in suits. From our first day until we boarded the train back to D.C., New York looked choked, congested and busy.

When we waited in the Metro tunnel at Union Station after getting off the train, I felt a vast different between the two cities, and then I concluded:  D.C. is a ghost town compared to New York.



http://shfwire.com/busy-new-york-dc-ghost-town