$50 000 000 anyone?

... that's Zimbabwean dollars. Today I went to a talk at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) by two Zimbabwean activists from within the MDC. The situation there is so bad at the moment. At some stage during the evening, they passed around a $50 000 000 dollar bill which had just been issued. It was worth US$1 as they passed it around. What is it worth now?

Pierre!

My good friend Pierre, whom I met in IHouse, performed a Houdini-style stunt and appeared in New York from nowhere (well, from Paris). Yeah!

Together we trowelled the overlarge portions at Mama's Food Shop in Alphabet City and some of the huge beer selection at the DBA bar.

Rent

Made it to my first Broadway show last night - Rent in the Nederlander Theater, just off Broadway, with student tickets I got through Columbia. I went in having no background information and - BAM! - musical about aids and drugs and homelessness in the New York of the 1990's which was really energetic and a lot of fun to watch for someone who grew up on Gillbert and Sullivan fodder. And also a sign of how much New York has changed - the city from then was not always recognizable from the city of now.

Moving Road Movie

Last weekend I helped my friend Alyssa move her stuff from her parents' place in Jordan, Minnesota to Princeton, New Jersey where she is starting a new job at ETS. The trip was 1300 miles (2100km) and took us through 9 states: Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, a tiny bit of West Virginia, most of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York (to pick up more boxes).




Before the trip, I spent two days in Jordan and the nearby 'twin cities' of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Alyssa's parents have a small farm and a house they built themselves (during the construction of which the family of 5 and three helpers slept together in a shed for good on a year). Alyssa's dad loves wood, and it was everywhere in the house. Here is the moving van - we spent hours inside it trying to figure out the optimal way of stopping everything from shifting around. Although New York already felt a bit like Spring, Minnesota was still locked in winter, with a lot of snow and ice.


My room mate Jessica, also from Minnesota, was by luck in the Twin Cities that weekend too, so we picked her up from the airport and hung out together. Here we are in Target (big US supermarket chain which is based in Minnesota) kitting ourselves out with the essentials for a trip halfway across the continent: atlas, rope and chocolate drizzle indulgent snack mix (you have to love the US food industry)




The Twin Cities have a nice friendly vibe about them. We went out a lot: to a Ethiopian restaurant, an Irish bar with faux decor but genuine music, a gay cafe, the food co-op where Alyssa used to work, and then ended up meeting a bunch of Alyssa's friends from her college in the Herk, in Minneapolis' Uptown. It was a fun crowd in a fun venue because it has a microbrewery and - almost as good - a shuffleboard, which involves sliding pucks on salt down a long board, trying to knock your opponents pucks off. A bit like a combination of boule and bowling.




The trip to the East Coast was smooth - got up early each day and drove until late, stopping only rarely. So the experience was one of flash-glimpses of America: snow-covered corn fields in Iowa; the town of Preoria Illinnois which was distinct in a score of ways from the cookie-cutter similarity of other towns, the Hummer-Limousine in Indianapolis, the greening as we went eastwards and crossed over Pennsylvania. We had no CD in the car, so we read to each other from Tales of the City, did cross-word puzzles and listened to the sometimes quirky radio from the places we were passing through. In Iowa's farming country, a song by Kenny Chesney was playing:

She thinks my tractors sexy
It really turns her on
Shes always staring at me
While Im chuggin along

Here are the full lyrics if you want more. In Pennsylvania it was International Harvester by Craig Morgan.

We spent the night in Columbus, Ohio with Pete, Alyssa's boyfriend, in his cool wooden house for which he pays a rent which makes someone in New York weep. This is Tammy Faye, his cat, named after Tammy Faye Baker the wife of fallen evangelist Jim Baker. There is a strong resemblance.





This is the New Jersey Turnpike - got to be one of the ugliest (and most dangerous) stretches of road in the world, and all that with the Manhattan skyscrapers looming on the horizon. We rode down it into New York to pick up more boxes from International House and the best cargo of all: Stacey, who came back with us to Princeton. About the only tense moment was return down the highway hell of New Jersey in the dark when someone ahead of us had a puncture and was moving really slowly on the crowded freeway. Imagine going for hours of urban dystopia: freeways, factories, airports, endless strip malls. Then suddenly a barrier of green and you emerge into a quaint other-wordly Grimm-Brothers village of wooden houses and stone buildings; that was pretty much the experience of arriving in Princeton for the first time, and one of those strangely American experiences. We got in at 11PM, exhausted, found a restaurant which was still open, unpacked the mattress and fell asleep.

And the next day was the moving in of Alyssa's Minnesotan furniture, including her Prohibition-era speakeasy table with the secret drawer for the gambling chips, and the return of the truck to nearby Trenton and ... we were done.

Roomies Four

Brooklyn, like Manhattan, has a restaurant week during which restaurants make all kinds of special offers. I grabbed at the half-price wine with my fellow roomates (Nate, Jessica and Darla) at Miriam Restaurant.

And here, to give some context, is my room in Brooklyn. The orange walls are my work.