Toyi-Toying in New York

Friday I helped a group of other South Africans organize the South African Cultural Hour at IHouse. Thee have been a number of these (French, America, Greek-Iranian) and ours was the last. And the most chaotic. The group broke into infighting at the least slight. Responsibilities shifted, food didn't come, music was there and then wasn't. And despite everything, it was a big success. There were lots of South Africans in the audience and at some stage they were all singing Shosholoza on the stage, and then later fiercely toyi-toying.

Severe Weather Alert

Today was monsoon day in New York. I've never lived in a place where it rains as hard as it does here - even in the tropics it's not like this. Today a 10 minute walk to campus under an umbrella had me stomping through streams of water and soaked on arrival. Makes you sorry for the rats...

Queens-Brooklyn Graffiti Biketour

I set out on a bike tour today with a group of friends from IHouse on a long-discussed and much-procrastinated bike tour to go to Flushing, way out beyond La Guardia airport in Queens, and home to a sprawling pan-asian town (lots of Chinese and Korean shops, and a couple of Japanese ones too). The route is supposed to be really interesting because it goes through all kinds of ethnic neighborhoods.

But it didn't turn out as planned. Abel, Alissa, James, Linde and I cycled across Harlem and Randalls Island in the East River which is made up of only sports fields and bridges. On the lies Astoria, a greek-mediteranean neighbourhood where we stopped for a welcome cup of espresso (it was a bitterly cold day) in an italian cafe with old men hanging around and a huge Forzza Azzurri banner on the wall. And it was after that our trip got derailed because we decided to do a short detour through Long Island City, and it was then that the Flushing Tour became the Graffiti Tour.

Long Island City is part of Queens just across the river from Manhattan. The number 7 train there goes under the East River emerges into an area full of graffiti with some amazing views of the Queensborough Bridge and Manhattan skyline beyond. I'd seen this from the train, and I'd always wanted to go there ... so we tried to find it by following the spray paint. The signatures and the colour and the overhead metro line got us to 5 Pointz, a building covered with graffiti on all sides.

By that stage it was too late to go to Flushing ... and we wanted to see more. So instead we headed south into Brooklyn, through the polish neighbourhood of Greenpoint (which I wrote about in another blog) and on into Williamsburg. Most of the waterfront there is fenced off, but Abel, who had been there before, knew of a place where the chain links were hanging loose, so we got in to one of the grandest views of Manhattan I know.



Like Queens to the north, Williamsburg it also covered in Graffiti ... we kept on seeing more and more. This is one of my favourite pictures from the trip:





Cycling back over the Williamsburg Bridge was an experience in itself: leaving Brooklyn, Oi Vey (and that's official). Back on Manhattan Island we cycled back up the east side which was all clean of graffiti ... and from there Brooklyn and Queens looked a lot less attractive!