Autumn in New York

Well it’s been a while and there’s lots I could catch you all up on…but I guess for now I will start with updating you on some of the things I’ve been doing over the last month. The events described below are in no particular chronological or even logical order, but are included simply as they occur to me.

One day I woke up and found myself in a room that looked something like this:

Later that day I sauntered down the street -

...over to Columbia, and sat on the steps of Low Library where I pretended to look cool while taking pictures of myself -

...and then pretended to read a book while actually watching other people and secretly taking pictures of them:

Another day I took a trip to Brooklyn Tabernacle, a huge church with an amazing choir and lots of good cheer. I then took a walk and strolled down the Brooklyn Bridge and got some interesting shots of manhattan.

Then I woke up one Saturday morning at some unearthly hour and took a train for two hours with other crazy people and climbed and climbed for hours to the top of a mountain called “Breakneck Ridge” just so we could get to the top and really learn to appreciate the feeling of being alive and stationary.

And then one bright morning I woke up to find ex-homegirl Alison at my door! We had much fun catching up and doing real New York things like eating pastrami on rye and walking rapidly down the street while drinking coffee and mooching off free wine and cheese tastings and sneaking illegally into church towers with panoramic views of the city and lining up for yummy Magnolia cupcakes and boutique-shopping in Soho and gallery-hopping in Chelsea.

I also got to work on my schmoozing and cocktail-party conversational skills at such events like the Columbia conference on “India: An Emerging Giant” which featured speeches by top Indian economists and scholars and the Indian ambassador to the US and the US ambassador to India and the Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry who gave the keynote address at a 3-course shmancy catered dinner that cost $150 for the dinner alone! – all of which I got to attend for FREE by virtue of being a Columbia student and winning a student lottery! Or other events like the formal cocktail reception held at I-House followed by a lecture delivered by Nobel-prize winning economist and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz (I read some of his Globalization and Its Discontents in class – a very interesting read that I would recommend to anyone trying to make sense of the powers that be in the world today). I also got to attend a conference at the UN where different people like the Executive Directors of UNICEF and UNESCO and the Ministers of Education of Jamaica and Ghana and others all got together to discuss how we’re doing in trying to achieve the UN goals of ‘Education For All’ children by the year 2015 (apparently we still have some ways to go). After the morning-long session I got to sneak into the main UN General Assembly building for free (well not really sneaking in since I had to go through a security detector and get frisked first) and join my friend Dominik (Dominik without the suit)
(UN intern from Lichtenstein and fellow I-house resident…the first of his kind that I’ve met; I must confess I didn’t even know the country existed before I met him) for lunch at the UN cafeteria. Oh and one evening I got to sit in a room with about a hundred other soaking people and listen to Salman Rushdie rant against the evils of fundamentalist Islamism and religion in general and Islamic terrorism in particular and the importance of free speech and justice and naming things for what they are and of being able to criticize whatever you bloody well feel like without having a death sentence placed on your head. Interesting guy, that Salman. I didn’t see any armed bodyguards, but I did see his very hot wife, Indian supermodel and actress and cookbook-writer Padma Lakshmi.

When I wasn’t schmoozing with the big shots I spent the last month mostly printing lots and lots of pages of reading and then trying to get through a few of them once in while. There’s always lots of fun stuff to do at I-House, like taking advantage of the free salsa or kickboxing classes,
sitting in the cafeteria for hours and meeting new people, or doing
(I-House Friends: Frederick, Imre, Honza, Prithvi)-->
the same thing at the pub downstairs, or going to their special ‘Salon Night’ where you get to have your floormates - professional jazz musicians and concert pianists and classical guitarists and string quartets, all of them doing grad degrees at America’s leading music institutions, perform for you. I also attended a poetry reading by one of New York’s leading contemporary poets John Ashberry, and went to visit the International Centre for Photography with my friend Harrigan the art/photography major. Oh and I also went to a Halloween party where I believe my ingenious costume was hands-down the scariest costume in the room… I went as a skunk. I even carried around a bottle of spray to use against anyone that rubbed me the wrong way.

Over the last month I feel like I’ve been to about ten different countries without really having to leave a five-mile radius. Let’s see, I haggled over fake designer purses and gorged on yummy dim sum and purchased giant delicious fresh fruit from street-side fruitstands in the narrow streets of Chinatown. I spent an afternoon sipping a cappuccino and munching on a canola while reading and people-watching at a sidewalk café in little Italy. I went to dinner to a Brazilian restaurant with a group of other Brazilians where we spoke Portuguese and drank caipirinhas and savoured beans and meat exactly the way God intended it to be cooked. I got to celebrate Nigerian independence day along with my Nigerian friend Mercy who came to visit, plus 2/3rds of NY’s Nigerian population, all running down the street screaming after some Nigerian heartthrob movie star.

(Mercy and Nigerian Idependence)

Then I went out to celebrate Diwali with a group of Indians from I-house to an Indian restaurant where we cajoled the waiter into giving us special disgustingly sweet desserts by impressing him with our Hindi. I also got to have tapas and sangria while being entertained by live Spanish flamenco performers in Soho, and to try smoking a peach hookah with a half-Persian friend. I even got to learn about American culture at the ‘American Cultural hour’ organized by some I-House residents (they have a different country night each month), where we got to eat pumpkin pie and drink sweet tea and learn how to speak Southern'. And then yesterday I went to a birthday party in the Dominican Republic – one of my friends invited a few of us to her relatives’ home for a family party complete with tons of home-cooked Dominican food, rapid Spanish conversations and lots of salsa dancing. The highlight of the evening tho was getting to ride in a car and sit on a real couch and use a bathroom that had soft toilet paper – the little things that remind me that there is a world out there that I was once a part of, where real people live real lives in real homes.

Yeah, it's been a busy month. I love NY...