when i return to my hotel room it’s quite a bit chilly, mucking around with the controls of the air conditioning system does raise change the target temperature — but leaves the AC system impressively unimpressed. the reception promises to send an engineer to check on the AC system. so, i decide to go for a stroll and visit neighboring the westchester, which is, in the words of my last taxi driver, “very upmarket”…

…and it is. it’s an assortment of clothes stores, jewelery stores, clothes stores, shoe stores, and a “food court” — which is a bit of a mismatch: the food quality is not too exciting, nothing really healthy on offer, just the usual junk-food-level, it seems. at one point in time i find a directory of all the shops sorted by category. the only one that i’m interested in is bookshops. there are a couple listed — unfortunately, the ones listed are greeting card shops like hallmark…

seems like rich people don’t read — or, if they do, just greeting cards.

p.s. i finally found a borders bookshop across the street from the entrance to the crowne plaza hotel.

it’s 17:50, it’s quite cold, i’m outside the IBM hawthorne lab, waiting for the taxi that i called 20min ago to arrive — “give me 5min and he’ll be there” was the taxi dispatcher line…hmm…the taxi finally arrives, i get in, tell the taxi driver that i need to get to the crowne plaza in white plains, which he acknowledges. he’s a bit on the impatient side it seems, we speed along, or, rather, we swim along: it’s an american car…think: pudding on wheels, well, think: speeding pudding on wheels. traction is not a word that you could accuse this car of…after about 15min we get into downtown white plains and he starts asking me whether it’s trump plaza here or at city center.

huh? something is wrong.

me: ahm, no, not the trump plaza, the crowne plaza taxi driver: yeah, yeah, right, the trump plaza. me: no, the crowne plaza hotel! C-R-O-W-N-E plaza! taxi driver: yeah! trump plaza! this one or the one at city center? me (getting desperate): no, not trump plaza — crowne plaza hotel, C-R-O-W-N-E! taxi driver (getting it slowly): crowne plaza???

he mutters something and then, we are finally in agreement about where i want to go. phew.

the coup de grâce: of course, he doesn’t have any receipt forms left (”forgot to stock up in the morning”), so i get a hand-written receipt on a piece of paper torn from an old envelope…wonder what the accounting department is going to make of that.

it’s 2:00 in the morning, i’m waking up. my body is still thousands of kilometres away and thinks that now is a really good time to get up and go to work — sigh, my problem is that in contrast to my body i know that it’s not 8:00 but 2:00, and that it won’t do me any good to get up this early. so, i turn around and try to convince my body that, really, we don’t have to get up for a loooong time…

…it seems that my body does not quite belief the story, we repeat this dialog a couple of times until, at 5:00, i give and get up. we spent the next hour reading the USA Today courtesy copy, then kill some time in the bath, and finally dig out the laptop and do some surfing, fixing the blog (somehow the “made it to the eurostar” blog entry got filed under 23 october instead of 23 september).

finally, at about 7:30 i’m on my way to hawthorne again (taxi ride is US$ 15.00).