Will in New Mokum

South Africa Refreshed

2009-02-09T04:13:00.002-05:00

I've stopped adding to this blog, but the end is also a new beginning. My blog on my experiences being back in South Africa is called South Africa Refreshed.

Breaking Up: Final Blog Post

2008-12-16T01:11:00.005-05:00

I'm sitting amid a pile of boxes and suitcase. In about 20 hours my plane to South Africa flies out from JFK. These are my last hours in New York.

That makes this the last blog post from New Mokum.

I spent my last evening, by chance, in the IHouse Pub with Brian DeBono who I met when I went to the House to sell my old printer.

I spent my last weekend saying goodbye to friends at a farewell dinner, and hanging out with Alyssa in a day of flyering (old printer, anyone?), brunching with St.Ace, Christmas shopping, movie going (Milk - see it!) and a final late-night visit to the amazing jazz and pot atmosphere of St. Nick's Pub which is just around the corner from me on 149th Street, and I left me wishing I'd discovered it sooner.

I spent my last week in a crazy fast-rotate cycle of packing, working on my research project and trying to enjoy the city. Shipped my stuff out of New York on Friday.

At the moment, New York is feeling like one of those relationships where you wake up to the fact of how important it has been when its pretty much over. Actually, I've never had one of those relationships with a person, but I'm sure they exist. But it seems at least I'm having one with a city. So, New York, I'll publish it on the Internet: although I've vilified you constantly, I will 'fess up and say you are an amazing city, harbour some of the best people I've met, and been the scene from one of the happiest and fullest times of my life. It has been an amazing experience. I think I have been in love with you without really knowing it.

Now its time for me to go.

10 Things

2008-12-09T03:04:00.002-05:00

... I will miss about New York

great people
winter sunshine
shopping for groceries at midnight
the subway
water water everywhere
gothamist architecture
ethnic neighbourhoods
endless variety
dogs dressed in T-shirts
not really being in america

And for good balance, here are 10 things I will not miss about New York

Duane Reade, and its suppository aisle
the subway
obese cars
times square
hipsters in fake glasses
fast food nation
consume consume consume/trash trash trash
rats
tvs in bars, laundromats and taxi cabs
really being in america

Broadway, Second Act

2008-12-05T00:20:00.003-05:00

Made it onto Broadway tonight for my second show, in the company of a tibetan princess. The show was August: Osage County by Tracy Letts. It is the story of a family in Oklahoma which implodes. And no, its not a musical.

Winter Hiking: Sleet Sleet Sleet

2008-11-30T00:59:00.000-05:00

I've been a driver for the hiking club for two years, but I have never lead a hike. I wanted to lead at least one before leaving New York, so today I lead a small group (6 others) onto Schunnemunk Ridge, close to Westpont Academy about 60 miles north of New York. As my luck would have it, this was the worse weather I have ever hiked in: rain, then sleet, then mist, then rain. Actually, it was not only a cold and slippery hike, but it was also a pretty intense one which I am glad I did. I was also very happy that everyone who put their name down actually came along. And even more glad that I had a thermos of hot tea with me.

(Photo: Brian Bulthuis)

Microbrewery Kitchen

2008-11-29T00:52:00.001-05:00

Today I joined friends (Heide, Melinda, Louisa) brewing beer in Heidi's kitchen. We brewed one batch, bottled a second and drank a third. Not only did this stink nothing like the Holsten brewery I lived next to in Hamburg (it was a pleasant smell which reminded me a bit of bread) , it was also huge fun to do - and the product was amazing!

Mugabe as an Anti-Gentrification Symbol in New York

2008-11-28T00:28:00.001-05:00

Sickening as it might sound, I saw Robert Mugabe used for the second time as a symbol in New York today. This photo of 2008 election photos and the "fist of empowerment" (sic) is from the window of the "African Peoples Farmers Market" on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I walked past it on my way to thanksgiving with friends. The older photo was taken on Sep 16 2007 at the African American Day Parade in Harlem.

The organization behind this is called "Friends of Zimbabwe" and is based in Brooklyn. Among other things, they are protesting gentrification (the "colonisation of the black areas in New York by real estate companies to extract maximum profit" as Kai put it). Here is an article on the movement in the Workers World, and this media advisory from the group from 2004 talks about Mugabe's 'strong leadership example'. This would almost be funny if it wasn't so nauseating and misguided. Can these people really ignore the catastrophe Mugabe has boxed his country and people into because they want to use him as a symbol for their local issues?

Thanksgiving's Seitan Turkey

2008-11-28T00:23:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving weekend is like Christmas for vegetarians: it kind of puts them on the spot, especially when, like for me this year, you eat in a mixed crowd of vegetarians and meat eaters. I cooked up a Seitan 'Turkey' from scratch (kind of like a meatless meat loaf). It was made from soy flour, tofu, wheat gluten and lots of other good things. I celebrated with Kai and Jed and Farrel and a bunch of other people I met for the first time in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.

Hiking the Croton Aquaduct

2008-11-24T01:27:00.003-05:00

Today I hiked the last part of the Old Croton Aquaduct, which was completed in 1837 as New York's first major water supply. The hike was lead by Arcadia, who is doing an independent project on the aquaduct. We walked through Yonkers (north of New York) into the Bronx, and the hike ranged from pretty countryside to gritty urban landscapes.

Extreme Metting

2008-11-22T01:30:00.003-05:00

I'm doing my best to catch up on two years of not taking full advantage of the many discounts which a Columbia ID gives you in New York. Today I went for a packed hour into the Metropolitan Museum and got Byzantine piled on Papa New Guinea, Renaissance Italy, Ancient Egypt and 18th Century France. Whew!

Ice Skating in Central Park

2008-11-20T01:30:00.000-05:00

Thursday night we went ice skating in Central Park - the rink is down by the South East corner of the park, and is one of serveral open-air rinks in the city (including Byrant Park, which is small but free). The location is amazing: there is something about a ring of skyscrapers which puts me in a buoyant mood. Jules, my friend from Canada, proved once more what an awesome teacher she is by taking Jackie, from Kenya, for her very first time on ice, and teaching me the fundamentals of skating backwards.

The rink is owned by Donald Trump, and his name is everywhere. It adds to the smooth slitheriness of the ice...

Aftewards we had gluhwein with extra kick in it and toblerone-chocolate fondue. Yeah!

Mini Cooper Extreme

2008-11-16T03:02:00.000-05:00

Hired a Mini-Cooper convertable and went out with Kinneret and Julia to the Dia:Beacon Art Gallery north of New York. Great fun, although I have to say that I like the Mini's more to look at than to drive.

Anti Prop-8 Protest

2008-11-15T01:34:00.002-05:00

The bitter side of the recent election was the passing of Proposition 8 in California, which banned the gay marriage law passed by the state supreme court there. Today, I went to a protest outside city hall in New York (one of many across the US). Huge crowd and a great feeling of solidarity. The photo shows Erica Beckmann, Anna and a group of their friends.

Winter Kayaking

2008-11-09T01:43:00.000-05:00

One last kayak trip down the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts in cool temperatures. Made it through the Zoar Gap without getting wet.

Good Cheer

2008-11-04T23:13:00.002-05:00

We left the bar where we were watching the election results just too early ... I got home, jetlagged from the trip to Germany, and suddenly the streets around erupted in hooting, whistling, cheers and the explosions of fire-crackers. Barack Obama has just been declared by the TV networks to be the next US president.

Germany

2008-11-03T01:38:00.001-05:00

Visited friends in Germany over the first week of November in Hamburg and Cologne. I'd missed three weddings there since my time in the US; so I had a lot of celebrating to do.

Economics Debates (and Economist Namesdropping)

2008-10-21T02:08:00.001-04:00

New York is amazing because of the people you get the opportunity to hear. Today, I got to hear George Soros, Nouriel Roubini from NYU and Jeffrey Sachs as they shared a stage talking about the current economic crisis, the "bubble on a much larger bubble" as Soros described it.

Shortly afterwards, the chief economic advisor to Barack Obama, Austan Goolsbee, held an hour-long debate with his McCain counterpart, Doug Holtz-Eakin, on campus. Part of the panel from Columbia's side was Joseph Stiglitz. This was more about politics than economics, but it was interesting to hear the two of them debate issues such as health care or the cost of the war in Iraq.

Looking for New Jersey's Sweet Spot

2008-10-19T02:06:00.003-04:00

Over the weekend, I visited Alyssa in Princeton where she is working at ETS. She and I went on a search. We wanted to find New Jersey, not just any old New Jersey, but the essence of New Jersey at its most scenic. This blog post is the story of that search.

At first we thought we'd found it in in Princeton. How can you not love a town which has a fake gothic university, fake tudor houses and looks so much like a gingerbread fairytale you just want to rip a piece off the pavement and wolf it down? When Alyssa pointed out that, despite a large student population, Princeton has only two bars in it, we came to the realization that we did not in fact love this town much, and it was not the scenic New Jersey we were looking for. But it had to be close. The scenic I heart New Jersey moment we wanted was out there. We knew it. We just had to find it, amongst the rolling hillsides around the town. So we set off on our bikes, searching.

We rode and rode, the sun came up, the leaves flamed yellow and gold. Then, suddenly there was a sign. Scenic Outlook, it said. Autumn Hill.

This had to be it.

Through the knotted woods we rode, over gnarled roots and exposed loam, so fast the foliage blurred around us. Past the rusting hulk of a bus. Paths twisted in all directions, we thought we'd lost our way. But then a second sign: Scenic Outlook.

Before us lay a calm glade with slabs of rock and a curtain of vegetation on its far side, through which the scenery opened: rows of prim town houses, fanning out like the wings of a dove towards the horizon. Green and beige corduroy bands of luxurious lawn undulating in soft swell to where, far off in the distance, the low purple crest of hills.

New Jersey. A feast for all senses, but especially the sense of irony.

Autumn Colour

2008-10-16T00:57:00.003-04:00

The countryside around New York is ablaze with colour at the moment ... the photo is from the Stokes National Park, in the north west corner of New Jersey, where I went hiking on Sunday.

True Story of How a New York Waterfall became an Icecream

2008-10-11T01:13:00.005-04:00

Saturday night we (Stacey, Abhishek, Alyssa and Kay) went looking for the New York waterfalls ... didn't know the city has waterfalls? It had three, done by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (an icelandic artist sounds like someone who would be able to create waterfalls, right?). Okay, they weren't quite real (but then again, nothing in New York is). One of them was under the Brooklyn Bridge. We went to see it on its last day, but it wasn't there. Ack! Switched off early? Switched off in respect of the plunge of Wall Street (not too far away)? I am still not sure, but there was no waterfall.

To console ourselves, we did the obvious: went into Chinatown, and gave the evening a happy ending with vegetarian dim sum and delicious ice cream to celebrate the Indian Summer.

Home is where the Harlem is

2008-10-01T01:49:00.003-04:00

I fought the subway, and the subway won. After 6 months of hour long commutes and too many late-night waiting for the train which never comes sessions and many other adventures, I threw the towel in at the Manhattan Transport Authority (and wished it had been something heavier). My living situation in Brooklyn was also never really something I was happy with. I will miss the burrough, though, and my cool roommates Nate and Jessica, and the neighbourhood of bars and restaurants, and Prospect Park, and the fabulous Park Slope Co-op.

I am really glad I had the experience of living there at all.

For the end of my stay in New York, I am living on 142nd Street, in an area of Harlem known as Hamilton Heights. Its two subway stops north of Columbia on the 1-Train, and only three subway stops from Times Square on the express A-Train around the corner. Most days, I ride my bike to Columbia. Here is my neighbourhood on Google Maps. I have a room with a lot of light on the top floor of an older (pre WWII) building on a quiet street. My flat mate, Kay, is from Texas and has a Texan's laidbackness and generosity.

The area here is completely different to Park Slope, which can be characterized (or caricatured) as where you go when you're earning very well and have, or are about to have, spawn, none of which is true of me. Hamilton Heights has a strong Dominican and other Latino population; there is a lot of life on the streets. Gentrification is happening here too, but more slowly than in the part of Harlem with which I am familiar (south of 125th Street).

Brooklyn's Underground Music Scene

2008-09-28T02:12:00.001-04:00

I'd heard a lot about it from my roommate Nate, but I waited until it was my last weekend in Brooklyn to go and explore it for myself. Brooklyn is where the bleeding edge of the music scene in New York is, and in contrast to the hugely regulated scene on Manhattan, Brooklyn has a flourishing underground scene in old factories and warehouses.

On Saturday, after my last shift at the Park Slope Coop, I went to the ironically named Silent Barn on Wyckoff Avenue, in Bushwick deep in the east of Brooklyn. The Silent Barn is an innocuously bland looking building which enjoys the camouflage of a large latino discoteca next door, which masks much of the sound it makes. Inside, hipsters thronged, taking photographs of each other; the air was thick with tobacco and marijuana smoke. A father with his two year old daughter on his shoulders, a cat, the kitchen complete with pots and fly strips, and old sofas on which people were reading beneath lamps all gave the place a homely feeling. It was under-ventilated and grafittied to the hilt. Beer was available downstairs, at prices which were way too legal for my liking (I always feel ripped off buying a beer in a bar in America). The bands played in the middle of a large open space; the concert was organized the the legendary event promoter Todd P. I saw These Are Powers (wall of electronic sound and guitars, fistycuffs between guitarist and someone moshing) and Marnie Stern (playing alone with her IPod).

Sunday I joined my now-ex roommate Nate (who photographs and blogs prolifically on this scene) at Death by Audio in Williamsburg. Here he is caught behind his own camera lens.

Kayaking the Lehigh

2008-09-14T01:52:00.000-04:00

Spent both days this weekend kayaking the Lehigh river in Pennsylvania, about 2 hours west of New York. I was with a group of 5 others, mostly from Columbia. There was a release on the river (an upstream dam shedding water) and it was crowded with other kayakers and rafters.

Had a shaky start (I hadn't been in white water for almost a year) but then got my muscle memory back and it was fine .... more then fine: the first trip I didn't swim (i.e. flip and have to get out of the boat under water), and I did the eskimo roll in running water ... and learnt to surf (poke your kayak's nose on a wave and find the neutral spot where you don't have to paddle much to stay where you are, despite the strongly running water).

We also did a couple of adventurous stunts, like sliding the kayaks down sloping rock faces, or even crazier: launching ourselves into the water from a sheer 5m rock face.

An Evening with John and Barack

2008-09-12T10:52:00.006-04:00

"Its crazy", Sampada said to me on hearing the news, "that you, most un-american person I know, are also the only one I know to have gotten a ticket". Yesterday, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, both John McCain and Barack Obama were in New York at a commemorative service at Ground Zero, and then in the evening both came to Columbia's Campus to give a talk on civil service at the Service Nation Summit. There were about 100 tickets given out to Columbia students; thousands applied to a lottery - and I got one. Even I, the most un-american person Sampada knows, was excited.

The event wasn't a debate; each candidate was to speak in turn. There was heavy security on campus, with streets being closed off and access control at the gates, and a fleet of white media vans from people like Fox News which lined Broadway with their antennas and satellite dishes. The university had set up a giant screen in the central plaza, and thousands of students who didn't get tickets watched from the Low Library steps; the university had a festive air.

I expected the event to be fairly heavily regulated, and did as requested - didn't bring a camera or other electronic stuff, came two hours early to get through the metal detectors and queues. As it turned out, it was surprisingly relaxed, I could have come much later and still gotten my seat, and almost everyone else there had brought cameras and moved around at will, going as close to the stage as they wanted to take a picture. There was little heavy-handed security visible once we were past the security checks. The MC had difficulty getting people to sit down and stop talking; it verged on chaotic.

Before the candidates, there were a series of other speakers, including David Patterson, the governor of New York, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, James Gaines, Editor-in-Chief of Time Magazine and Toby Maguire (Spiderman actor). There were also two relatives of 9/11 victims who had set up volunteer organizations, both of them spoke really well in a movingly non-sentimental way about what they had done as a response to their family loss.

And then, we were told by the MC that on the count of five seconds to live television, we should applaud (I thought they had machines to do this?). The countdown came ... the journalists (from NPR and Time) introduced themselves, and then with little fanfare, John McCain bounded onto the stage, and held forth for an hour on civic service, fielding some fairly tough questsions from the journalists along the way. What would you have done differently if you were president on 11 September 2001, was one question (gotten more people to join the army, his reponse). America will no longer be majority caucasian in the near future. Mixed societies exhibit less civil duty. How could you counter this? and so on.

I haven't seen McCain much on television (I spend much more time reading a newspaper than watching TV) but the impression he has repeatedly made from the media is of a fairly irritable old man. The impression he made on me live was much more positive: he was witty in a dry way, he was courteous and he gave clear answers, sometimes simple yes/no ones, to the questions that were put to him.

One of the oddest things about the experience last night was that every 15 minutes, the speeches of the candidates were interrupted so the media could go into an advertising break. So suddenly, one of the journalists would say "You have only one minute left to answer!" and then McCain would finish speaking, the microphones were switched off and the whole proceeding was suspended as the viewing public was bombarded with adverts on cars, food and toilet paper. And the candidate sat there on the stage and made small talk with the journalists. I've always assumed the adverts were inserted into a mixed version of a recorded speech, but the speeches of some of the most important men in America are actually interrupted by advertising. It was so strange.

After McCain had spoken for an hour, it was announced his time was up ... and then Barack Obama bounded onto the stage. The two men gave each other a brief embrace, then McCain left and Obama took the stage to whistles and cheers which were much more enthusiastic than those that greeted McCain. He has a great voice, deep and powerful. In some of the advertising breaks, he also stood up and came to the edge of the stage to speak to the crowd. I got to about 20 meters away from him.

Back in New York

2008-09-06T23:31:00.000-04:00

I'm back in New York. It was a hectic summer. I need to add a lot of blog posts still, I will do them retroactively. My summer was not blank, it was very very full.

It was bittersweet to come back to New York. I was missing San Francisco as we touched down (something special in the air at JFK airport); it didn't feel like coming home, it was muggy and unpleasant, and the flat was a mess. But it was really good to see friends again, and the people I know at Columbia. The photos are from Alissa Tan's birthday, celebrated at an Italian trattoria in the West Village. Alissa demonstrates here what it is to be bound at the ear with a yak sock to everyone's favourite PhD candidate in Tibetan Studies, and shopper of exotic goods, St. Ace.

Bike Tour in the 'Big South'

2008-08-31T01:25:00.003-04:00

A lot of my blog postings are following the pattern "In 2007 this, but 2008 that". This one is no different.

In 2007, after my internship was over, I hired a car and drove a crazy arc of thousands of miles all the way up the West Coast, through 4 states, ending up at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in which huge amounts of flammable anything went up in the air.

In 2008, I just got on my bicycle and rode a 750km loop south of San Francisco, to the Big Sur, on the spectacularly curved coastline hugged by the old Highway 1.

Children of the Vines

2008-08-09T01:09:00.005-04:00

Pierre and Nicki, old friends from my undergrad days in South Africa, flew over from Chicago to spend the weekend. We hired a car and drove up to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys where we encountered lots of wine and sweet scenery, but no Russian River (we looked all over the place for it and couldn't find it. Maybe we were drunk at this stage). The photo shows us looking for the river. Fortunately we could eat grapes along the way.

Pierre and Nicki also got to experience San Francisco in all its many-splendoured diversity, including Tenderloin junkies using our car as a shelter to get a fix and a man with a giant cloth snake around his neck stripping naked to sun bathe in the Mission Dolores park as we sat there on Sunday morning munching our fine baked breakfast. Bon Apetit!

Watts Tower, and Sandy in a House on a Hill

2008-07-27T00:30:00.006-04:00

As a last bit of tourism before turning my back on LA, I drove a cross-section across the city, from Beverly Hills and the yet-more-luxurious Belaire through south-central LA to the Watts Towers, built from old crockery, bottles and other junk by an Italian immigrant in the first half of the 20th Century.

On my way out of Los Angeles, I had an unplanned but fun stop over to visit my ex-Ihouse-neighbour Sandy at her parents' place in Hidden Hills, a gated community to the North West of the city. The house is high on a hill; as I sat there sipping a strong Lebanese coffee, eagles were circling around. Here's Sandy together with her father:

The Strange and Fascinating Land of SoCal

2008-07-26T23:00:00.010-04:00

In California, its common to talk about SoCal (LA, San Diego, Santa Barbara) and NorCal (San Francisco and the entire Bay Area, Sacramento, Santa Cruz). It's also common to turn your nose up on the one from the other. SoCal is all about traffic jams and Hollywood, Butox and silicon, beaches and bimbos. NorCal is about Silicon Valley geeks, hipsters and the great Smug Alert.

Long before I first went to California, I asked my friend Jackie about why NoCal was called NoCal and not MidCal, since there's about as much coast to the North of San Francisco as to the South.
"Honey", she said, "for us, San Francisco is where California ends. North of that, its all one huge dope field".

I'd spent my entire time on the west in 2007 in NoCal (and some weeks of it in the huge dope field too), and the wanderlust for the new and strange was now strong on me. I had to get down to SoCal and see the real California, not perpetually cold and foggy San Francisco, which has about as much beach-and-palm-tree culture as New York. As an added, powerful incentive, the fabulous Stefanie (whose room I stayed in San Francisco) was in LA/Hermosa Beach for the summer, taking care of her ailing grandmother.

So I worked my way through the 4th of July and took a Friday off in early August to drive down the coast on the old Highway 1, through the fire-ravaged Big Sur coast, where I camped the night, and then down further south through the border town of San Luis Obispo, and then I was there in the land of all of our collective dreams: SoCal. And driving into Hollywood was an eerie feeling, like I'd come back to a place that I knew so well, even though I'd never been there before. This was the America as its seen in movies and on TV.

I went down down laden with the prejudices all NorCalians have (even the part time NorCalians): it will be an one giant traffic-snarled metropolis and a bunch of superficial air heads working for Hollywood. And LA was a giant traffic-snarled metropolis, but I loved it. It reminded me of Johannesburg: vast, sprawling, in-your-face with bumper-to-bumper traffic across 5-lane freeways at midnight, full of ostentatious wealth. Except it had a giant beach, and lots and lots of palm trees.

It was on the giant beach that Stefanie introduced me to SoCal beach culture in the form of the amazing Hermosa Beach Volleyball Tournament. It went something like this: dress up in (skimpy) costumes to form Beach Volleyball teams. Be pretty good at what you do at the beginning, but drink as much as you can in the course of the day, illicitly, like beer from plastic bike bottles or vodka infused into pineapple, or tiny, innocent-looking bottles of sake, so by the end of the day your team can hardly stand, let alone hit a ball across the net. Spice the event up further by introducing penalties by which your team can make up losses; penalties range from 'bum crack beer' (pour beer down the back of your team mates and drink it from between their legs) through 'mayonnaise madness' (squirt mayonnaise all over your body and roll in the sand) to 'girls making out in the sand', this last one ultimately destroying the neighboring volleyball team because all the male members forget their game and stumbled over, fascinated, to have a look. It was hilarious.

(Stefanie and I just watched)

Alyssa and Me

2008-07-23T02:11:00.005-04:00

As a reminder of the good stuff on the East Coast (friends ... and muffins) here is a photo from my next-to-last day in New York, which I spent with Alyssa (or should I say: she spent it with me). It was her birthday-in-anticipation. We went to an exhibition by David Byrne, of The Talking Heads, and saw him, almost on exhibit: there was a flash-crowd-paparazzi effect when he appeared which could only happen in a world in which everyone is carrying cameras.

Sunday 7AM, hard at work with a group of 16 year old school kids

2008-07-21T01:52:00.002-04:00

... there I was early Sunday morning, running bright orange cones and caution tape down the length of the Golden Gate Park. I was working as a volunteer for the day on behalf of the San Francisco Aids Walk. I've been volunteering a lot this summer, for the first time in my life. The day was fun (although maybe not everyones idea of it)

Hiking to Alamere Falls, Point Reyes

2008-07-19T02:19:00.001-04:00

One of the many great things about working for Google is that you can find people who are interested and enthusiastic about doing any number of different things. On Saturday, I went for a hike at the Point Reyes National Sea Shore north of San Francisco with a group of other Googlers whom I hadn't met before. This is Clara, Greg, me and Alex.

It was a pleasant hike ... along the way we saw this little guy (not sure if he's a fox or a coyote, I suspect the latter) who was really curios and hung around us for a while. Here are some more photos on Flickr.

Kayak Reunion

2008-07-13T02:18:00.000-04:00

Since coming to America, my kayak, which I was using regularly in Amsterdam, has been in storage. A stall in New York is (like many other things there) way too expensive for me to afford as a student. I finally got the opportunity to get it out its case and put it together on Sunday - I am storing it at a place in Sausalito, on the bay just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd been there before (night kayak with Laurie last year), and although it takes about an hour by bike to get there, its a much better location than in the city.

I thought it would be less of a novelty here than it was in the Netherlands (its collapsable, and looks really sleek when you put it together) but I got a lot of people coming up and asking me about it as I was putting it together. Which took time - over two hours, in fact. "That will be a pleasure well earned!", said one man. "If you had one of those tupperware boats, you'd be in the water already". I had forgotten the pedals (its been two years) so I had to take it half apart again once it was almost together.

It was a pleasure well earned - I went up the bay to the north, past crowds of plump seals with fur which looked like the cheap leopard-skin blankets which we had as kids, sunning themselves in the late afternoon sun. They are fun to watch; they bark and sometimes have a spat: huge animals slapping feebly at each other with dainty flippers.

Just beyond the seals was another colony: of eclectic boat houses. These are nothing like I'd experienced in the Netherlands. This example was like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairytale (and yes, it is floating on the water). Some were way out into the bay, floating by themselves, like the new age pyramid below.

Mission District

2008-07-12T02:52:00.002-04:00

I live in the Mission in San Francisco. This is one of the best areas for a large number of reasons: its flat and sunny in a hilly and foggy city; it has a huge variety of cheap delicious food, great book stores and cafes and some of the best bars in the city. What's not to like about it?

It also has a huge amount of street art and murals. I spent part of today just walking around and taking some of them in. Here are a couple of photos from the walk on Flickr:

One of the projects I'd like to do before leaving here is getting a photo series of the some of the taquerias in the neighbourhood.

Fire Arts Festival, Oakland

2008-07-12T01:04:00.002-04:00

I'd had the Fire Arts Festival recommended to me in my first stay in San Francisco, so this year I made a point of forking out for the expensive ($45) ticket and headed across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland for an evening of ... fire. It was pretty much what the name says, although the name could really have been the Amazing Incredible Fire Art Spectacle without much exaggeration. Towering vortexes of flames (so huge they reached up to the overhead suburban rail, and caused the drivers to slow down and have a look, passengers plastered against the windows), giant sculptures repeatedly emoliated in flame, perpetually burning cacti and people dancing with high-voltage electric discharge were just a few of the things I saw.

Somethings, like the fire-spitting fire engine and the steam punk tree house, were familiar from Burning Man 2007. It was great to see them again, especially since I had made the decision not to go back to Burning Man this year. I didn't realize how much the Crucible Workshop, which hosts this event, contributed to Burning Man - and this seems to be one of their major fund raiser activities.
There are more photographs on my Flickr page.

Bike Loop with good Closing Music

2008-07-09T01:22:00.003-04:00

I have my Marin Bear Valley with me this time around. Its been getting increasingly in need of care and attention in New York (I didn't really fix it in any way for two years), so its been a real enjoyment to spend some time - and money - getting it fixed. New tyres, saddle, pedals, brakes, and on Saturday a new drive system (gear cones and chain). To celebrate it I took it for a 40km ride on Sunday, doing a loop around San Francisco to Lake Merced in the south west corner of the city, and then up along the Pacific coast. The photo of the crockery car is something I encountered on the way - its a city of eccentrics.

California is one of those cities (like Barcelona) which turns its back to the coast
and this is the first time I've seen the Pacific since coming back here. The suburb alongside the beach is called 'Sunset', which is a way of reminding people that live there that in the evenings in other places, such a thing occurs. In San Francisco, all you get is a deepening of the gloom as the fog blows in each afternoon. The beach itself is sandy, but that about the best thing you can say about it. The water is freezing cold and there are vicious back currents which make swimming risky.

My trip took me to the gorgeous Golden Gate park, which is San Francisco's equivalent to Central Park, and then (by plan) to the amazing Amoeba Records, in the Haight-Ashbury (back in the 1960's, this area was the center of the 'Summer of Love). Amoeba is a warehouse sized space packed full of music and DVD's, all of which you can listen to in their entirety at listening stations. This makes it both a very amazing place and a dangerous one, especially when - like me - you haven't bought any music for a while and the urge to do so is strong upon you. I walked out, two hours later and with $150 less in my account, with a varied selection of new and used CD's (if you're interested: King Kahn & The Shrines, Trentemøller Chronicles, Birdy Nam Nam, Bonny "Prince" Billy (Lie Down in the Light), Walter Meego (Voyager), Amadou & Mariam (from Mali, with contributions from Manu Chao) and Damien Jurado (On My Way to Absence).

Music isn't the only thing I've been spending money on recently. After a long time being a student, the temptation to spend when you're suddently on a full salary again is strong. Witness the bike, the $100 shirt and the $500 reading glasses (although that last item is more an example of what you have to pay in chronically under-insured America).

Working on the 4th of July

2008-07-05T01:56:00.002-04:00

I spent the 4th of July holiday at Google at work, because I wanted to avoid the crowded weekend and get another day off some other time ... it was an eerie experience being alone in a big building normally fully of people and activity, but not an unpleasant one.

I only saw parts of the celebration around me: red-white-and-blued kids getting on the train, the beginnings of a parade in Redwood City (en route to work), and then, on my return to San Francisco, my suburb - The Mission - turned into a warzone of firecrackers, fireworks, billowing smoke and patrolling police everywhere (private fireworks are illegal here, but it doesn't seem to be strictly enforced). I escaped by going to have a meal with friends on Potrero Hill, which is biking hell but has grand views down into central San Francisco - where somewhere among all the fog, the official firework celebration was going up into the air.

In the Mission

2008-07-01T01:59:00.001-04:00

Back at Google ... back in San Francisco ... and back at the same house with the same great people I got to know last summer. Stefanie - a middle school teacher - was heading off to Costa Rica for the summer but her grandmother is in a bad way so she is staying with her family in Los Angeles instead (I'm in her room). She came up to visit for the weekends; here she is in her West-African Made-in-India dashiki "Freedom Size" which she got for an event at her school, and now servers her as pajamas ...

San Francisco Gay Pride

2008-06-29T02:04:00.004-04:00

San Francisco is a very gay city year round, but in June with the Gay Pride march, it becomes ... um ... well, GAY. The rainbow flag replaces the American one throughout the city (or sometimes the American one m orphs mysteriously into a rainbow-hued variation), and thousands of people flock in from all over to party. There is a woman's march on Saturday lead by the awesome Dykes on Bikes, and the bigger main parade on Sunday.

Marriage was a big theme this year - not that I saw much of the parade itself, because I marched with the Google group (which had huge balloons, swarms of crazy bikes, and included the lead engineer as a friendly gesture from management). I was a contingent monitor, and also helped out with some of the monitoring during the celebration afterwards - essentially pushing people out of the way so that ambulance carts could get through to people who needed help.

Gay Colours

2008-06-20T01:46:00.003-04:00

Its that time of year again - San Francisco is awash with the rainbow flag as first the Frameline Film Festival and then the Gay Pride Parade party their way through the town. And Google has gotten in on the act - if you search on certain terms, like 'Gay Pride', the resulting page is not quite the normal one. Try it out. Its something which only happens on a few terms, and is in place for about two months.

Asymmetric Flights

2008-06-17T03:13:00.005-04:00

Getting out of the USA was quick and pleasant; I was at the airport an hour ahead of my flight and it wasn't a problem. One look at the grimly pulled mouth of the Alaskan Air representative assured me that me leaving only an hour to get back into the US was not funny at all. And she was right. As in Shannon airport in Ireland, the US has staked out is immigration and customs office in a foreign international airport, all the better to refuse you entry with, and that meant queues: queue to check in (small, I was late) and then another queue to let good ol' Uncle Sam take my good ol' fingerprints and then onto the next queue for immigration and then finally (just when I thought I was in the home run, and was about to start running because my plane was about to take off) the mother of all queues through the off-with-your-shoes-belt-and-laptop-in-a-separate-basket bit.

I made it back. Yeah. Always so much excitement and will-they-wont-they fun. And the silver lining was that I (on the waitlist) got put into the side of the plane that I didn't want to be on, but it turned out to be just the right one: the plane passed over the series of giant volcanoes which I'd previously blogged about from the ground level, stretching from southern Washington State all the way into Northern California. Then it flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco downtown before making a U-Turn to land over the crazy coloured salt fields in the south side of the Bay. It was a beautiful flight.

The sunset photo below was taken on the outward bound trip, the others from the return one:

So for the joy of asymmetry, here is my list of the most striking differences between the USA and Canada:

Canadians are even more polite than Americans. They stop for you if you're jay-walking across a road.
the public transport in Canada is both usable and used, although cars are only marginally smaller than America's hulking monsters
coins for dollars, and attractive money

And here's what's the same:

checkerboard street grids with exciting names like "5th Avenue" "Broadway" and "64th Street"
Fast Food Nations
quarters, nickles and dimes

GoogleShare

2008-06-17T01:50:00.001-04:00

Google had a volunteer day today which took me up to the top of the San Bruno Mountain State Park battling invading aliens with about 40 other Googlers. The photograph is my fellow intern, Altaf, from Bangladesh. The invading aliens were hemlock and monstrous tendrils of ivy; i'll never see this plant in the same way after the experience of ripping out 8 meter strands of it from the side of the mountain.

City Fjord

2008-06-15T02:05:00.006-04:00

Today I discovered that one of the beauties of Vancouver is that with a short bus ride and about half an hour in a kayak, you're out in a gorgeous Fjord, the Indian Arm, with steep forested sides with snowy peaks behind them, and the illusion that you're in the heart of nature. Its gorgeous.

I had to do an eskimo roll in the sea kayak to prove that I could take it out by myself - the first time I failed, but they let me try again, and it worked fine. All those pool sessions in Columbia were worth while.

I kayaked for 5 hours and can feel it in my arms. I can hardly type, so I'm keeping this post curt.

Vancouver

2008-06-14T01:36:00.005-04:00

I've been in Vancouver since Tuesday night at the SigMOD Conference on databases. When I told friends that, they said "wow, database conference, that sounds like fun" (that needs some heavy sarcasm punctuation of some sort). Actually, it wasn't half bad - stimulating and perplexing for me at the same time, some of the presentations I only half understood. But there was some good stuff. It was my first academic conference.

The city is beautiful - verdant green, with snow-capped mountains off on the horizon over the water. At the same time, its eerily quiet, to the point that I find it disturbing. Its not a small city but it sounds like a quiet village. About the only sound is the buzz of the seaplanes taking off constantly. Large parts of the city are encrusted with tall condos of green glass which adds to the feeling both of its greeness and its sterility. I guess after New York, any city is going to seem sterile. You can't get less sterile than New York.

Renoogling

2008-06-10T01:42:00.000-04:00

Back in San Francisco, at the house I was living in last summer (yeah! Stefanie! Laurie! Nicki!). And back at Google (which makes me a born-again Noogler) where I am working on the adwords backend. That's the system which supplies the Google web page with appropriate adverts - and helping out on it is a lot more interesting than it probably sounds. I never thought I'd say that about advertising.

Graduation!

2008-05-19T03:29:00.003-04:00

My family (parents, sister Val, brother Pete and aunt Jackie) all came to New York to celebrate my graduation ceremony with me. Here I am with my parents in a graduation robe which looks a little like a Hogwarts nightgown, just after the SEAS Class Day. It was great to have them there - and man, is it great to have graduated!

Strictly speaking, I should think about winding this blog down now...

Alva Noto Concert

2008-05-19T00:38:00.000-04:00

Good electronic music is relatively rare in New York, but tonight, I made it to a great performance by Alva Noto and other artists from the Noton label in the Project. Alva Noto is originally from Germany but is resident in New York. The visuals were great, and the acoustics in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn were much better than the narrow space would suggest.

Window Washing and Window Dressing

2008-05-17T00:39:00.001-04:00

Every year at the end of Spring Columbia spends a huge amount of effort sprucing up their campus for the graduation ceremony. For weeks before hand, flowers are planted, windows washed and hedges clipped. Even the dustbins get swabbed down. Here are workers washing the Lerner facade.

Dissent Networks of the Supreme Court

2008-05-13T00:54:00.000-04:00

Although I have blogged a lot about my New York experiences in the last two years, I have rarely blogged about what I am really here for: living it up in the party capital of the US .... uh .... no, I mean working like crazy at grad school. But I've done some things which I have found really interesting. So I'm going to post a couple of results from some recent work.

This semester I did a great course on Network Theory, or the study of complex systems represented as theories, under Professor Dragomir Radev from the University of Michigan. What I liked about this course is how it applies to so many fields: computer science, of course, but also biology (protein-protein interactions), politics (committee structure of the US House of representatives) or linguistics (word networks like WordNet)

As a final project for the course, I wrote a paper called Dissent Networks in the US Supreme Court. Based on data from the Rehnquist I court (1986-1995) I linked the Supreme Court justices based on the extent to which they dissented together against the majority opinion in the court rulings. Then I ran a clustering algorithm on the network to cluster it into different blocs. Here is an example of the work, from the year 1989:
The abbreviations for the Justices are Ma=Marshall, Br=Brennan, Wh=White, Bl=Blackmun, Re=Rehnquist, St=Stevens, O'C=O'Connor, Sc=Scalia, Ke=Kennedy. The size of the nodes represents how much the justices dissented altogether, and the strength of the lines shows how much they dissented with each other. The colours represent the dissent blocs as identified by the clustering algorithm. The clustering is what is interesting: based on the dissent links, very clear blocs emerge. For 1986-1989 it was pretty much the same picture as the one shown above: heavily dissenting veteran justices Thurgood Marshal (the first black justice on the court) and William Brennan from previous liberal courts joined with their younger colleagues Stevens and Blackmun to form a consistent dissent bloc in a conservative court lead by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

Things get really interesting after this, because the older justices retire and are replaced by conservative nominations by first Reagan and then George Bush, the dissent bloc falls apart. Here is the situation in 1992, look at how different it is:
It is only after the nomination of Justices Ruth Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer by Bill Clinton in the mid-1990's that the clear dissent bloc re-emerges, although in a weaker form.

Five Boroughs

2008-05-06T01:07:00.000-04:00

It was a crazy weekend. Beers on Friday night, a half marathon early Saturday, night in a bar with friends thereafter, and too many cranberry vodkas and not enough sleep later up early again (with a hangover) to do the 43 mile/69 km Five Boroughs Bike Tour, which makes a giant loop through Manhattan, the Bronx (token bit), Queens, Brooklyn and ends at Staten Island. I rode with the weekend's partner in sports craziness, Marie, and Ryan and Mark from Columbia's Asian Studies Institute.

The tour was a great experience: most of the roads were closed, and it started off cool and misty, with a dream-like feeling of cycling down the canyons of Manhattan with no traffic light to stop you.

The cyclists took over entire freeways and used bridges otherwise closed to cyclists, like the Verazzano Narrows bridge. For me, a highlight was crossing the amazing (and spectacularly rusting) Queensborough bridge. We did it in about 5 hours, and then I got home, showered ... and went out again to meet friends.

Well-Earned Bagel

2008-05-04T01:20:00.000-04:00

With a head cold, five hours sleep and very little training, I stumbled through a half marathon this morning, and got a half-way decent time (1:47). Marie, a friend from IHouse, joined me. The race went along the Coney Island waterfront and then headed up the Oceanview Parkway to Prospect Park, ending pretty much right in front of where I live.

In Berlin after the marathon, you can get a beer. In Sweden, it was a coffee. In Brooklyn it was - what else - a choice of bagels in familiar variations: cinnamon raisin, sesame, onion. A bagel never tasted so good.

High Literary Concentration

2008-05-01T01:04:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about New York is that it is relatively easy to get to hear internationally famous people. Tonight at the 'Town Hall' theater, as part of the PEN World Voices literature festival in New York, I saw on one stage in quick succession Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje (English Patient), Annie Proux (Brokeback Mountain), Ian McEwan and South Africa's own Rian Malaan. Tomorrow, Zimbabwe's Chenjerai Hove is taking part in a reading for the same festival.

$50 000 000 anyone?

2008-04-24T01:12:00.000-04:00

... 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!

2008-04-18T00:35:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-12T01:57:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-03T00:42:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-03T00:38:00.000-04:00

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.

Bike Trip to the Pallisades

2008-03-25T00:49:00.000-04:00

Today I took advantage of the great sunny weather and biked with Stacey and Ryan and Mark, a couple of her class mates, over the George Washington Bridge to the Pallisades in New Jersey. After the monumental ride over the bridge, 10 minutes of cycling hell going the wrong way down busy vehicle streets full of roadworks got us to cycling paradise: towering sandstone cliffs, the expanse of the Hudson and the illusion that you have a stretch of unspoilt nature all to yourself.

(Non)Resident Alien

2008-03-20T00:58:00.000-04:00

The IRS calls me a 'nonresident alien' - I love this term so much, Stacey gave me a t-shirt with it on as a gift. Here is one mean alien and his cool friend:

Brooklyn Night Life: Orthodox Jews and Monkey Town

2008-03-15T01:35:00.000-04:00

I wanted to go out in Brooklyn this weekend to get to know my new burb better, and made the last-minute decision, after my coop shift, to head over to Monkey Town in Brooklyn which I had read about some time back in the New York Times. Its in Williamsburg, which takes about half an hour by bike (longer by subway!) and the bike ride is interesting, because its one of those trips that passes through a shifting sequence of ethnic neighbourhoods. Most distinctive is the Orthodox Jewish area of South Williamsburg. On Saturday night at around 10:30pm it was abuzz with bearded men in huge furry hats and white leggings and women dressed in dark simple dresses with prams.

MonkeyTown was a real treat: its a bar-restaurant in which the back portion is dedicated to multimedia shows, with the help of four giant projection screens on the walls of a cube-shaped room. Comfortable sofas line the screens and you can lounge back and be washed over by sound and images. This show had a line-up of ambient electronic bands (Xela, Zelienople and Helios). The music reminded me a little of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. It was unexpectedly relaxing, and a really good evening's discovery of what Brooklyn has to offer.

A Small Piece of Socialism: Tasty and Cheap

2008-03-15T01:11:00.000-04:00

In America, the politics are so skewed that words like 'liberal' or 'socialist' are demonized. Even something which might maybe in passing be construed as vaguely left-leaning leaning gets damned as 'pink'. So it is odd that my move to Brooklyn has brought me into something which is as socialist an experience as I've had so far - more so than anything I experienced in a year living in communist China, or in socialist Zimbabwe in the 1980's.

Since January, I have become a member of the Park Slope Food Coop on Union Street. This place is something of an institution in Brooklyn; it was founded in 1973 and is now one of the largest member-run coops in the US. Food coops are fairly common here - friends of mine have talked about them before - and they work something like this: the coop, which looks like a supermarket, is either only open to members or members get special discounts, in return for which they are required to work for no pay. The Park Slope Coop is members-only; they check your ID at the door. They mark up everything they sell by 20%, which means it is significantly cheaper than a normal supermarket. And better yet: the food is really good quality; almost all of it is organic, and a lot of it is sold in bulk (read: minimal packaging).

I have to put in 2.5 hours every four weeks, on a regular shift. I am in receiving, which means I bring stuff out onto the shop floor and pack it onto shelves. This particular shift, I spent most of my time in the produce section. It was actually really enjoyable to pack fresh fruit and vegetables onto the shelves, in the same way that gardening can be enjoyable. Here's me stocking the lettuce:

There are only 20 full-time employees at the coop. Its in an old building next to a fire station, compact space which can get really crowded but there is high turnover, so the food is always fresh. It is strange to go in their and see beautifully coiffed women working the tills, or people who look like - and probably are - graphic designers shouldering bags of beans.

Schunnemunk in Autumn, schunnemunk in Spring

2008-03-15T01:05:00.000-04:00

The first hike of 2008 and the last hike of 2007 were both at the same location: Schunnemunk Mountain, close to both the Hudson and the Westpoint Military Academy, about an hour's drive north of New York. It was really great to get out of the city again - small things like the colours and the textures of tree trunks were fascinating; it felt as though I were in a refreshing sensual shower, even though the landscapes showed no sign of spring. Here are some photos from this year:

And these ones are from last year's Autumn trip; I never got around to posting them.

American Slang

2008-03-04T00:42:00.000-05:00

Here's some slang which I've heard a lot here in New York but never outside the US.

back in the day - some time back in the not-too-distant past
like - most young Americans say this word about 5 times in every sentence, meaning 'to say' 'to be' or just as a random filler with no meaning, as in 'she was, like, get out of here'
to luck out - contrary to what I thought, this means to be lucky
ghetto - as in 'that supermarket is so ghetto' or 'isn't the B-Train ghetto?', both of which have been said to me. Means poor and, implicitly, black.
douche bag - an insult, literally a bag for squirting liquid into body orifices
hipster - Brooklyn is full of these, its what young arty people are before they morph into yuppies
sketchy - is the American equivalent of dodgy in British slang - uncertain, or dubious
junk - penis, as in 'man, that urinal is all open - anyone can see your junk!'

More Than 1% of US Adults Behind Bars

2008-03-04T00:38:00.000-05:00

This story was on National Public Radio this morning as I listened it, working from home with a cold:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

States spend on average 7% of their budget on the prison system. In the NPR interview, they were talking about the 'Prison-Industrial Complex' which was offering jobs in depressed areas. I'd never heard the term before, but there is even a Wikpedia entry for it.

Gives a whole new meaning to America being the home of the free.

Network of Supreme Court Cases

2008-03-03T00:58:00.000-05:00

One of the courses I am doing this semester is 'Networking Theory' under Professor Dragomir Radev from the University of Michigan. I've just been working on the representation of the Supreme Court decisions as a network. I didn't get any good visualizations yet, but I'm hoping to carry on with this for a later project.

Tenement Museum

2008-03-02T01:05:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to carry on the momentum of discovering New York that I had last semester with the fabulous History of the City of New York class. Today I went to the Tenement Museum with Sampada - its an old tenement building on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. They are tracing the stories of the 7000 (!) people that passed through there between the 1870's and 1931. The museum shows how hard the lives of the people that lived there were - but also tells a lot of interesting stories on the way.

Damn -forgot my camera.

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

2008-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-24T01:08:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-21T01:17:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-15T00:26:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-05T00:24:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-05T00:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Brooklyn: How Sweet It Is

2008-01-27T23:49:00.000-05:00

When you cross one of the bridges leading into Brooklyn, there are road signs in the normal US green and white motorway colours, but with unusual messages:
Brooklyn: How Sweet It Is or Brooklyn: Believe the Hype
on entering. Or on leaving
Leaving Brooklyn: Fuhgeddaboudit! and Leaving Brooklyn: Oi Vey!

Since the beginning of the month, I've joined the very long line of people who have come from all over the world to become a Brooklynite. Brooklyn is the most populous borough in New York, and the second largest (after Queens). Its got a strong identity within New York; when the boroughs merged to become the present city in 1898, Brooklyn was the only one in which there was fierce resistance. Some still lament the occasion as The Great Mistake of 1898.

I haven't seen too much of my new home-borough yet, but what I have seen I really like. I live here on the edge of Prospect Park, Brooklyn's equivalent of Central Park (and created by the same team, Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux). It takes about an hour by train to get to Columbia, but that is about the only negative thing about the move. Brooklyn's suburbs, here and elsewhere, consist of row after row of fine brownstone houses; it has a vibrant music industry and a lot of good cafes. Sometimes it reminds me of San Francisco. The hectic of Manhattan is far reduced here, and where I live, there is a strong neighbourhood feeling.

I am sharing a flat with three others: Jessica is a student teacher, Nathe a neurologist (actually a blogger and photographer who does neurology on the side) and Darla an architect.

Moving to Brooklyn, I got to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I have painted my room and gotten some of the furniture I need; slowly the pile of boxes in the middle of my room is getting smaller and the visible carpet is getting bigger.

Swamp Things

2008-01-15T00:11:00.000-05:00

Coming out of the Everglades, without showering for three days, my hands were blistered and felt like claws from the paddling, I was feverish and aching all over.

But man, did we have an amazing time!

I spent three nights in the mango swamps there with friends from New York, Stacey and Jason. We were in a canoe and a kayak, and did a round trip of about 50 miles, the first part of which was on the ocean and the second in the 'backwaters', the complex waterways inland. The first night was on the beach, alone, where we built a huge bonfire. On the second day, we were paddling towards Shark River to get into the backwaters when suddenly behind us, a huge dark fin rose out of the water. Yeah! I thought. A shark. I'd wanted to see one. It went under. Then it came back up again, a lot closer.
"Stace!" I yelled. "Maybe we should hug the shore more!"
As it turned out later, they were not sharks but dolphins. And we saw a lot: playing around us in groups, or fishing in pairs.

After the night on the beach, we had booked space on 'chickees', simple wooden platforms on posts in the water which provide a campsite (its impossible to get out in the dense mangrove swamps). The second day, after the 'shark' sighting, we misjudged our speed and were a way away from the chickee as the sun was setting. It was a tense but beautiful experience to be paddling as the sun was setting: crazy colours in the sky and suddenly flocks of pelicans and other birds filling the skies. We ended up in the almost complete dark (no moon, and cloudy skys) navigating our ways by the stars. Luck was on our side: the group already in the chickee had tiki torches we could see through the mangroves, and we found it from their light. It was about 8pm when we arrived.

Most of the expected swamp things stayed away: we saw only one real shark, one alligator (and he was the show alligator to the side of the park's main camp) and were attacked by mosquitoes and gnats but not eaten alive by them as we'd feared, so the 10 dollars I'd spent on th bee-keeping hat were wasted, apart from this great fashion shot by Stacey.

Beach Life, Miami Style

2008-01-06T20:10:00.000-05:00

South Beach, Miami at 8pm on a Sunday night in a stylish townhouse and I'm surrounded by snoring people who have made it through 36 hours before succumbing to sleep. Today is my friend Jason's birthday; we began the celebration at midnight, went out dancing until about 5am and then went skinny dipping in the tepid Atlantic, at which point I came back to sleep but the others stayed to watch the sunrise with a bottle of champagne and ended up spending the day on the beach. The weather was difficult to ignore: although it is the middle of winter, it was a gorgeous day - just warm enough for swimming, but further pleasantly mild.

Before I arrived, almost all of my knowledge of Miami came from the 80's TV series Miami Vice. I haven't seen much of the city itself, but South Beach could have come straight out of the series: a mixture of pretty beaches with clear blue water, white and pastel art deco architecture, elegant cafes, endless tattoo parlors, houses straight out of the pages of architecture magazines and porn parlours - and that all on one city block. The streets are populated by an amicable mix of tourists, bikers, skateboarders, cubanos and muscle men. South Beach itself is on an elongated island reachable from the mainland by a series of bridges; like Manhattan, it feels like the distance from the mainland USA is much further than the lengths of those bridges.

Tomorrow, Jason and I are meeting Stacey and heading into the Everglades for a three day kayak tour

Two Thousand Grate

2008-01-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

My resolution for 2008: do more blogging.

It has been a while since I had the chance to do a posting. My last academic semester was unbelievably hectic - and as it turns out - was not the last. I am staying on at Columbia, at least for another semester, to do research into database processes on modern multi-core architecture. This is a combination of an opportunity and me just being a sucker for punishment!

Christmas in Ireland: Mist, Rain, Showers, Wind and Dampness

2007-12-31T20:56:00.000-05:00

Spent Christmas in Ireland with family and friends. My sister Val had rented a small cottage in county Kerry, in the south west of the country. My brother Peter flew over to join us, so there was a high concentration of family and lots of accompanying noise and chaos.

The countryside where we were staying was beautiful, but most of the time it was obscured by thick curtains of rain - it rained and rained and rained. Good for catching up on sleep, recovering from jet lag, talking, eating, drinking strong beer in pubs and watching television to all hours of the morning. We got out one day and made it part of the way around the Ring of Kerry to the island of Valencia, the rain intensified in the course of the day and on our return, new waterfalls and streams were thundering down the sides of the hills.

One of the stranger moments of the holiday was a drink in the small town of Killorglin, near to where we were staying. That the drink was not in a pub but in a tapas bar was a sign of how Ireland is becoming more cosmopolitan, even in small towns. But stranger still was the fact that the bar was in a converted church. When I asked about it, I was told that it didn't really matter, because it had been part of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland!

The picture is in Doneraile Park close to Mallow, where we spent the last day before my departure.

Tour de Bronx

2007-10-22T01:52:00.000-04:00

Most people, when they hear the words "The Bronx" think of things like high-rise housing projects, crime and urban decay. I know that was something of the image that I had of it. It is the poorest buroughs in New York and one of the poorest areas in the US.

I'd only been to the Bronx twice before today; now, having cycled through it for a 40 mile 'Tour de Bronx' ride, I have a better idea of what it is like. And that is: high-rise housing projects, crime and urban decay *and* a lot of other things: sumptuous mansions overlooking the Hudson and the Jersey Pallisades, Lobster Restaurants and yacht life around City Island, stunning views and an old stone fort at the New York State University Maritime College, suburban living (with picket fences) in the neighbourhoods along Long Island Sound.

The event was free, chaotic and fun; it drew a mixed crowd which included me, Julia Henderson and Yinbel, the IHouse team. It was organized in part by Transportation Alternatives, an organization which pushes for fewer cars in New York. They have a long way to push.

New York (Still) Cares

2007-10-21T02:02:00.000-04:00

Last year I painted hopscotch squares on a school yard in Queens; today I pasted category labels onto Harry Potter and Charlotte's Web books with other engineering students at a school with the great name of MS 394 K in the heart of Brooklyn. It was all part of the New York Cares day, was a lot of fun and had me itching to read some of those books.

This is our book-categorizing team, and the school librarian who had a sweet, lilting west-indian accent.

Newtown Creek

2007-10-18T01:14:00.000-04:00

Another History of the City of New York tour took us to Newtown Creek, which is the heavily polluted stretch of water between the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, east of Manhattan. The tour was lead by Jack Eichenbaum, a retired Geologist who does tours of Queens. Here is a New York Times article on him.

The section of the walk in Brooklyn was in the Greenpoint neighbourhood, the polish enclave I have blogged about before. The entire waterfront here is fenced off, decaying industry which is really frustrating because of the beautiful views of Manhattan which the it hides. This is what the Empire State Building looks like from there:

Hiking Upstate, Driving Downtown

2007-10-15T02:07:00.000-04:00

Long day in which the official driver of the hiking club's trip out to the High Point State Park in New Jersey (me) missed his alarm and awoke half an hour before the group was supposed to be picked up. A hectic taxi ride to midtown Manhattan and even more hectic drive back up to Columbia later, and I picked them up only 15 minutes late. Whew! I enjoyed the driving, and the hiking, through trees all turning red and gold on a beautiful autumn day, was great. This was the first hike on which we didn't see the Manhattan skyline off in the distance. This site of the hike was the highest point in New Jersey, which is about as exciting as the highest point in the Netherlands.

When returning the car in the evening, I had the experience of driving through downtown Manhattan in the middle of the day. The operative word here is pushy: everyone is, and if you aren't, you're lost.

The Gunks

2007-10-07T00:40:00.000-04:00

It may sound like a disease, but the Gunks is not, in fact, something you have (and scratch like crazy) but a place you go to. Preferably with with plenty of climbing gear in beautiful autumn weather and some of the fine climbers from the Columbia Rock Climbing Club, which is the experience I had today.

The Gunks are in Minnewaska State Park in upstate New York, about two hours north of the city.
View Larger Map

They are are series of sheer, 20-30 meter high basalt cliffs which provide excellent, varied climbing. I have a lot of indoor experience, but this was only my third time to climb outside. It was a great experience, but at the end of the day, my hands were stiff and sore - they really had the Gunks.

Kayaking on the Hudson

2007-09-30T02:13:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-29T01:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-19T01:41:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-11T00:46:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-05T00:23:00.001-04:00

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.

Climbing Mount Shasta

2007-08-26T21:04:00.000-04:00

I have become an outdoor-urban-hybrid. I'm sitting sipping a latte in a coffee shop in Shasta City, and the promise of it kept me going most of the day: up the volcano and back down again and enjoy a latte at the end.

There are a string of volcanoes down the Pacific Coast: Rainier (Washington), Mnt Hood, Mnt St Helens, Mnt Jefferson and many more in Oregan and Mnt Shasta in Northern California. Driving down Highway 97 is a parade of one icy cone after the other. This is Mount Hood, rising above Oregan wheat fields.

Since I couldn't climb Rainier, I decided to climb Shasta in the NE corner of California. It is lower, but at over 4300m its not a hill. I camped out last night on the side of the mountain, in a grove of dwarf pine trees next to a spring of glacial water and got up at 3:30 am to do the climb. The Milky Way was so bright it looked like a cloud, and experiencing dawn break across the glaciers was a special experience. Its been a while since I last did this (Mount Kenya) and I had forgotten that going up a volcano is hell: you make a single step up, huffing with the altitude, and the shale mountainside slides down around you. Coming down is like walking on the moon: you make kangaroo leaps and let the shale slide you down.

It was a tougher climb than I anticipated; especially the last summit stretch onto the plug which involved some real climbing, but without ropes and alone on a rock face where you had to check every handhold and foothold wasn't going to crumble away. In retrospect I shouldn't have done it - it was risky - but I'd climbed up too much shale to give up. And sitting up there made it all worthwhile: a panoramic view in all directions and the opportunity to watch lazy clouds coalescing and dispersing in the dizzying volume of air below.

American Radio

2007-08-25T21:27:00.000-04:00

This trip has involved a lot of driving - which I've really appreciated - and combined with that I've had the opportunity to sample some of what is broadcast on American radio frequencies. FM here is mostly music, and although there are a lot of stations, its still hard to find something worth listening to. Mixed in with the commercial stations there are many religious broadcasters who play Christian pop and rock or host talk on issues like "The Day of Rest and the American Work Ethic".

AM hosts a lot of talk radio, and it gives an indication of how polarized America is. The recent intelligence report on Iraq was a hot topic two days ago, but the commentators took wildly different spins on it (we are winning militarily and now they are moving the goal posts vs we cannot win because of the political situation in Iraq). On a syndicated show on one of the CBS stations, environmentalists were made scape goats for Hurricane Katrina (they prevented new sluices being put into place), the collapse of the WTC during 9/11 (fire-dampening asbestos stripped) and car accident fatalities (pollution controls make cars lighter). One virulent right-wing show that I kept on getting was that of Sean Hennity who makes a living out of liberal-bashing (and in America liberal is a dirty word). A lot funnier was Doctor Laura who's show (at least the part of it I heard) consists of people phoning in with some kind of heart wrenching story (my daughter was abused by my husband, for example, or I lost the love of my life through my own selfishness) only to get told that they are total morons or they are unintelligible and hurry up, why don't you? It is very entertaining (for a short while).

Mount Rainier

2007-08-24T12:02:00.000-04:00

The Mount Rainier National Park is a couple of hundred kilometers south of Seattle. The drive out there ran the gauntlet of some of the ugliest strip malls (worthy of New Jersey) leading rapidly to a gorgeous natural setting. In America, Paradise is easy to get to, and comes with a view point.

I would have liked to climb the mountain, but it requires the kind of experience with crampons and ice picks I don't have, and the organized trips had been booked out months in advance. So I spent a couple of days hiking around the tree zone and back again. Thursday I got up really early and saw a large number of animals, one after the other: coyote, deer, squirrel and beavers.

I hiked a lot through alpine meadows, but I also climbed up above the tree line where the snow bridges were all melting.

I left Mount Rainier really early in the morning (got up before dawn) and got these images in the Reflecting Lake at the base in the morning light.

Cassie and Roy

2007-08-22T02:50:00.000-04:00

I'm staying here with Cassie and Roy (whom I know via Vivienne). They've been very hospitable and given me a welcome bit of suburban comfort in the middle of my trip. Both work in the IT industry, so we could exchange a lot of tech talk.

Cassie and Roy live together with a frisky shoe-chewing husky named Shadow, who was a lot of fun once she got to trust me.

Seattle: Urban Interlude

2007-08-22T02:26:00.000-04:00

Seattle is a beautiful city, compact core with a lot of water in all directions (lakes and the Puget Sound). I took a break from the outdoors here for a couple of days, sat in a lot of cafes and drank a lot of coffee, spending time in bookshops or rubbing salt into my own wounds by visiting the University of Washington (they turned down my masters application).

I am a long-time listener (and member) of the Seattle-based radio station KEXP which has a style in music very similar to mine (i.e. eclectic) and a lot of good attitude to boot. It has been great to be able to listen to them on FM radio, and a fun experience to walk around Seattle and recognize things I've heard them mentioning repeatedly on the air: that's where Queen Anne is ... there is the Paramount Theatre ... the High Dive ... Silver Platers ... Easy Street Records. I went to a free in-store concert at Easy Street last night; local band Minus the Bear played and signed copies of their new album Planet of Ice.

Here are some other images: totem pole in the Pioneer Square district, and the Space Needle with a bit of Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project building.

Oregan and Portland

2007-08-20T01:46:00.000-04:00

I motored through Oregon in a day, reaching the city of Portland in the evening. The first part of the day was spent hugging the coast, through a series of beautiful bays and small towns which were all demarcated as tsunami danger zones. In the early afternoon, I was seeing little of the ocean and the going was slow, so I headed inland from Reedsport along the banks of the beautiful Umpqua river to the Interstate freeway (for anyone who has never spent time on the US road system: an interstate, other than doing what the name says, is a big freeway with a lot of traffic and higher speed limits).

My overnight in Oregon was a great experience: 20 minutes east of the city of Portland in a suburb with the unlikely name of Troutdale, I stayed at the McMenamins Edgefield. Doesn't sound too amazing, I thought when it was recommended to me. But the hotel really is beautiful, with a strong alternative feel, covered with murals. Its a restored poor farm project (part of Roosevelt's New Deal) which has been renovated with loving attention to detail, and its not just a hotel/hostel but a microbrewery (its own beer, wine and pear brandy) with a whole complex of bars, music stages and wine-tasting cellars. Here's a selection of some of the murals.

I was really tired when I arrived, so although I drove into Portland hoping to see something of it, I ended up just walking around a little and driving back to the hotel to get some sleep. I did go through again the next morning for breakfast, and what little of the city I saw I liked a lot: for one thing it seems to have one of the most extensive tram networks I've seen in America.

Kanaka

2007-08-20T01:09:00.000-04:00

Kanaka Rajan, who I know from the Columbia Hiking Club, was supposed to be joining me on this trip. She had to cancel at the last minute, because of a family emergency. Kanaka: if you're reading this, I hope things are going well with you right now, and I'm sorry you couldn't have joined me.

Tree Hugging, Clambering and Cussing

2007-08-17T12:13:00.000-04:00

Redwoods towering hundreds of meters above your head give a sense of reverie and awe. Redwoods blown over the hiking trail by storms so you have to clamber over, under and around them give a sense of awe too, and a redwood intimacy I had never expected, but also a lot of frustration: it was painfully slow and difficult to hike a couple of miles through the forest in these conditions. Of course, I had ignored the warning sign.

Here are some images of my hike:

Night in the Forest

2007-08-17T01:38:00.000-04:00

I'm taking an on-the-fly planning approach for this trip, with a rough big picture to which I attach details as I go. Most of the time this works really well, but its high season, so inevitably the situation arises which arose to meet me when I arrived in the evening at the Redwood National Park in the North West corner of California: the campsites were all full, and the ranger didn't look like he'd be breaking any rules to squeeze in one more tent. But, he said, you can go back to the hiking trailhead and go a ways down the trail and camp in the wild overnight. I had all the equipment I needed (including a water filter), and I didn't have too many alternatives.

It was about 7pm by the time I set off, and I got to a gravel bank on the Redwood Creek after about an hour. As the sun set, the forest came alive with sounds: something (ducks?) was plopping in the water in front of the tent the whole night, other things were rustling in the undergrowth and sometime in the night, some kind of insect scrabbled repeatedly to try and get into the tent. This might all sound a little like the Blaire Witch, but spending the night in a forest by rushing water with incredible stars overhead made me really glad the campsite was full.

Eureka, California

2007-08-17T01:27:00.000-04:00

There is a remix from Mylo with an overlay text which goes

Well this is all about my problems to get out of drugs,
cause I had enough of that,
I've had the college,
I've had the earing the money,
and the material trip,
I just decided I was going to find a new way of life
And so i took off on my bycicle,
Peddling up to highway one,
and found myself one day in Eureka California.

Today I understand this text a little better: Eureka, one of the larger towns in Northern California, has a bohemian core of beautiful, multicoloured Victorian-era wood buildings in an ugly suburban shell. I didn't spend a lot of time there, but long enough to see these funky murals:

Touring Culture

2007-08-17T01:13:00.000-04:00

Cyclists are a frequent sight on Highway One. Beautiful beaches, plentiful campsites and a winding coastal road might sound like ideal cycling conditions, but I'm not sure I'd do this (and I'm an avid cyclist). The roads are hectic with car traffic, and the cyclists have to share them with the motorists. Share the Road is the admonishing sign you see all the time here. But its pushed to extremes, because not only do you share the road, you also share the freeway (cycle lane is on the right) and share the insanely narrow iron bridges with a blinking light system which is supposed to warn thundering oncoming traffic of a cyclist on the bridge. Yikes.

The hectic traffic is not just cars, but hulking white "Recreational Vehicles" and even more hulking mobile homes: huge boxy buses and typically towing a 4x4 but housing just a couple or a family. Its an alien camping culture for me.

Mendocino

2007-08-16T22:55:00.000-04:00

There is nothing in Northern California, said a friend (from Southern California). Just one giant marijuana plantation. Northern California is vast, and - at least when you've been living on the East Coast of the US - a little empty. I drove through any number of small towns with a sign on the outskirts saying something like Boonville Pop. 440. So far I haven't seen any marijuana.

Mendocino (Pop 824), where I spent last night, is typically small but its striking: a lot of old Victorian-era wooden buildings and distinctive wooden water towers, some of which have been incorporated into the buildings around them as extra space. It is perched on top of spectacular headlands with flocks of screaming birds and bays which surge with orange kelp. All this picturesqueness has inevitably made Mendocino the setting for a number of movies and TV shows (East of Eden, Karate Kid III, Murder She Wrote).

Highway One

2007-08-15T22:38:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid spending the holidays at the coast in Port Alfred, I used to fall asleep dreaming of the rolling motion of the waves. Now I am falling asleep dreaming of the side-to-side motion I've been doing all day as I wind my way up the Pacific Coast on Highway 1, the old coastline road which hugs the Northern Californian coast. You get breathtaking views of the Pacific as it changes, as though the scenery were seen through a kaleidescope and the same landscape gets filtered by a new colour at every shake: blue, then silver, then grey; cool fog follows sunny yellow and on and on through countless hairpin bend and hills and moments that you're really, really glad your concentration didn't just lapse.

I met some divers at the Salt Point State Park who were collecting abalone - I'd only seen the huge shells before (they sold them for ashtrays in South Africa), here is what they look like freshly hauled up from the sea before they are ashtrays:

The diver that caught them told me the details of the cooking process: pry, hammer ,cut, hammer, boil ... and then they don't taste of much apart from what you cook them with. You may as well eat tofu, even if you can't dive for it. Salt Point was beautiful, with a lot of strange rock formations.

Eagles are a constant sight on the coast ... they hover along the cliff line on updrafts, looking for prey, then swoop up and back and repeat.

Nikhil taught me a smart trick: if you dismount the lens off your camera and reverse it, it functions as a macro lens. Here is me playing around (the plant is about 1cm wide). The whole area is flush with flowers and berries.