Toyi-Toying in New York

Friday I helped a group of other South Africans organize the South African Cultural Hour at IHouse. Thee have been a number of these (French, America, Greek-Iranian) and ours was the last. And the most chaotic. The group broke into infighting at the least slight. Responsibilities shifted, food didn't come, music was there and then wasn't. And despite everything, it was a big success. There were lots of South Africans in the audience and at some stage they were all singing Shosholoza on the stage, and then later fiercely toyi-toying.

Severe Weather Alert

Today was monsoon day in New York. I've never lived in a place where it rains as hard as it does here - even in the tropics it's not like this. Today a 10 minute walk to campus under an umbrella had me stomping through streams of water and soaked on arrival. Makes you sorry for the rats...

Queens-Brooklyn Graffiti Biketour

I set out on a bike tour today with a group of friends from IHouse on a long-discussed and much-procrastinated bike tour to go to Flushing, way out beyond La Guardia airport in Queens, and home to a sprawling pan-asian town (lots of Chinese and Korean shops, and a couple of Japanese ones too). The route is supposed to be really interesting because it goes through all kinds of ethnic neighborhoods.

But it didn't turn out as planned. Abel, Alissa, James, Linde and I cycled across Harlem and Randalls Island in the East River which is made up of only sports fields and bridges. On the lies Astoria, a greek-mediteranean neighbourhood where we stopped for a welcome cup of espresso (it was a bitterly cold day) in an italian cafe with old men hanging around and a huge Forzza Azzurri banner on the wall. And it was after that our trip got derailed because we decided to do a short detour through Long Island City, and it was then that the Flushing Tour became the Graffiti Tour.

Long Island City is part of Queens just across the river from Manhattan. The number 7 train there goes under the East River emerges into an area full of graffiti with some amazing views of the Queensborough Bridge and Manhattan skyline beyond. I'd seen this from the train, and I'd always wanted to go there ... so we tried to find it by following the spray paint. The signatures and the colour and the overhead metro line got us to 5 Pointz, a building covered with graffiti on all sides.

By that stage it was too late to go to Flushing ... and we wanted to see more. So instead we headed south into Brooklyn, through the polish neighbourhood of Greenpoint (which I wrote about in another blog) and on into Williamsburg. Most of the waterfront there is fenced off, but Abel, who had been there before, knew of a place where the chain links were hanging loose, so we got in to one of the grandest views of Manhattan I know.



Like Queens to the north, Williamsburg it also covered in Graffiti ... we kept on seeing more and more. This is one of my favourite pictures from the trip:





Cycling back over the Williamsburg Bridge was an experience in itself: leaving Brooklyn, Oi Vey (and that's official). Back on Manhattan Island we cycled back up the east side which was all clean of graffiti ... and from there Brooklyn and Queens looked a lot less attractive!

Wanaque Reservoir

New Jersey, said the girl from New Jersey at a dinner party, is the armpit of America. There is nothing there but suburbs and roads for people to get through it or out of it.

I've crossed through New Jersey a couple of times now, and its almost true. Its an armpit. But she forgot some things: suburbs, road and strip malls. Gigantic ones that go on forever. Ikea follows Starbucks follows Macey's follows Mr Sleepy follows Micky D's follows Comfort Inn follows Starbacks follows Barnes and Noble and on and on and on, each with acres of parking.

But today Jersey revealed that every lymph gland has a pretty side ... or that before it became the Garden State they use to blurb up their number plates it must have been really lovely. I went hiking in the Wanaque Reservoir, in northern Jersey, with the hiking club at Columbia. 5 hours spent hiking around the reservoir, brief visit to a cave full of tiny, sleeping bats, past a waterfall and up through the 'valley of rocks' full of moraine from the ice age where bears scratch the bark of trees (though we only saw the bark, not the bears).




Its good that you can get out of New York relatively quickly - although even from that distance, you can still see the silhouette of Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon.

Spring Break in Chicago

After UIUC I spent the weekend in Chicago with Pierre and his wife Nicki. Nicki lives in Chicago's Near North in the 9th floor of a 30-something floor building. These appartment blocks are shooting up all over this part of Chicago as people rediscover the joy of living downtown.

It happened to be St Patrick's that weekend, which is celebrated in a big way in many parts of the US. We didn't see the parade, but thousand of people in cheap green beads were milling everywhere. The long-suffering Chicago river, previously used to get rid of masses of offal and sewerage and later having its course reversed (so the offal and sewerage would go elsewhere) gets spiffed up by having huge amounts of green dye dumped into it for the occasion. Its all about green awareness.





Chicago has some awesome architecture, both from the last century (lots of very fine art deco) and this new one - the pavillion of the Millenium Park by Frank Gehry is stunning. I have more photos of Chicago up on Flickr.









On Saturday evening we met up with Mark McNally (also a friend from Wits and now living in Chicago) and went for an excellent meal at a restaurant called the Green Zebra before diving back into some of the St Patrick's late-late revelries.

Campus Envy

Universities in the US are very competitive. The university equivalent of the Fortune 500 is the US News list of America's Best Colleges which ranks universities here by faculty. Rankings have all kinds of affect on research funding and getting the best faculty and students. Last time I looked Columbia - which is more famous for Law, Business or Journalism - had some kind of middling to average rank for computer science. But the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (try saying that after a night of solid malt whiskey drinking) is way up there among the top 3 computer science campuses in the country. As well as having stellar faculty and doing really important research, its also famous for being the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the birthplace of the supercomputer HAL in the film 2001, the one that went crazy and tried to kill everyone.

I went there to pay a long-overdue visit to my friend Pierre who is completing a PhD in computer architecture. We were undergraduates together at Wits in Johannesburg. The computer science department at UIUC is vast and exudes well-fundedness and the campus is beautiful. The last time I saw a gym like the student one was a luxury spa in Hamburg. I spent a really good time with Pierre and some of his research group ... we went out on the town (at UIUC you get a pick of two towns to go out on - we were in Champaign) and took advantage of bars offering a huge choice of beer, talking until way into the night about pretty much everything but computers. Cheers to studentville!

My First Eskimo Roll

Better than an eskimo nose kiss (and with a lot more chlorine) - tonight I managed my first eskimo roll in a white water kayak in the pool at Columbia. It wasn't pretty but I got from hanging disorientated underwater to right-side-up!

Things I'm Getting Used To (but maybe shouldn't)

I have been in the US for 6 months already, and some of the initial culture shock that I had is beginning to wear off. Its a good thing, but I also feel how things which used to seem so extraordinary are becoming everyday. So I thought I'd list some of them here, as a reminder to myself as much as to anyone reading this. Here are some of them - there are a lot more.

• pharmacy chains, lots of them, open 24 hours
• disposable cups, plates and trays - use once and throw away, even in expensive cafes
• coffee to go - everyone walks around slurping from these paper mugs before tossing them
  
• or water to go - those that aren't drinking coffee are sipping water from bottles
• ... and/or chewing gum (cliche but true)
• ... and/or talking on a cell phone
  
• chain me up: there is a Starbucks on every second block in Manhattan (see above)
  
• baggy clothes and jeans worn half way down your hips
• armed policemen (also in baggy clothes, but less stylish)
  
• prudishness
  
• being id'd at every bar I go into
• ... to drink bad beer at high prices
• media advertising (i.e. adverts for tv and film - everywhere - including ...)
  
• yellow taxi cabs (media advertising on the roof)
• craziest mix of people in your average subway car (including me)
• the US flag everywhere: the average subway car, churches and gyms are just the start
• spanish as a second language, by the banks, by the metro, even by the army to recruit (yo soy el army!)
• bagels, especially as sold from little silver caravans on the side of the road for a dollar with some cream cheese
  

I'm becoming Americanized, I think, or at the very least gradually New Yorkified ... but there's a way to go yet.

Google!

Today I was phoned by Google and told I had an internship there over summer. I will be working as a test engineer at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.




Wuhu!

I'm unabashedly happy... I went out with as many people as I could find to celebrate.

Snowboarding!

Last week Wednesday outside the library, horizontal bullets of ice whipped passed the window. This weather makes you studious, and also very happy if you happen to be going snowboarding, which is what I did with a group of other international students on Friday at Hunter Mountain in the Catskills. The conditions were fabulous and it was great to be back on a board again.

The Superbowl Experience

Sunday was the the Superbowl here. Its the day on which Americans eat (and presumably watch more television) than on any other day apart from Thanksgiving.

Like Christmas or an election, the build-up to it is unavoidable.

Today there was an article in the New York Times analyzing the half-time adverts. Apparently there were subliminal references to violence and Iraq. I know nothing about American football, but I suspect the game might contain subliminal references to violence anyway.

So how was the Superbowl itself? I have absolutely no idea, and man, its bliss!

Flushing Chinatown

Today I went with Michael to the third and last unexplored Chinatown in New York, in Flushing, Queens. Its at the end of the 7 metro line, and getting there you pass a New York hodgepodge landscape of graffiti and scrap yards and amazing views across the east river to Manhattan, and the world trade fair site which turned into a spaceship in Men in Black.

The Chinatown in Flushing is more of a Panasiantown: mix together a mass of Korean and Chinese restaurants and supermarkets full of tanks of live fish and evil-looking vegetables, throw in a Quaker building, a bit of the Smithsonian institute, a gray stone church and the obligatory McDonalds and Starbucks that every part of New York has and there you have it.

Great tempura!

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.