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)