Weekend on Thin Ice

Last weekend was the International House Community Weekend, yet another example of why its worth living in a shoebox to be here. The community weekend is an overnight trip to the countryside so you can get to know others in IHouse. This time it was to Cold Spring, which is in upstate New York about two hours from the city, and the same place I was hiking last year. We went there and back in a yellow New York school bus which you see everywhere on the streets in the mornings here, so everyone who is over a meter and a half tall has their knees crammed up against the seat in front and survives the trip on pure good spirits.







There are a couple of organized activities to get to know each other, on the lines of: give us your most embarassing story - I told about my tenth most embarrassing. And there were some outdoors adventure-type activities like figure out a way of getting the group across this pit of stinking mud using only these two planks.

But most of the time there was free time. I went with a flashlight onto the frozen lake at night with Alyssa and James and won the night ice-sliding contest. We built a huge bonfire and sat around it until late at night in a snowstorm with several bottles of wine (this is a great combination). On Sunday we went on a hike into the winter-brown woods and played snowfights and frizbee on the ice, which was creaking and snapping around us.

Googling "Almonds"

Friday the university organized a trip to the New York offices of Google in downtown New York. Its the second biggest Google location in the US (their headquarters are in California), taking up a floor and a half of a building spanning an entire city block.

"Welcome to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory" said my classmate Ken as the lift doors opened, and it was true: everything in the Google office felt a little magical ... and a little divorced from reality. Games and hi-tech toys everywhere, bright primary colours, only young people, and a work policy which allows you to spend 20% of your time on a project of your choice and come and go as you please.

"At Google, we believe everything is possible" said the young engineer with no hint of irony at the start of the presentation on the company and its technology.

Gaining weight at Google is one of those possible things: there were kitchenettes there every 100m full of croissants, bagels, fruit, sweets and nuts. "Just help yourself - everything is free" said Rebecca who was showing us around. I tried to get a discrete handful of almonds, but the machine overfilled the cup I had with an embarrassing roar. The excellent gourmet lunch in the restaurant was also free, for everyone in the office, everyday.

So Google found its way to my heart through my stomach. I applied for an internship and have a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Late Winter

Winter is two months late, but its here. Its snowing outside! Up to now, the weather has been eerily warm (I was in a t-shirt in Washington). It is my first winter here in North America, but its not a normal one...

The semester has just started, my new year's resolution is to make it an easier one: search engine technology, advanced databases, cryptography (and no killer operating system weekends any more wuhu)

I've been spending my hours holed up at the station (WBAR) doing web design for their relaunch, in the company of thousands and thousands of CD's. That's a work incentive!

Cleveland: Fasten your Rust Belt

I went back with Susanne to Cleveland, Ohio (on the shores of Lake Eerie, about half way between New York and Chicago) for the last part of the trip we made together.

The Greyhound there was an experience in itself ... it was an overnight bus with a huge cross section of people traveling on it, chaotic in a 3rd world kind of way (everyone gets on the bus, then suddenly everyone has to get off it again and go to the next bus; if you can't find a seat, too bad, despite having a ticket, you stop repeatedly in the middle of the night and have to get off the bus, even if you're continuing with the same one, and so on). Here's a picture of the bus station in Pittsburgh, a city I almost went to study in, at 3am at which stage Susanne wasn't interested in having photos taken any more!

Cleveland is a rust belt city, struggling to find its feet again after the industry from its heyday in the 20's withered away. It combines a prohibition-era style with industrial gothic and a feeling of desolation.




Susanne lives with three other German students in a wooden house in Treemont, about 5 km outside of Cleveland, and works as an intern in the Metro hospital, where "saving lives is just the beginning". The hospital is the one in the city which is the last recourse of people without medical insurance (there are a lot of these in the US); she sees a lot of patients who are seriously ill with easily-preventable diseases. She is counting down the remaining weeks of her visit.

Philadelphia and Chinatown #5

Next stop on the Chinatown bus tour was Philadelphia, where we went to visit Farrel, my traveling companion of 6 months in the trip up through Africa.

Farrel was on his way from living in Washington to living in New York when a new film making project in Philadelphia grabbed him ... we watched parts of the films and went drinking in the gaybourhood around the corner from where he lives (in a cute three-story flat, one room per story, nicknamed a holy trinity).

Philly made a really good impression ... there was art there everywhere, but especially in the form of huge murals on the sides of buildings. These are some of them that we saw as we walked around ... and we deepened our understanding of American history, too, Philly is good for that. And had some of the best noodles ever in the Chinatown there, in a restaurant where the chef stretches them from dough just before cooking them.

Warming to Washington

I never thought that I would like Washington as much as I did ... it must have been the huge number of museums there, all of them free, displaying the most amazing things like the Apollo 11 capsule in the Air and Space Museum. In fact, this museum had pretty much everything you could wish for in it: Spaceship One, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Wright Brothers flyer.



But topping the Air and Space museum was the Museum of the American Indian, very modern and interactive, beautiful building but mostly because of the guide who took us around and gave us a personal insight into what it is like to be a modern Native American.

If you like books, the Library of Congress is a temple.




And to top it off, we danced to Jazz in Georgetown and slurped beer under lots of dead stuffed animals to the sound of a bluegrass band in Madams Organ, Adams Morgan, as Washington revealed itself to be a Southern Town, an illusion made much stronger by the warm temperatures and flawless weather.











Immemorial memorials, many many things which were cut with that pompous greek-column cutter and lots of cockroaches in our hotel room: that was Washington too.

Under The Bridge at Midnight

If you're going to spend New Year's Eve under a bridge, then the Brooklyn Bridge is a good choice. We (me, Susanne, Honza, Joel and Verina) didn't plan for it to be that way, but our just-off timing meant turned the original plan to be on the bridge at midnight into the situation of us under it as all the fabulous fireworks went off ... somewhere else where we couldn't see them.

We cracked our bottle of champagne open anyway, eying the police cruising around (drinking in public is the quickest way to make you feel like a criminal in the US) and then walked up the bridge against the streams of people coming down.


With an additional bottle of wine and strong-and-foul brand Czech spirit to keep us criminal - and warm - we made it over the bridge to Brooklyn. There we were able to persuade a cab driver to take all five of us in his cab, which turned out to be a DJ Cab where you could pick your songs off a menu, so we drove into Williamsburg for the party-until-late part of the evening to the fabulous sounds of Nina Simone.

Chinatown Bus to Boston

Coastal cities around New York are accessable with "Chinatown Busses" which are run by Chinese operators and leave from Manhattan's Chinatown. They're cheap, fast, comfortable and reliable.

Our first of several 36-hours-in-a-city trips was with LuckyStar up north to Boston, which had the extra benefit of an eat-as-much-as-you-like Chinese buffet for US$5 en route. We stayed with Carola and Dirk, friends from Berlin.


Boston is a pleasant mix of a European and North American cities, sprinkled with top notch universities. This is the Frank Gerry Strata building at MIT; we also toured Harvard. Boston was a good five degrees colder than New York; it felt like winter there for the first time.

The Brooklyn Saladbowl

On Boxing Day we got to see more of the Brooklyn Saladbowl ... beginning with one of the three Chinatowns in New York on 8th Avenue/Brooklyn (8 is a lucky number) where we had authentic-tasting jaozi in an authentic-looking noodle shop and were called authentically lao-wai (foreigners).



From there we moved through an orthodox Jewish enclave and caught the subway to the desolate-but-famous Coney Island .






A little bit futher along to the east is the Russian Enclave of Brighton Beach where the shops are fulled with caviar and sausages.





And back to the north through Prospect Park is the Yuppy enclave of Williamsburg were we blended in and shopped.

Christmas: Fairytale of New York

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
- The Pogues, Fairytale of New York


Finals ended on Dec 21st, grading on Dec 23rd and on the same day Susanne arrived from Cleveland where she's in the middle of doing a medical internship, and we spent Christmas here together.

After a period of intense work and without family, neither of us felt like it was really Christmas. The weather didn't help either: the temperature was hovering at around 8 degrees at midday, so it felt more like spring than winter. At Susanne's suggestion we used Dec 24th (heilger Abend in Germany), into a day of last-minute express christmisification. And it worked.

Starting from Morningside Heights, we walked right across Central Park, through huge flocks of black birds (starlings?), around the reservoir and into the southern part of the park (new territory for me which is a sad-but-true indication of how little time I've had to explore the city). Like children in a fairytale lost in the forest, we followed our noses to the boat house's hot spicy apple cider; it was a beautiful day and it was flooded with late afternoon light the same colour as the cider in our cups.

Further down, Central Park ends (my perspective) at 59th street where huge banners advertise luxury renovated apartments going for a festive two and a half million greenbacks. This is a corner of New York along 5th Avenue where the filthy rich stroll in self-parody and the window shopping torpedoed my last cynical anti-Christmasness. They must have teams of artists and a budget I'd rather not know (its art, right?)

Further down 5th Avenue is the bombastic Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Centre, decked out in rasta-coloured lights, dazzling with millions more watts of camera flashes from the surrounding throngs. Giant glittering snowflakes on the sides of buildings chime kitch ... kitch ... kitch. It was interesting to note that, apart from this, the lights in public spaces in New York were modest (and that word is almost an insult here).




Further down we deliberately gave ourselves some last-minute Christmas shopping stress just before the doors closed (its the season for it), had some hot chocolate in front of the open-air ice skating rink in Bryant Park and a glass of expensive wine in a design bar just off Times Square before heading back to a laid-back meal with Abel, a friend at IHouse from Germany.

Not a conventional Christmas, but a day which truly left us feeling like it was Christmas.

Back (on the Other Side of the Exams)

I've emerged! The semester lies behind me! I finally have time to blog again, even if its as a batch.

By the time my finals came around, I was already coming out of the most stressful part of the studies. At a certain point, it was difficult for me to give exams any kind of serious attention, because I was mentally already in a post-exam state: enjoying myself.

The finals were mixed: where I thought I did well i did okay, and where I thought I'd skidded and burned I got a good grade.

After two weeks of time mostly off line, I can face a laptop again. Here goes with the makeup blogs.

City of Extremes

The tourist board calls New York the city of superlatives: the biggest this and the most that. Well, its true. Here are some of my own.

New York is the most expensive place I have ever lived. Not only living costs (I pay as much for rent of a tiny dorm room here as an entire house boat in Amsterdam) but also in everyday costs. A beer in a bar costs $5, and unless you add a dollar tip you'll be ignored for the rest of the evening. A sandwich will set you back $5. And the most expensive jar of Marmite ever now has a place of honour in my fridge.

New York has the most rats. Its full of them. At night, Columbia swarms with leathery tails and gry bodies, they jump into the trash cans and rustle around; they scamper in front of you from hedge to hedge.

New York has the fattest people I've ever seen. The cliche about America is true - obesity here is normal.

Music music music

Been to a couple of good music concerts here in New York, and about three weeks ago there was a huge number of bands playing here as part of the College Music Journal Marathon. This is the Rosewood Thieves - I went to an in-studio performance hosted by a Seattle radio station, KEXP.

I am DJ'ing my own show too ... I'll post details later!

New York Marathon

Single image from the New York Marathon held on November 7th ... just took an hour off to see some of the first people coming through Central Park. Am thinking of taking part myself next year ...

Thanksgiving: A Day Off

Its been a while since I last had the chance to write; and the evil force which has stopped this blog this has a name: Columbia University. It keeps me bound to a laptop programming assignments every day, all day, seven days a week.

But, having worked through Thanksgiving (no turkey) I took a break. Last night when I went to see some live music in the lower East Side with Pierre (friend of mine, a French engineer from I-House) and today I got up late and we had lunch at Tom's Restaurant, a classic American diner on Broadway. This is Pierre and my Capacinno (never seen that much whipped cream before).




I have been really frustrated about not seeing much of New York, so I spent the day doing just that - walking around the city. I took a subway trip out to Brooklyn/Greenpoint. In New York you regularly come across the salad bowl effect: suddenly everything is in Spanish, or Korean, or Yiddish. In Greenpoint, it was Polish. The signs on the shops, the books and magazines, the beer on tap; suddenly everything was Polish. Even the water tower had a huge white and red flag on it, in case you didn't get the message.



This Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord was also their in the neighbourhood. Just south of Greenpoint is Williamsburg, which is a newly-hip suburb. There is a word you hear in New York all the time, and that word is gentrification. Williamsburg is a good example of this; it must have been a rough neighbourhood 20 years ago, but today the thrift stores/99cent shops and Polish pharmacies suddenly give way to record and book stores and stylish coffee shops.









Thanksgiving Thursday had grim weather, but today was a fabulous late-autumn day. It was hard to get down to the water (the East River, which separates Manhattan and Brooklyn/Queens) but eventually I found a way down and took these photographs of the Williamsburg bridge and Manhattan as the sun was setting. It was a really peaceful moment, and there were groups of other people down there enjoying it too.





After taking this photo, I walked across the bridge to Manhattan and all the way up to Times Square (must be between 5 and 10 km walk) where I met another friend, Michael, to catch a movie (Borat)

Putting my Mark on New York

It's midterm time here at Columbia, so were're even more highly harried than normal, but back in a day when I was blissfully unaware what a midterm was I commited myself to the "New York Cares Day". What sounds like a contradiction-in-terms is in fact a volunteer day where people do something for the public space in the city. I went with a group of other graduate engineering students to "Public School Number 5", deep in the heart of Brooklyn, where we swept and repainted lines on the school courtyard. I spent most of the day painting hopscotch squares with Caroline, an electrical engineer from Canada. Turns out I have a hidden talent.

New York really is like a salad bowl, with areas where everything will suddenly be written in Spanish, or Hebrew, or Russian. The area around Public School Number 5 was black, all the teachers and students were black, and things there cost half as much as they do in Manhattan, according to the bagel-and-coffee index.

Life as a Nonresident Alien

Recognize the description? That's me, according to the US government ... in fact my full title goes something like status-holding nonresident alien offering dependent personal services. You have to love whoever thought that one up. I want to get it printed on a t-shirt.

Unscathed over Breakneck Ridge

Last Sunday I got out of bed really early. It was a beautiful autumn day and I was all set to go on a hike with the Columbia Hiking Club ... only I was on the waiting list and they were full so I ended up heading out of New York with a couple of other waitlistees (Jon from the WWF and Querin the crazy robot man who I know from IH). We took a train up the Hudson valley which runs right alongside the water most of the way - train with a view - to the little town of Cold Spring ("George Washington camped close to here, drank from the spring and gave it its name") which is a picturesque village not far from picturesque Westpoint Academy on the banks of the Hudson.

We hiked up into the forested hills north of the town, an area called "Breakneck Ridge". The leaves are changing colour and the forest gives the impression of being deep in nature - until you get to the crest of the hill looking over the wide expense of the Hudson and get the sound of buzzing of scores of speedboats and, from some points, the needle-like skyscrapers of Manhattan on the horizon. But it was a big suprise how easy it is to get out of New York, and how beautiful and untouched nature is out there.

First Visitors

I've had the first visitors here ... couple of weeks ago my Beijing Buddy Rene came to visit New York. Great to see him again, although we had way too little time to catch up with the 5 years since we last saw each other. Rene got to be the first person to experience sleeping on my room floor. That he did it at all is a signe of a true friend; my room isn't geared to guests. There were good meals and good talks that went on here with the club of ex-expat Beijijngers.



Couple of days later I had a great meal with Inge and Chris from Amsterdam; they had come to see New York in four days - and did a good job in that time.

NJ Turnpike: Going Bravely Where I've Never Gone Before

Last Friday I pushed the frontiers of what I know of America by hiring a UHaul van to go and pick up my boxes, my bicycle and canoe, which had just cleared customs. For those of you who don't know it, UHaul is the McDonalds of the moving business in America; they are on every street corner, they're dirt cheap and not too good for your health (if you have to deal with their call centre, or get hit by one of their trucks).

So I left the island for the first time: drove up Broadway and over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. The bridge is the first one to span the Hudson river (downstream its all tunnels) and its stunning: a bit like the Golden Gate, all huge curving pipes so high it gives an expansive view across the breadthy river. I wasn't brave enough to grab the Kodak moment. On the other side, I experienced something which is a guaranteed groan-enducer in New York: the infamous New Jersey Turnpike, a toll road where you have to pay according to how long you drive down it. And on the other side of that, after much dreary suburbia, lay Newark City and a group of paunchy, middle-aged men armed to the teeth, behind the kind of metal detectors the people in Heathrow only dream of. Yes, this was the US Customs, who with that amount of firepower on their hips are surely doing a good job of protecting America's frontier.

They stamped my documents, I collected my stuff and my eight square metres have become a lot ... cosier.