Today I officially finished my first week as an employee at American Express. It has been a great and exhausting experience. I think I've figured out the subway; with a transfer to the express line at time square the commute isn't bad. It takes about 40 minutes from door step to door step, but that includes a lot of walking. The business leader I will be working with on the Healthy Living project is very organized and very supportive and nice. There are four BYU alumni in HR; one is in our ward. The other day he gave me the low down on two of the neighborhoods not to visit...DJ and I had already managed to walk right through the middle of both of them. Luckily it was broad daylight, and equally lucky, DJ looks pretty tough.

Today I had lunch with the other HR interns and a couple of the HR employees. Once it was established that I am from BYU: "didn't they have a scandal around the basketball team?"...yes, one of the stars violated the honor code and was kicked off the team..."what exactly is the honor code?"...I explain to them..."wow, that's way different than at my school!" Yes, very different! So far it has been four days and I have been invited to four happy hours. My happy hours are at home :)

We got a subway sandwich Thursday night and went for a walk. For the first time the weather was dry and cool, a nice break from the humid heat! We went for a walk in the park along the Hudson and found these cool tables to watch the sunset on as we ate our dinner.

Friday after work I went to Chelsea Market, a cool collection of shops and food markets around 9th ave and 15th street. Above the market they film many of the food network shows. I bought this artisan bread, gouda cheese, and triple berry chutney for our dinner Friday, the day of our one month anniversary. It was a delicious dinner!

Delicious Chelsea sandwich

These pictures show the view from the windows on my floor at work. On the left is a zoomed in picture showing the Statue of Liberty. That is what I get to look at every day. Above to the right is a zoomed out view, you can still kind of see the statue on the island in the far left. It doesn't look so small from our window. Below is our view of ground zero. You can see they are making significant progress on the north side of the plaza. New sky scrapers are beginning to rise (not shown in the picture) and trees are growing around cement walk ways. Apparently 11 AmEx employees died in 9/11. The AmEx tower had front row seats to watch that tragety
















On Wednesday the comp and benefits team (my team) had a service day at the New Jersey food bank. The picture on the right shows some of my new co-workers hard at work sorting food into the correct boxes. The picture on the left shows my intern group, Julia, Kate, Maria, and me. After the food bank we went to a ritzy restaurant near the Jersey shore in Jersey city. We played games, ate a lot of food, and, of course, had cocktails. After it was all said and done we took the ferry back to Manhattan.

This week DJ has been busy working on the finishing work of the website, working out the remaining bugs, and getting it to launch. He is making good progress and looking forward to when this is finally done. Oh so close!