Chinatown Bus to Boston

Coastal cities around New York are accessable with "Chinatown Busses" which are run by Chinese operators and leave from Manhattan's Chinatown. They're cheap, fast, comfortable and reliable.

Our first of several 36-hours-in-a-city trips was with LuckyStar up north to Boston, which had the extra benefit of an eat-as-much-as-you-like Chinese buffet for US$5 en route. We stayed with Carola and Dirk, friends from Berlin.


Boston is a pleasant mix of a European and North American cities, sprinkled with top notch universities. This is the Frank Gerry Strata building at MIT; we also toured Harvard. Boston was a good five degrees colder than New York; it felt like winter there for the first time.

The Brooklyn Saladbowl

On Boxing Day we got to see more of the Brooklyn Saladbowl ... beginning with one of the three Chinatowns in New York on 8th Avenue/Brooklyn (8 is a lucky number) where we had authentic-tasting jaozi in an authentic-looking noodle shop and were called authentically lao-wai (foreigners).



From there we moved through an orthodox Jewish enclave and caught the subway to the desolate-but-famous Coney Island .






A little bit futher along to the east is the Russian Enclave of Brighton Beach where the shops are fulled with caviar and sausages.





And back to the north through Prospect Park is the Yuppy enclave of Williamsburg were we blended in and shopped.

Christmas: Fairytale of New York

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
- The Pogues, Fairytale of New York


Finals ended on Dec 21st, grading on Dec 23rd and on the same day Susanne arrived from Cleveland where she's in the middle of doing a medical internship, and we spent Christmas here together.

After a period of intense work and without family, neither of us felt like it was really Christmas. The weather didn't help either: the temperature was hovering at around 8 degrees at midday, so it felt more like spring than winter. At Susanne's suggestion we used Dec 24th (heilger Abend in Germany), into a day of last-minute express christmisification. And it worked.

Starting from Morningside Heights, we walked right across Central Park, through huge flocks of black birds (starlings?), around the reservoir and into the southern part of the park (new territory for me which is a sad-but-true indication of how little time I've had to explore the city). Like children in a fairytale lost in the forest, we followed our noses to the boat house's hot spicy apple cider; it was a beautiful day and it was flooded with late afternoon light the same colour as the cider in our cups.

Further down, Central Park ends (my perspective) at 59th street where huge banners advertise luxury renovated apartments going for a festive two and a half million greenbacks. This is a corner of New York along 5th Avenue where the filthy rich stroll in self-parody and the window shopping torpedoed my last cynical anti-Christmasness. They must have teams of artists and a budget I'd rather not know (its art, right?)

Further down 5th Avenue is the bombastic Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Centre, decked out in rasta-coloured lights, dazzling with millions more watts of camera flashes from the surrounding throngs. Giant glittering snowflakes on the sides of buildings chime kitch ... kitch ... kitch. It was interesting to note that, apart from this, the lights in public spaces in New York were modest (and that word is almost an insult here).




Further down we deliberately gave ourselves some last-minute Christmas shopping stress just before the doors closed (its the season for it), had some hot chocolate in front of the open-air ice skating rink in Bryant Park and a glass of expensive wine in a design bar just off Times Square before heading back to a laid-back meal with Abel, a friend at IHouse from Germany.

Not a conventional Christmas, but a day which truly left us feeling like it was Christmas.

Back (on the Other Side of the Exams)

I've emerged! The semester lies behind me! I finally have time to blog again, even if its as a batch.

By the time my finals came around, I was already coming out of the most stressful part of the studies. At a certain point, it was difficult for me to give exams any kind of serious attention, because I was mentally already in a post-exam state: enjoying myself.

The finals were mixed: where I thought I did well i did okay, and where I thought I'd skidded and burned I got a good grade.

After two weeks of time mostly off line, I can face a laptop again. Here goes with the makeup blogs.

City of Extremes

The tourist board calls New York the city of superlatives: the biggest this and the most that. Well, its true. Here are some of my own.

New York is the most expensive place I have ever lived. Not only living costs (I pay as much for rent of a tiny dorm room here as an entire house boat in Amsterdam) but also in everyday costs. A beer in a bar costs $5, and unless you add a dollar tip you'll be ignored for the rest of the evening. A sandwich will set you back $5. And the most expensive jar of Marmite ever now has a place of honour in my fridge.

New York has the most rats. Its full of them. At night, Columbia swarms with leathery tails and gry bodies, they jump into the trash cans and rustle around; they scamper in front of you from hedge to hedge.

New York has the fattest people I've ever seen. The cliche about America is true - obesity here is normal.

Music music music

Been to a couple of good music concerts here in New York, and about three weeks ago there was a huge number of bands playing here as part of the College Music Journal Marathon. This is the Rosewood Thieves - I went to an in-studio performance hosted by a Seattle radio station, KEXP.

I am DJ'ing my own show too ... I'll post details later!

New York Marathon

Single image from the New York Marathon held on November 7th ... just took an hour off to see some of the first people coming through Central Park. Am thinking of taking part myself next year ...

Thanksgiving: A Day Off

Its been a while since I last had the chance to write; and the evil force which has stopped this blog this has a name: Columbia University. It keeps me bound to a laptop programming assignments every day, all day, seven days a week.

But, having worked through Thanksgiving (no turkey) I took a break. Last night when I went to see some live music in the lower East Side with Pierre (friend of mine, a French engineer from I-House) and today I got up late and we had lunch at Tom's Restaurant, a classic American diner on Broadway. This is Pierre and my Capacinno (never seen that much whipped cream before).




I have been really frustrated about not seeing much of New York, so I spent the day doing just that - walking around the city. I took a subway trip out to Brooklyn/Greenpoint. In New York you regularly come across the salad bowl effect: suddenly everything is in Spanish, or Korean, or Yiddish. In Greenpoint, it was Polish. The signs on the shops, the books and magazines, the beer on tap; suddenly everything was Polish. Even the water tower had a huge white and red flag on it, in case you didn't get the message.



This Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord was also their in the neighbourhood. Just south of Greenpoint is Williamsburg, which is a newly-hip suburb. There is a word you hear in New York all the time, and that word is gentrification. Williamsburg is a good example of this; it must have been a rough neighbourhood 20 years ago, but today the thrift stores/99cent shops and Polish pharmacies suddenly give way to record and book stores and stylish coffee shops.









Thanksgiving Thursday had grim weather, but today was a fabulous late-autumn day. It was hard to get down to the water (the East River, which separates Manhattan and Brooklyn/Queens) but eventually I found a way down and took these photographs of the Williamsburg bridge and Manhattan as the sun was setting. It was a really peaceful moment, and there were groups of other people down there enjoying it too.





After taking this photo, I walked across the bridge to Manhattan and all the way up to Times Square (must be between 5 and 10 km walk) where I met another friend, Michael, to catch a movie (Borat)

Putting my Mark on New York

It's midterm time here at Columbia, so were're even more highly harried than normal, but back in a day when I was blissfully unaware what a midterm was I commited myself to the "New York Cares Day". What sounds like a contradiction-in-terms is in fact a volunteer day where people do something for the public space in the city. I went with a group of other graduate engineering students to "Public School Number 5", deep in the heart of Brooklyn, where we swept and repainted lines on the school courtyard. I spent most of the day painting hopscotch squares with Caroline, an electrical engineer from Canada. Turns out I have a hidden talent.

New York really is like a salad bowl, with areas where everything will suddenly be written in Spanish, or Hebrew, or Russian. The area around Public School Number 5 was black, all the teachers and students were black, and things there cost half as much as they do in Manhattan, according to the bagel-and-coffee index.

Life as a Nonresident Alien

Recognize the description? That's me, according to the US government ... in fact my full title goes something like status-holding nonresident alien offering dependent personal services. You have to love whoever thought that one up. I want to get it printed on a t-shirt.

Unscathed over Breakneck Ridge

Last Sunday I got out of bed really early. It was a beautiful autumn day and I was all set to go on a hike with the Columbia Hiking Club ... only I was on the waiting list and they were full so I ended up heading out of New York with a couple of other waitlistees (Jon from the WWF and Querin the crazy robot man who I know from IH). We took a train up the Hudson valley which runs right alongside the water most of the way - train with a view - to the little town of Cold Spring ("George Washington camped close to here, drank from the spring and gave it its name") which is a picturesque village not far from picturesque Westpoint Academy on the banks of the Hudson.

We hiked up into the forested hills north of the town, an area called "Breakneck Ridge". The leaves are changing colour and the forest gives the impression of being deep in nature - until you get to the crest of the hill looking over the wide expense of the Hudson and get the sound of buzzing of scores of speedboats and, from some points, the needle-like skyscrapers of Manhattan on the horizon. But it was a big suprise how easy it is to get out of New York, and how beautiful and untouched nature is out there.

First Visitors

I've had the first visitors here ... couple of weeks ago my Beijing Buddy Rene came to visit New York. Great to see him again, although we had way too little time to catch up with the 5 years since we last saw each other. Rene got to be the first person to experience sleeping on my room floor. That he did it at all is a signe of a true friend; my room isn't geared to guests. There were good meals and good talks that went on here with the club of ex-expat Beijijngers.



Couple of days later I had a great meal with Inge and Chris from Amsterdam; they had come to see New York in four days - and did a good job in that time.

NJ Turnpike: Going Bravely Where I've Never Gone Before

Last Friday I pushed the frontiers of what I know of America by hiring a UHaul van to go and pick up my boxes, my bicycle and canoe, which had just cleared customs. For those of you who don't know it, UHaul is the McDonalds of the moving business in America; they are on every street corner, they're dirt cheap and not too good for your health (if you have to deal with their call centre, or get hit by one of their trucks).

So I left the island for the first time: drove up Broadway and over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. The bridge is the first one to span the Hudson river (downstream its all tunnels) and its stunning: a bit like the Golden Gate, all huge curving pipes so high it gives an expansive view across the breadthy river. I wasn't brave enough to grab the Kodak moment. On the other side, I experienced something which is a guaranteed groan-enducer in New York: the infamous New Jersey Turnpike, a toll road where you have to pay according to how long you drive down it. And on the other side of that, after much dreary suburbia, lay Newark City and a group of paunchy, middle-aged men armed to the teeth, behind the kind of metal detectors the people in Heathrow only dream of. Yes, this was the US Customs, who with that amount of firepower on their hips are surely doing a good job of protecting America's frontier.

They stamped my documents, I collected my stuff and my eight square metres have become a lot ... cosier.

A Classic Jog

I've been able to start jogging again since my twisted ankle recovered. My jogging mate is called Michael, he's a journalist from Austria doing a postgrad here. , and earlier on tonight we went to Central Park for the first time. It takes about 15 minutes to jog there from where I am staying at International House.

Jogging into the heart of the park we came to the reservoir ... a setting in a thousand films, like a smal circular lake, but this was for me the ultimate jogging experience. The buildings of Manhatten were on three sides, the sun was going down with sunset and spectacular dark clouds behind the Chrysler Building and the other skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. An awesome 360 view of the city which we jogged around twice - with packs of other New Yorkes. It was a moment - and they are suprisingly rare - when it really hit me that I was living in New York.

Shopping!

I am trying to keep one day a week free from study as a chill-out-discover-new-york-live-it-up day. Yesterday I succeeded, and I went shopping because I thought this would be a good way to discover New York. The highlight of this trip was the Strand Bookshop on the corner of 12th and Broadway. This place is a huge and magic collection of new and second hand books. It was humming with people. Came out of it with a handful of books on New York and the feeling that I had really seen something


In addition to bookstores, New York has the most amazing collections of delis. Many of them are open all night, and they offer a great variety of things like cheese and turkey meat ... or in this case, live crabs.

Evening of the 9/11 Anniversary

Friends of mine had been to Ground Zero and said it was just a big hole in the ground. But on the evening of the actual anniversary, I spontaneously decided to go down and have a look at the site. Perhaps it had something to do with the Towers of Light which had been beamed up into the sky in the days preceding. Like a moth, I'm attracted to lights and bright colours.

These glass towers for sale were the first thing I saw as i came out the subway. Further along the site there are signs asking people not to sell anything. There were a lot of people milling around; at some stage the Hells Angels (or the American Rifle Association, no idea) thumped past on Harley Davidsons. There were a lot of photos and flowers stuck in the fence around the site. People were there telling their stories from the backs of fire engines. Others were making brass rubbings of a copper memorial plaque. Mosts people there were tourists with cameras, but there was still a charged atmosphere. At some point, a middle aged man started ranting about the muslims and got quickly taken to one side by the police, who were out in force.

The site of Ground Zero has a suprising, newly-built train station (link to New Jersey) in the centre of it. The twin spotlights were not not coming out of the Ground Zero site itself, but from some buildings a little to the south. The posters of the police and fireman as saints were an extreme form of the way they are seen as heros here.

Harlem and The World Famous Apollo Theatre

Harlem is just around the corner from International House. The border between Riverside Heights, where the university lies, and Harlem is razor sharp, and the thoroughfares of Broadway (Riverside Heights) and Harlem (125th street) couldn't be more different. Broadway is full of delis and bookshops, and it gets more and more swank the further you head south towards the Upper West Side. 125th street is full of churches and discount department stores, and its heaving with life ... hawkers, people hanging around, a mobile dental clinic.

There have been big changes in Harlem since I was last there 10 years ago though. Back then I stuck out like a sore thumb with my whiteness. Its become a lot more mixed, racially. Back then I was nervous walking around, now 125th street hosts an H&M, and a Starbucks, and a Body Shop. How is that for normality: retail chains. One of my favourite vegetarian eateries is there too; you get a delicious mix of things in a paper cup for a couple of dollars and excellent fruit juices, advertised by the ailments they cure (so you order an extra large Rheuma or some freshly squeezed Impotency).

Bill Clinton's office is on 125th street. So is my social security office. I have one of these cards now, its printed on cheap card, there is some symbolism here somewhere, and in general a social security number seems more than anything else to function as a handy key for all kinds of other systems, from tax to the university.

Also on 125th street is the World Famous Apollo Theatre. The World Famous Apollo Theatre has an amateur night which launched stars like James Brown, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. I went to the World Famous Apollo Theatre last Wednesday with Catherijn, a law student from Amsterdam. People were pulled out of the audience and really pulled off a great act, although some of them ran. Luckily we were in the upstairs part. The audience really gets in on the act and cheers or yells people off the stage. The real contestants had all already won a couple of competitions, so there weren't enough really bad ones and too many that would really like to be Celine Dione, and in fact probably will be some day. Everyone can be a star: that is an American phenomenon, and those that don't make it don't loose the hope.

Wine in a Brown Paper Bag in Brooklyn

Last Friday I walked with a group of other IH students across the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the classic view of the bridge (with the Manhattan Bridge further in the background). It was a beautiful evening, full moon rising, and the bridge was crowded. You are walking on slats, so when you look down you can see the river beneath you ... and some of the girls in the group were in stilletos! I sprained my ankle just before I took this photo, and have the bruises to prove my bridge experience.

We were supposed to be going to a famous pizzeria just close to where the brige meets Brooklyn, but they didn't want so many people at once so a smaller group of us split off and walked (hop hop for me) down to Brooklyn Heights, where we got something else to eat.

After the meal we went down to the waterfront. On the way we stopped at a wine shop which was still open (11 at night, I love this) and bought a bottle of wine. When we asked if it was a screw top (we thought we were being subtle), the owner promptly corked the wine for us, gave us plastic cups, and that famous Brown Paper Bag. Abel (Germany), Catherine (Korea) and I drank the wine (in the bag) to this view over Manhattan. The light beam is the "Towers of Light" from Ground Zero which was marking the 9/11 anniversary; I'll post more photos of this later from a night-time visit to the site.

West Indian American Day Parade

A giant Caribbean parade which takes place in Brooklyn on the Labour Day Holiday (last Monday Sept 4). The first part of it was made use of by American politicians (Congressional midterms are comming up here in November) and corporations, although sometimes the difference between the two was not clear.







Later the real party started. There were people from all over: Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad and Tabago. This was the crowd going crazy with flags behind one of the Jamaican floats. Apparently some people party through the night before, sleep a couple of hours and then carry on.







Here are some more random images of the parade:

Manhattan and Columbia

This is Columbia, the very statue where the tourists line up to get their photos taken and incoming graduates whip out there cell phone cameras. She's an Ivy League babe, cause this is Ivy League, baby. Columbia has lots of faux grecian columns. Where have I seen this all before?







These guys scamper around all over the campus ... it adds to the Harry Potter feeling that I get from some of the professors.






The campus is way up on the North East part of Manhatten, sandwiched between Harlem and the Hudson River. Most New York addresses are written with street coordinates. Columbia is 116th/Broadway.














And here's a view down Broadway with a taxi (yellow, but no checks - when and why were these abolished?):





International House, where I am staying, is a lot of fun, friendly atmosphere and a grand location 5 minutes from the uni. The sole disadvantage: the rooms are tiny! Here are the 8 square metres of New York I call my own:

And here is the gotham-city view I have over Harlem and Washington Heights in North Manhatten ... the metro line 1 comes up above ground just here and it sparks and squeels over this old iron bridge. The 125th street metro station (the closest to IH) sits up on this bridge, and the whole thing shakes as the trains roll by. Not sure when the last time was the metro got a cash injection, but it was a long time ago. This is a genuine New York real deal view, no parks or river or other frills. Further advantage of my room location: I don't have to spend money on an alarm clock, because the roar of the traffic and the squeeling of the subway wakes me up at about 7 in the morning every day.

International House and the ISSO (international student organisation) have been doing a lot of orientation activities ... this was one of the more unusual: a trip to a fake city beach (yup, that palm tree is not real) in Queens with a brilliant view across to Manhatten. It is called Water Taxi Beach because the Water Taxi ferry stops here. The view is amazing, but that was the best thing that could be said about the beach: otherwise bad beer and cringe-inducing open mic session blew this one out the water ... and no amount of skyscrapers could save it.

New Mokum Week Zero

Tomorrow I will have been in New York a week. I wanted to start a blog of my impressions and images of the city; I will be here for only 18 months.

This is the last photo of me on my house boat in Amsterdam, the day before I left. The book is "Ik ben een New Yorker".

About the name: Mokum is the old yiddish name for Amsterdam, New York used to be New Amsterdam, I have just moved here from Mokum, so it all ties together ... at least it feels that way at two o'clock in the morning.

Tomorrow is the start of the semester at Columbia and I still haven't got a final list of courses. The city never sleeps, but right now I sure need to.