Kayaking on the Hudson

Finally, finally, finally! On the Hudson today in a sea kayak at the invitation of Adelene, from my kayaking group at Columbia. We went up the Hudson in windy conditions with a group of others to the Mitsuwa Marketplace on the Jersey shore, pretty much opposite IHouse.

Misuwa is a fabulous Japenese complex which has a supermarket (cheap sushi, cheap saki and many other good things) and a food court, complete with the charming plastic example food they use to advertise menus all over Japan.

Stuffed, we returned down the Hudson by holding onto each other's canoes and just letting the current and wind take us back to the boathouse on 59th Street.

All-Night Bike Ride across New York

The History of the City of New York course is showing me things I would never otherwise see in the city. One of these is Times Square, at midnight ... on a bicycle with 200 others. All this was part of the famous All-Night Bike Ride, which sets of from Columbia's campus just before midnight, and goes across the length of Manhattan to Brooklyn and back. I was a volunteer mechanic, which had me pumping a lot of flat tires and adjusting seat heights throughout the night. I got back at about 5am in the morning. One of the more hair-raising parts of the trip was not Times Square, but 5th Avenue which was hectically busy even at 1am in the morning. The photo is of Washington Square, at the tail end of 5th Avenue.

Marek and Maike in New York

Marek and Maike (or M&M), two of my closest friends from Germany, came to visit me on a trip which was way too short for all of us. Here we are in the Rockerfeller Plaza (that is all the gray bits on the edge of the picture)

Back at Columbia: The Beginning of The End

After the warmth and friendliness of San Francisco, it felt strange to be back in New York. Big, loud, noisy and rude were all words which went through my head shortly after I arrived at JFK, late at night, and it took about a week for them to fade.

It was, however, great to come back to International House (tiny cell and all) and have a lot of people enthusiastic about seeing me again. I did try to move out of here this semester, but I couldn't find anything in the time that I was looking, so I am staying put in the tiny cell, and just enjoying the friendly atmosphere.

This is my last Semester at Columbia. It is a special semester because I only have to do 6 credits in it (unlike previous semesters in which I have had to do 12), so I have a lower workload and hopefully a bit more time to enjoy myself. After some difficulty in figuring out what I want to do, I have ended up taking Biometrics (automatically determining categories or identifying people or things) and Programming and Problem Solving, which is a fun course involving a lot of programming groupwork in a creative atmosphere. In addition, I am auditing (i.e. sitting in on) a course on (Environmental) Ethics Values and Justice given by Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, which looks at the ethical issues around environmentalism. I am also taking an amazing undergraduate course on the History of the City of New York which involves a lot of trips to interesting parts of the city. This will be the stuff of many blog posts to come.

Burning Man

I wash the dirt from my feet in the basin of the restroom in a fast food restaurant on the outskirts of Reno. Try to flatten my hair. Step out of my dusty desert clothes into the last set of fresh ones I have. Splash water across my face. The basin stains with the pale brown of the desert dust, then washes it down with the small miracle of running water from a tap disappearing into a drain. I step out of the wash room feeling like I'm emerging from an airlock in a space station. I have come from out there, and now I am back in here again.


I spent the last week of my trip at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert, with Tim, Joe, Alison and other people that I had met through Google. It is difficult to describe Burning Man in a paragraph, so I will say only that it was the strongest sense of being in an alternative reality that I've ever had, and if you're curious, I've uploaded photographs onto my Flickr page.