New York!
I'm in New York. Did I mention I was leaving? Everyone seems pleased with the weather here. It's about like the middle of winter in California.
We're staying for the moment chez one of Kevin's friends in Queens. He's super-nice. The night we flew in we met David and Morgan in Manhattan for a dinner of chic Afghan food and very chic and expensive desserts while listening to techno.
The next day, we got up at the crack of 1 pm (which felt like 10, of course) and spent the afternoon wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well, I was happy to wander aimlessly. Kevin was intent on finding the section of modern art. We wandered past Byzantine stuff, and medieval European stuff, and whole rooms full of armor and swords (one section of European and one section of Japanese), and through a reconstructed Egyptian temple and by temperature-regulated Egyptian sarcophagi, through entire reconstructed 16th and 17th century European rooms full of furniture and plates (and the coolest bed ever, in dark blue velvet with a canopy 10 feet high), rows and rows of mostly unlabeled paintings and chairs and sofas and glassware, Greek art, Roman art, rooms full of suggestive terracottas... And then Kevin started to get more and more agitated when we kept circling through the Greek area and a hall of statues where it looks like a reception was being set out, so I had to take the map and find the modern art section for him. There was an impressive room full of Manets and Picassos and such, and an exhibition of paper collages and lithographs, but after all that we had walked through, it felt sort of like an afterthought.
In the evening, we ended up at what really must be called bab5 East, although there are slight differences.
New York is a foreign country. I think before when I was visiting, I was content to just speak French and *be* foreign. But now I'm not, so there's this sense that it must be home to me. People have strange accents and use different expressions ("to stay or to go?"). They look and dress differently: it looks like winter, everyone scowls all the time, and I've seen more "couture" than after a week in Berkeley. Bagel shops are run by Thai people. Food is expensive even by bay area standards. Strange people always seem to be jumping into holes in the ground. However, I'm still endlessly pleased with the transit system. The bus and subway run on the same cards! You can by a 7-day pass for $21! You can get from somewhere random in Manhattan to Queens at 3 am without a car!