Winter ... and Spring ... And Winter Again

The weather here is crazy ... oscillating wildly between bitter cold and the feeling of spring.

Every winter, Columbia decks out the trees along 16th Street (the closed part in the campus) with lights. There are a lot of these kinds of installations around New York at Christmas, but Columbia leaves them on until ... well, they had just turned them off on Friday night, which is a sure sign that Spring is coming.

Climbing Comp

My climbing hasn't really gotten much better, but I have gone to a couple of competitions since the beginning of the year - they are a lot of fun (loads of people. loads of climbing) and not as competitive as it might sound. Here is a picture from today's competition at the Cliffsd of Valhalla in Westchester County, north of New York.

Daily Dose of Liberty

My daily commute is on the F-Train, which trundles between Coney Island and Queens. Close to where I live, it comes out of the ground for two stations as it curves through an industrial part of Brooklyn, across the Gowanus Canal, which is about as beautiful as the name evokes. There, between the buildings and the harbour cranes off in the distance is a smidgen of copper green: the Statue of Liberty. How is that for a boost to an early morning subway trip while slurping coffee out of a paper cup? Yeah, America! Take in my huddled mass!

Um.

To be frank, the coffee is what really does it.

Piece of Paper Behind Me

Today I went with a couple of other students to pick up my Masters diploma. "What's your name?" said the man behind the desk. He looked at my ID, punched it into the computer and zzzzzzt out came a fresh diploma into my hands.

Talk about an anticlimax! After all the work, I would have preferred someone to have hammered it out of stone in front of me.

Here is Sampada, with two her two diplomas (actually one of them is mine, but I think it half belongs to her anyway!)

Post Superbowl Pre Super Tuesday

Yesterday was the Superbowl ... I missed it again, and about the only part of it I heard was when fans of the New York Giants (actually based in New Jersey) went berserk when the team won.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, when a lot of states across the US hold their primaries, caucuses of party political conventions. It's make or break time for presidential candidates. I haven't seen too much in the way of campaigning in New York - a couple of Obama supporters in front of the museum on Saturday night, or in front of the coop, and that's about it. But the election is a lively one and people are talking a lot about the differences of the candidates. On Thursday I sat with friends listening to the debate between Clinton and Obama; tomorrow I hope to go to a primary party.

S is for Security

Saturday night I used my new location to the fullest: rode across the Park to the Brooklyn Museum where I met up with Julia, a Canadian friend. The museum does monthly first-Saturday parties which are a lot of fun: nicely mixed crowd and nicely mixed high-brow (Rodin statues) and low-brow (Karaoke) - or should that be the other way around?

Afterwards I rode to Williamsburg, arguably the hip heart but definitely the hipster liver of Brooklyn. Takes about 30 minutes to get there on a bicycle, and that's fast by New York standards. Another friend - Hal - was celebrating his birthday there in a bar done up to look like a fake Hofbrauhaus. We had a good time there, sipping litre-pitches of draft beer. I got talking to the ex-girlfriend of a friend, and she had an interesting story to tell. She studied Marxist literature, and some time ago tried to get a guest lecturer from Italy into the US. His visa was refused, and because she had sponsored the request, she is now marked as a security threat. Each time she flies, her ticket is marked with an S which means she has to be there an hour ahead of other people and get searched thoroughly. It's a permanent mark against her name in some government database.