nawl

When we last left off, there had been arrivals in a strange city, museum visitations, and strange cultures.

On Thursday, we took the train to Princeton and split up for dinner with different sets of friends. I narrowly missed going to Hooters, but did manage to acquire some vanilla fudge. (I have been on a quest for the past week to find fudge, and have mostly failed.) The most interesting part of the evening was a chance encounter at the Small World Cafe involving Waterloo people and French Canadians which showed that the world really is small, at least among ivy league academic types. New Jersey is very flat and quiet after New York, and the constant low roar of life (cars) here was audibly gone at night. There were even geese.

I spent Friday afternoon walking along the river from 46th street to the bottom of Manhattan. Apparently a major city project to prettify the piers is underway, including a mostly decent foot and bicycle path that runs along the water in exactly the direction I randomly chose to walk. It was interesting to see the different areas in various stages of completion. Some piers were nothing more than vast expanses of rotting logs sticking out of the water, others were abandoned stretches of concrete. I walked by several helicopter landing pads. I was about to exclaim about how odd New York's definition of a "park" was when I ran into a very obviously newly developed commercial area along the water around Chelsea. There seemed to be quite a bit going on inside some brightly colored warehouses, but it was a bit forboding to foot traffic. Further down there were more areas that could reasonably be called parks.

When the parks ended, I found myself in a mall-like structure called the World Financial Center. Hmm. It was all glossy glass and polished marble, full of corporate cafes that sold $10 salads and Gap stores and the like. Then I went up a level and found myself looking out of a wall of glass onto a panoramic view of the World Trade Center site. Somehow it was actually spookier to be in a building that felt like the ghost of what the World Trade Center must have been like, and where you might end up having lunch or buying flowers or the like if you worked there, than to look out on the site from the side that tourists are normally brought to and see merely the cavity of buildings I've never seen. When I walked over to the other side, I discovered that the subway station underneath the towers had been reopened since the last time I was there. I had no idea it had even survived. That was also spooky. The platform that looked out on the site was full of tourists taking pictures of themselves against the view.

I took a train from there to upper Manhattan, where I'd been given a random intersection to meet at. Only I apparently made a bad choice of lines and a bad choice of directions when leaving the station, and ended up taking an impromptu tour of Harlem (which was a strange combination of burned out buildings and snazzy new ones, and people on the street who kept asking if I was ok) before discovering that the street I thought I was supposed to be on ended in a cliff, which I scaled by stairs only to discover that it disappeared again into a gate which turned out to be an entrance to Columbia University. The view from the top of the cliff over the park that contained it and Harlem was actually quite nice, but I realized that the park felt a bit odd, like a fissure in the pavement that manages to almost completely cover nearly everything else I'd seen until then.

On Saturday we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I was most impressed upon reaching the other side to see large buildings apparently owned by Jehovah's Witnesses. There was even a tower labeled Watchtower, and large amonitions written on the side of the buildings to read the bible and the other publications the Jehovah's Witnesses distribue. We wandered a tiny amount around Brooklyn, then subwayed back to Manhattan for a very snazzy Italian dinner at a place called Briocco where our waiter was quite suave and Italian-accented and introduced the specials using the first person: "I have steamed asparagus, with a sauce of..."

After dinner, we had big plans to go out ballroom dancing. Our first stop was supposed to be a free open house of a pretty standard ballroom dance place, so we were a bit surprised when the elevator doors opened and we found ourselves at "Big Apple Ranch", a gay and lesbian country-western dance night. Apparently our hostess had a bit of confusion with dates. So we made our way to Cachet, a swing dance held in a hidden little corner off Times Square. I ended up being most popular with a crowd of older guys from New Jersey, and by the end I was so tired that I was content to watch some of the best dancers do an amazing spastic Lindy Hop.

Today we had lunch with another one of Kevin's friends from grad school who moved out here to teach high school in the Bronx. He had some pretty amazing stories, including being alarmed to discover that some of the parents he was meeting at parent-teacher conferences were younger than he was (he's not yet thirty), and that it was pretty standard around here for high schools to have nurseries. We were also introduced to the smallest park I've ever seen, a sad little plot .04 of an acre big, set up with benches and ivy and squeezed between buildings on either side.

Tomorrow morning we fly home.