Weekend on Thin Ice

Last weekend was the International House Community Weekend, yet another example of why its worth living in a shoebox to be here. The community weekend is an overnight trip to the countryside so you can get to know others in IHouse. This time it was to Cold Spring, which is in upstate New York about two hours from the city, and the same place I was hiking last year. We went there and back in a yellow New York school bus which you see everywhere on the streets in the mornings here, so everyone who is over a meter and a half tall has their knees crammed up against the seat in front and survives the trip on pure good spirits.







There are a couple of organized activities to get to know each other, on the lines of: give us your most embarassing story - I told about my tenth most embarrassing. And there were some outdoors adventure-type activities like figure out a way of getting the group across this pit of stinking mud using only these two planks.

But most of the time there was free time. I went with a flashlight onto the frozen lake at night with Alyssa and James and won the night ice-sliding contest. We built a huge bonfire and sat around it until late at night in a snowstorm with several bottles of wine (this is a great combination). On Sunday we went on a hike into the winter-brown woods and played snowfights and frizbee on the ice, which was creaking and snapping around us.

Googling "Almonds"

Friday the university organized a trip to the New York offices of Google in downtown New York. Its the second biggest Google location in the US (their headquarters are in California), taking up a floor and a half of a building spanning an entire city block.

"Welcome to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory" said my classmate Ken as the lift doors opened, and it was true: everything in the Google office felt a little magical ... and a little divorced from reality. Games and hi-tech toys everywhere, bright primary colours, only young people, and a work policy which allows you to spend 20% of your time on a project of your choice and come and go as you please.

"At Google, we believe everything is possible" said the young engineer with no hint of irony at the start of the presentation on the company and its technology.

Gaining weight at Google is one of those possible things: there were kitchenettes there every 100m full of croissants, bagels, fruit, sweets and nuts. "Just help yourself - everything is free" said Rebecca who was showing us around. I tried to get a discrete handful of almonds, but the machine overfilled the cup I had with an embarrassing roar. The excellent gourmet lunch in the restaurant was also free, for everyone in the office, everyday.

So Google found its way to my heart through my stomach. I applied for an internship and have a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Late Winter

Winter is two months late, but its here. Its snowing outside! Up to now, the weather has been eerily warm (I was in a t-shirt in Washington). It is my first winter here in North America, but its not a normal one...

The semester has just started, my new year's resolution is to make it an easier one: search engine technology, advanced databases, cryptography (and no killer operating system weekends any more wuhu)

I've been spending my hours holed up at the station (WBAR) doing web design for their relaunch, in the company of thousands and thousands of CD's. That's a work incentive!

Cleveland: Fasten your Rust Belt

I went back with Susanne to Cleveland, Ohio (on the shores of Lake Eerie, about half way between New York and Chicago) for the last part of the trip we made together.

The Greyhound there was an experience in itself ... it was an overnight bus with a huge cross section of people traveling on it, chaotic in a 3rd world kind of way (everyone gets on the bus, then suddenly everyone has to get off it again and go to the next bus; if you can't find a seat, too bad, despite having a ticket, you stop repeatedly in the middle of the night and have to get off the bus, even if you're continuing with the same one, and so on). Here's a picture of the bus station in Pittsburgh, a city I almost went to study in, at 3am at which stage Susanne wasn't interested in having photos taken any more!

Cleveland is a rust belt city, struggling to find its feet again after the industry from its heyday in the 20's withered away. It combines a prohibition-era style with industrial gothic and a feeling of desolation.




Susanne lives with three other German students in a wooden house in Treemont, about 5 km outside of Cleveland, and works as an intern in the Metro hospital, where "saving lives is just the beginning". The hospital is the one in the city which is the last recourse of people without medical insurance (there are a lot of these in the US); she sees a lot of patients who are seriously ill with easily-preventable diseases. She is counting down the remaining weeks of her visit.

Philadelphia and Chinatown #5

Next stop on the Chinatown bus tour was Philadelphia, where we went to visit Farrel, my traveling companion of 6 months in the trip up through Africa.

Farrel was on his way from living in Washington to living in New York when a new film making project in Philadelphia grabbed him ... we watched parts of the films and went drinking in the gaybourhood around the corner from where he lives (in a cute three-story flat, one room per story, nicknamed a holy trinity).

Philly made a really good impression ... there was art there everywhere, but especially in the form of huge murals on the sides of buildings. These are some of them that we saw as we walked around ... and we deepened our understanding of American history, too, Philly is good for that. And had some of the best noodles ever in the Chinatown there, in a restaurant where the chef stretches them from dough just before cooking them.

Warming to Washington

I never thought that I would like Washington as much as I did ... it must have been the huge number of museums there, all of them free, displaying the most amazing things like the Apollo 11 capsule in the Air and Space Museum. In fact, this museum had pretty much everything you could wish for in it: Spaceship One, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Wright Brothers flyer.



But topping the Air and Space museum was the Museum of the American Indian, very modern and interactive, beautiful building but mostly because of the guide who took us around and gave us a personal insight into what it is like to be a modern Native American.

If you like books, the Library of Congress is a temple.




And to top it off, we danced to Jazz in Georgetown and slurped beer under lots of dead stuffed animals to the sound of a bluegrass band in Madams Organ, Adams Morgan, as Washington revealed itself to be a Southern Town, an illusion made much stronger by the warm temperatures and flawless weather.











Immemorial memorials, many many things which were cut with that pompous greek-column cutter and lots of cockroaches in our hotel room: that was Washington too.

Under The Bridge at Midnight

If you're going to spend New Year's Eve under a bridge, then the Brooklyn Bridge is a good choice. We (me, Susanne, Honza, Joel and Verina) didn't plan for it to be that way, but our just-off timing meant turned the original plan to be on the bridge at midnight into the situation of us under it as all the fabulous fireworks went off ... somewhere else where we couldn't see them.

We cracked our bottle of champagne open anyway, eying the police cruising around (drinking in public is the quickest way to make you feel like a criminal in the US) and then walked up the bridge against the streams of people coming down.


With an additional bottle of wine and strong-and-foul brand Czech spirit to keep us criminal - and warm - we made it over the bridge to Brooklyn. There we were able to persuade a cab driver to take all five of us in his cab, which turned out to be a DJ Cab where you could pick your songs off a menu, so we drove into Williamsburg for the party-until-late part of the evening to the fabulous sounds of Nina Simone.