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.