$50 000 000 anyone?

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

Pierre!

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

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

Rent

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

Moving Road Movie

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




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


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




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




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

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

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

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





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

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

Roomies Four

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

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

Bike Trip to the Pallisades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climbing Comp

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

Daily Dose of Liberty

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

Um.

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

Piece of Paper Behind Me

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

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

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

Post Superbowl Pre Super Tuesday

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

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

S is for Security

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

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