I'm in New York!

I wrote this post on Thursday night. It was very late and apparantly I was too tired to remember to put it on here. But here it is, 2 days later. I'll put pictures up shortly.

Hey folks! I have been in New York City for five days and Joel (Dr. Oppenheim) has already managed to spoil us a lot and show us a great many things. And, I have started working, and must say, my lab is amazing. So far I give my experience here a 9 out of 10. 9 because the weather has been muggy and chilly for the past two days.

Lets see…it’s after midnight and I have to wake up early tomorrow so I’m gonna write quickly about the past few days. I landed at the La Guardia airport at around 12 p.m. and then got a shuttle to University Hall, the NYU dorm that we’re staying at. The shuttle was over packed and, thanks to the terrible traffic, it took us over an hour to get where we wanted. Traffic was sorta like rush hour in Atlanta, but on a Sunday afternoon. Atleast there were cool things to stare at as the shuttle wove its way through the roads, going slower than a snail probably. I just don’t understand why anyone would want to drive around here, its effing expensive, takes up a ton of time, and has to be frustrating. Anyway, there was a guy in the shuttle who was also coming to U-Hall, and if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have had any clue about where we were. I got off the shuttle, not really knowing what I was supposed to do next, but Dr. Oppenheim was right there, at the stop, waiting for me! I gave him a huge hug, mostly out of relief and then he walked me to my room.

One of my suitemates, Nora, had already moved in, but apparently had gone out shopping. I met her later in the day and we went out to look for lunch. As it turned out, looking for lunch was much more exciting than actually finding lunch. We ended up getting take out food and eating it on Union Square park, which, by the way, is just across the street from our dorm. We’re on 3^rd Avenue and 14^th Street, smack in the middle of downtown Manhattan, with a lot of exciting things within walking distance. We met the rest of the SURPies later when Joel took us all out to dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant, which, I might add, had the best service ever. They had 25 people’s orders ready in about 15 minutes.

Monday was mainly orientation. We got a tour of the buildings that most of us were working in and then waited in a line for hours to get our IDs. Then my roommate Ugochi and I got take out food for dinner and ate it at a park bench beside some chess players. Y’know the street side chess players in all those movies that make a move, click the timer and do it very fast over and over again. Yes, we were sitting right beside them!

Tuesday we actually started working in the lab. And here, I got really really lucky. I fell in love with my lab as soon as I started. I’m gonna be honest here, although I have liked all my lab work, I did not enjoy my first few days in Scott’s lab and I definitely did not enjoy my first few days in Dr. Stice’s lab. Starting in a new lab is always frustrating, you have to read a ton of papers (a majority of which are incomprehensible), get used to all the lab members, feel comfortable enough to ask stupid questions and so on and so on. But here, everything fell together the moment I started. Ann, the post-doc that I work with, picked me up from the lounge that we were having breakfast at, gave me a pseudo tour of the building as we were walking to the lab, introduced me to all the other lab members and then told me about my project. And, I actually understood my project, every part of it. All thanks to my amazing Cell Bio class last semester!

In the evening on Tuesday, I saw my first Broadway musical!!! Spring Awakening. Wow! Everyone talks about how amazing these are, but I really hadn’t wrapped my mind around how amazing they really are until I saw one. I love good live music. Good live concerts are charming in numerous ways. Being at the musical, however, was almost better in the sense that it was like being at a good concert that also has a good plot! Y’know?

Yesterday we had dinner at the Katz’s Deli, the place where the infamous orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally was shot! The food was terrible. I still like saying I’ve seen the spot where Harry met Sally. On the way back we walked past the house where Will Smith lives in I Am Legend. Also, we walked past Times Square, the area where Bob Dylan hung out in the 70s, and where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived when they first came to New York. Yeah, it was a big deal.

I think those have been the main things we’ve done so far. We have stayed very busy this week, and it doesn’t look like that will change anytime soon. I’m okay with that

I think I’d like to go to sleep now. More updates later.