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)