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.