New York: Birds, Buildings, and Bridges

I try hard to keep my blog amusing and informative. That said, sometimes a kid's just gotta spazz. For instance: Wahooooo! New York! This is going to be the best week ever! Ahahahahaaaa . . . --Ahem. --Now for some rational, friendly, informative explanation.

First of all, I am not writing this blog from my dorm room at Oberlin College. I'm at a friend's house in Queens, being a goofy, overexcited tourist, and having the time of my life. You see, Oberlin has two semesters and a Winter Term (January). Each semester has two modules. Some classes (mostly P.E. classes, I think) only last one module, i.e., half the semester. These modules are clearly demarcated by week-long breaks. In other words, Oberlin doesn't just have a Spring Break; it also has a Fall Break serving exactly the same role in the first semester.

Most people go home over Fall Break. Some go on Immerse Yourself in Service (IYS) trips and spend the week doing community service somewhere in the country. Others stay on campus and catch up on their sleep/work/reading/social life. And still others, like me, end up visiting friends.

Though Guy (the friend I'm staying with) and I have been planning this for several weeks, I don't think I got the "this is really happening" moment until I looked out the window of the plane and saw Manhattan down there. Of course, after that, I didn't stop looking out the window until we landed.

The trip so far has been a single streak of sheer fun. Guy and his family are wonderful hosts. They've showed me some things they figured I absolutely had to experience. On the first day, we had several interesting conversations, ate the best pizza in the world, and--by the end of the day--had walked for miles.

One of the things we saw was the New York Panorama. This is a complete scale model of the entire city--it actually looked much like the view from the plane did. We wandered around its periphery trying to find things, like Guy's school and the park where we were. (I was able to find the Empire State Building...) This sprawling minitropolis is part of a museum in a park, left behind by one of New York's two World's Fairs.

The park has gotten into a lot of movies, because World's Fair remnants are very photogenic. There's the Unisphere, a giant globe that appeared in the last Iron Man movie, and the disused, rusting spinning restaurants that the cockroach-man had hidden his spaceship in in Men In Black. In daylight, they are obviously rusting and have a strange, desolate beauty to them.

Besides the panorama, we went to a few other parks and looked at bridges. New York has a lot of them, and one of them has beaten out my hometown's Tacoma Narrows Bridge for the title of second-longest suspension bridge in the world. (The longest is somewhere in Asia.)

The most fun, though, had to be walking around Manhattan at night. Old churches, mysterious swoopy architecture, Rockefeller Center, old diners and coffee shops, new diners and coffee shops, Tiffany's, buildings where so many shows are filmed and produced . . .

. . . and Times Square. Times Square shining with LED and neon, flickering lights reflecting everywhere, constantly in flux, full of people. I can see why all my social science books point to this as the icon of an information-service society where the media battle for a person's attention. You could drown in the information overload, or you could ride the wave. I just enjoyed myself being a rubber-necking tourist.

I was completely exhausted by the end of the day, but it was completely exhilarating.

The next day was much more low-key. Guy and his dad took me to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and we looked at birds. This is the perfect time for that--migration season. There was apparently a white pelican there recently, which is odd since they usually stay in Florida. It was gone when we got there, though. We mostly saw varieties of ducks and geese.