Wanaque Reservoir

New Jersey, said the girl from New Jersey at a dinner party, is the armpit of America. There is nothing there but suburbs and roads for people to get through it or out of it.

I've crossed through New Jersey a couple of times now, and its almost true. Its an armpit. But she forgot some things: suburbs, road and strip malls. Gigantic ones that go on forever. Ikea follows Starbucks follows Macey's follows Mr Sleepy follows Micky D's follows Comfort Inn follows Starbacks follows Barnes and Noble and on and on and on, each with acres of parking.

But today Jersey revealed that every lymph gland has a pretty side ... or that before it became the Garden State they use to blurb up their number plates it must have been really lovely. I went hiking in the Wanaque Reservoir, in northern Jersey, with the hiking club at Columbia. 5 hours spent hiking around the reservoir, brief visit to a cave full of tiny, sleeping bats, past a waterfall and up through the 'valley of rocks' full of moraine from the ice age where bears scratch the bark of trees (though we only saw the bark, not the bears).




Its good that you can get out of New York relatively quickly - although even from that distance, you can still see the silhouette of Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon.

Spring Break in Chicago

After UIUC I spent the weekend in Chicago with Pierre and his wife Nicki. Nicki lives in Chicago's Near North in the 9th floor of a 30-something floor building. These appartment blocks are shooting up all over this part of Chicago as people rediscover the joy of living downtown.

It happened to be St Patrick's that weekend, which is celebrated in a big way in many parts of the US. We didn't see the parade, but thousand of people in cheap green beads were milling everywhere. The long-suffering Chicago river, previously used to get rid of masses of offal and sewerage and later having its course reversed (so the offal and sewerage would go elsewhere) gets spiffed up by having huge amounts of green dye dumped into it for the occasion. Its all about green awareness.





Chicago has some awesome architecture, both from the last century (lots of very fine art deco) and this new one - the pavillion of the Millenium Park by Frank Gehry is stunning. I have more photos of Chicago up on Flickr.









On Saturday evening we met up with Mark McNally (also a friend from Wits and now living in Chicago) and went for an excellent meal at a restaurant called the Green Zebra before diving back into some of the St Patrick's late-late revelries.

Campus Envy

Universities in the US are very competitive. The university equivalent of the Fortune 500 is the US News list of America's Best Colleges which ranks universities here by faculty. Rankings have all kinds of affect on research funding and getting the best faculty and students. Last time I looked Columbia - which is more famous for Law, Business or Journalism - had some kind of middling to average rank for computer science. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (try saying that after a night of solid malt whiskey drinking) is way up there among the top 3 computer science campuses in the country. As well as having stellar faculty and doing really important research, its also famous for being the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the birthplace of the supercomputer HAL in the film 2001, the one that went crazy and tried to kill everyone.

I went there to pay a long-overdue visit to my friend Pierre who is completing a PhD in computer architecture. We were undergraduates together at Wits in Johannesburg. The computer science department at UIUC is vast and exudes well-fundedness and the campus is beautiful. The last time I saw a gym like the student one was a luxury spa in Hamburg. I spent a really good time with Pierre and some of his research group ... we went out on the town (at UIUC you get a pick of two towns to go out on - we were in Champaign) and took advantage of bars offering a huge choice of beer, talking until way into the night about pretty much everything but computers. Cheers to studentville!

My First Eskimo Roll

Better than an eskimo nose kiss (and with a lot more chlorine) - tonight I managed my first eskimo roll in a white water kayak in the pool at Columbia. It wasn't pretty but I got from hanging disorientated underwater to right-side-up!

Things I'm Getting Used To (but maybe shouldn't)

I have been in the US for 6 months already, and some of the initial culture shock that I had is beginning to wear off. Its a good thing, but I also feel how things which used to seem so extraordinary are becoming everyday. So I thought I'd list some of them here, as a reminder to myself as much as to anyone reading this. Here are some of them - there are a lot more.

• pharmacy chains, lots of them, open 24 hours
• disposable cups, plates and trays - use once and throw away, even in expensive cafes
• coffee to go - everyone walks around slurping from these paper mugs before tossing them
  
• or water to go - those that aren't drinking coffee are sipping water from bottles
• ... and/or chewing gum (cliche but true)
• ... and/or talking on a cell phone
  
• chain me up: there is a Starbucks on every second block in Manhattan (see above)
  
• baggy clothes and jeans worn half way down your hips
• armed policemen (also in baggy clothes, but less stylish)
  
• prudishness
  
• being id'd at every bar I go into
• ... to drink bad beer at high prices
• media advertising (i.e. adverts for tv and film - everywhere - including ...)
  
• yellow taxi cabs (media advertising on the roof)
• craziest mix of people in your average subway car (including me)
• the US flag everywhere: the average subway car, churches and gyms are just the start
• spanish as a second language, by the banks, by the metro, even by the army to recruit (yo soy el army!)
• bagels, especially as sold from little silver caravans on the side of the road for a dollar with some cream cheese
  

I'm becoming Americanized, I think, or at the very least gradually New Yorkified ... but there's a way to go yet.