My visit @ Google New York

Today was a freezing cold day in New York, our third day in New York.

Thanks to a kind invitation from Sean, a nice guy I met at the W3C meetings, Greta (my girlfriend) and I got to visit the Google offices.
The offices are not far from Times Square (may I write the address? Is everyone going to be there on the street asking for a free lunch?).
When we got out this morning we thought we would get the subway to Times Sq. and then walk slowly, visiting some shops and places while on our way to the Google offices, but it was SO DAMN cold that we basically moved from a shop to another trying to get some relief.

When we got to the offices we had to leave our photo-ID to get the passes to go up to the 21st floor where we had to meet Sean. Once there we got to give our name, city and country and electronically sign an NDA. This now makes me wonder if I’m allowed to write about this… Well, I might take it offline if I get a letter from any Google-lawyer.

Sean came to pick us up in a minute and invited us downstairs (20th floor) to have lunch, YES, we had free food!
Today was “Dominican Republic cuisine”, which we had never had before. It was really good, I had pork and Greta had chicken. I am sorry I didn’t write down the exact dish names, so I can’t write them here, but anyway they were really good.
I also had a really good ice green tea by Arizona with ginseng.
After lunch I could not resist from filling a dish with M&M’s and Skittles.
Sean took us for a quick walk around the office and I got to meet a couple of nice people.
The three of us had a nice chat sitting on comfortable couches in the “relax area”, next to a gorgeous massage chair! Only problem of the chair? It’s all in Chinese so basically people doesn’t know the programs they use! 😀
If *I* had that chair at work I’d probably fall asleep while having a massage.

The visit was great I got to see the Googlers at work and I have to say they all looked happy and satisfied which is nice to see at a workplace. From an visitor point of view I would say they looked relaxed and not feeling like doing the job just because they want to get the money to go somewhere better. They looked to be satisfied and gratified from what they do, which is GREAT!

So thank you Sean for the kind invitation at your office!

Greetings from