Welcome Spring Time!

What a new experience for me - Daylight Savings Time. I must admit, at first, not fun. Waking up and seeing the sunrise?! Eww. But leaving the office and there's still some sunshine left? Fantastic!!

I was able to catch a beautiful New York City sunset!
Unfortunately when you don't blog often, you forget the reasons you took pictures and what you may have wanted to write about at that moment. So below, a random picture of Brooklyn from the financial district in Manhattan. I walked around aimlessly that day looking for a place to deposit my checks. Eventually I just had to bring them to Dan in Vegas. Ahh, when will my direct deposit kick in? And why are there no Wells Fargos in Manhattan?!

And on my way home from wondering around aimlessly I just happened to run into 1 New York Plaza. Hmm, how about that? Goldman has a couple floors in this building - good to know.

Rain, rain go away. You're ruining my weekends...and my hair. This is Marie and I exploring the M&M store in Times Square. We tried our luck twice at getting Wicked tickets - but no cigar. Determined to win that lottery eventually. If you do get picked you get two tickets for $26 a piece...FRONT ROW!! No wonder it attracts a crowd!! We figured our chances would be better on a disgusting rainy day, but it just wasn't our day. Still made the best of it!

Cassie in Times Square!

So no Wicked tickets - what should we do? Marie and I still made it an awesome afternoon. We found this incredible Cuban restaurant and had the most delicious lunch. Umm...pork shank that falls off the bone with a fork - does it get any better? The waiter was quite impressed that I was able to kill that plate of food, but I was not about to let it go to waste. Later that afternoon we divulged our sweet tooth and found a bakery to enjoy some classic strawberry New York Cheesecake. Be jealous - so good. P.S. I definitely did an extra long run the next day because this was not the healthiest of eating, obviously. Thank goodness New York is temporary because I do not wish to see what I might look like as a plump Cassie.

We definitely made the most of this day and was not about to let the rain or lost Wicked tickets get us down, so we saw Mary Poppins instead!! My first Broadway!! And it was incredible!

I went with these lovely ladies below, Marie and April, and our friend Neil met up with us soon after this picture to catch the show as well. I must embarrassingly admit that I've never actually seen the movie, but I can't imagine it could be as good as the real thing. To any SYTYCD fans out there - you would have been uber-impressed by the dancing in this show. I even saw a guy dance upside-down on the ceiling, it was so good!!

My first Broadway (of many to come) - one of the highlights of my time here in New York so far.

Alrighty - so back to random. I just thought this was pretty - the sunset reflecting on the Manhattan skyline.

Ok, good story about the picture below. I know it does not look like anything in this picture, but be ready to be amazed. This past week has been Operations orientation, and new hire analysts were here from offices all over the world. There was a huge representation from the Salt Lake City and London offices, New York and Jersey City had several analysts, and we even had employees from Singapore, Sao Paulo and Tokyo. About 80 new hires with accents from all over the world in one of the most incredible cities in the world - needless to say we had an incredible time.

The picture below is from the first night of orientation. Literally almost all 80 of us took over the entire bar. Within seconds the place went from 5 diners to 85, it was amazing! And it just so happens, completely random, that elephants would be walking through the streets on this night right outside this bar. I'm completely serious...elephants! Turns out that the circus is in town, and they walk the elephants through the Holland tunnel from New Jersey to get the big guys in the city. Insane right? So everyone lines the streets, apparently at 1am in the morning on a Monday night, to watch the elephants, clowns, and the rest of the circus parade enter the city.

Now who else gets to say they've seen elephants walk down the streets of Manhattan?! Wish I could prove it with a better picture, but I swear this is no lie.

And this last and final random picture of this completely disorganized blog post is a picture of my team from orientation. Not to brag, but we're fantastic. Unfortunately, it may be a while until I see some of them (the Londoners), but I am extremely excited to join two of the others in Salt Lake City eventually. One of the most incredible weeks - between the fun we had going out, the amazing people we met from the company and the enormous amount of information we were taught - this training program is unbelievable.

AND, super exciting one final note, I found out that our analyst class will eventually merge with the summer analysts that will join in July, i.e. my husband and some of our closest friends. WHICH MEANS that next November we will ALL be traveling together back to New York City for Analyst 1 training. Ahhh...hooray!! How fun will that be?!