Hi and welcome back! I’ve now been in NY for a week and a half, and boy it feels so much longer than that. Many things have changed this past week, not the least of which is the fact that I’m not intimidated by the city anymore. Also, I’ve started to call U-Hall home, I more or less know my way around here, and we’re now regulars at a little bakery across the street (there’s an example of a poorly constructed sentence for you). All of that amounts to one thing: I feel like I belong here. It would be one thing to visit New York and hang out for a few days, but I get the greatest feeling when I realize that I’m actually a working girl in New York. The city is not just some place I’m touring, but it’s my temporary home.
And, let me tell you, my room in this temporary home has the greatest view ever! Here’s a picture if you don’t believe me:
We live on the 11th floor and I am sure that this is the best view on the floor. Everyone is pretty impressed by it. On our first night here, my suitemates and I just stared out of the window for about half an hour, and we still do this on a regular basis. I always eat my breakfasts and dinners by the window. The streets are always active and just starring at them strikes a major chord in me. I can’t help but feel happy when I’m looking down at it.
Despite that, we have managed to get out of the room and see a lot of Manhattan. This past weekend, most of us went on the Circle Line cruise on Saturday and Joel took us on a bike tour on Sunday. The cruise was chill. My favorite part was taking pictures of the city. Also, I finally got to meet Lady Liberty. She’s a hoot.
The bike tour was even more fun. Luckily, Manhattan is very flat, so the 15-mile ride didn’t feel bad at all. It was about 95 degrees throughout the ride, but that didn’t matter. We were biking around Manhattan, for pete’s sakes. We rode to a sweet park, some place where many of the cooking shows are shot, the streets where a lot of restaurant scenes in Sex and the City are shot, and by this palm garden near Ground Zero. We’re actually going to go to Ground Zero later in the summer. There is a great park close to there and its right by the water. Everything around there is so serene. Its hard to imagine what 9/11 would’ve felt like when you’re there with a ton of friends on a pretty day with happy people hanging out on the grass.
My favorite adventure yet happened before all of that. On Friday night, a few of us were hanging out in our living room all worn out from the day’s activities. Then at around 12:30 a.m., we decided to walk around. David had heard about this awesome awesome thing called The Telectroscope and showed me its website earlier that day. Basically, it’s a tunnel that connects New York City to London. So you look into it from here and see the Tower of London in real time on the other side. We had vaguely looked it up on the map, but hadn’t planned on going there till later. Somehow though, at 1 a.m., we ended up taking the subway to the Manhattan side of Brooklyn bridge. Then there was nothing to do but to walk across the bridge and try to find The Telectroscope. I’m gonna be honest here, I didn’t think we’d ever find it. We got to Brooklyn all prepared to walk around for a while, asked some cops about it, and ended up at the Telectrosope, without getting lost once. It was unbelievably amazing. There weren’t too many people on the London side of the tunnel. It was around 6 a.m. there and people have to pay a pound to look into it. It’s apparently being treated as an Art display in Brooklyn and it is right on the river. So the view from there is that of Brooklyn bridge and downtown Manhattan, with lights reflecting in the water. Absolutely breathtaking! And definitely worth the long unplanned walk. I wanna go back before I leave.
Besides all of that, work also has been a lot of fun. I am working in a Developmental Genetics lab on little microscopic worms called C. elegans. The first thing I had to learn was moving them from one plate to another. I was pretty sad when I squished my first one, but now I’m used to that. C. elegans don’t have nervous systems so they don’t feel a thing. But, to avoid too many squishing incidents, I have stopped drinking coffee during the weekdays. Because these critters are tiny, we have to work with a very thin wire to maneuver them around. My hands are all jittery if I drink coffee and that doesn’t fly, so I can either drink coffee or be good at my job. I like being good at my job and almost don’t miss coffee anymore.
And now I have to go work on a short research presentation for tomorrow. Later.
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