The day finally arrived. I woke at 2.30am local time and worked another couple of hours on the presentation. I was nervous until I sat in the session before ours. The presenters were quite interesting and distracted me from what was coming up. In the end, we were both cool, calm and collected, even with our Principal in the audience. Apparently he took photos. I haven’t seen them yet. There were four presentations in our session and after we had all spoken there was a Q&A time which we dominated because people were really interested in what we were doing. I was approached at the end by someone for James Cook University who would be happy to act as a guide for our future research.
Our Principal had told us we should visit St Patrick’s Cathedral and see St John Baptist De La Salle. So when we finished at the conference of the day, we did. And we lit a couple of candles for him.
Thanks to Yelp, we located a Japanese Restaurant for our celebrations. We were on 43rd Street, looking across the road to where the restaurant should be but could only see a Japanese restaurant with a different name. We crossed the road and at the front of a stark white corporate foyer there was a small sign with Sakagura written on it but the decor and the sign didn’t seem to match-up. There was a man at a concierge desk in the foyer so we entered, surprised the doors were unlocked, and asked the concierge. Oh yes, he said, just go in further, turn left and take the stairs to the basement. I asked him if he would recommend the restaurant. You’ll love it, he replied. As we descended the stairs and passed piles of rubbish, like descending to some drama out of Law & Order, we came upon the restaurant. We had to wait 20 minutes for a table but it was worth it. Wonderful food, plum flavoured sake and great service. For the first time, on the last of eight nights in New York, I slept through the night.
