Plain language

 
As we stroll through more and more neighbourhoods and extend further our reach into the city's life and habits, we discover new startling and striking features and facts (see also Basilio's post on the strange regime of food pricing). One of our new observations pertains to the use of language in public space.

The aptitude of the English language for marketing slogans and other advertisements is a commonplace. So much so that most of us have internalized and adopted many slogans and phrases. On the one hand, this phenomenon is certainly due to the predominance of the English language in global communication; on the other hand, however, English seems to be particularly well suited to bringing a message to the point in a straightforward, smooth and spirited way. What is more, these slogans are (usually) intelligible to all.

Living in New York has revealed to us that this particular use of the English language doesn't stop at the limits of the advertisement world, but has shaped various different instances of communication in public space.

1 and 2 trains usually run on two parallel tracks. However, as it happens, 2 trains "go local" (i.e., stop skipping intermediary subway stations) at some point in the evening and therefore change to the 1 train track. A well visible panel informs travellers about this peculiarity, specifying that "late nights 2 train also stops here". Being Swiss as we are, we obviously wonder about the inaccuracy of a time indication such as "late nights", yet we are also struck by the universal tangibility of this plain and simple statement. Surely everyone will have understood.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (short: MTA) has come up with various other beautiful examples of the use(fulness) of plain language. In contrast to its English counterpart, who prompts us to "mind the gap" in subway stations, the MTA announces upon the arrival of any train that passengers should "please stand clear from the platform edge". While the London tourist is still asking herself what the gap could be she should remind herself of, her New Yorkian counterpart has by now taken a step back ("don't become a statistics", as the MTA tells us).

MTA, which as a public corporation is an organ of the official New York, regularly informs passengers about enhancements of the New Yorkian network of public transportation, for instance by way of panels placed inside subway coaches. Travelling back home from Columbia I thus learned that MTA has installed several hundreds of new surveillance cameras to improve passenger safety. "Smile."

Yet MTA is not the only organ capable of simplifying communication between authorities and their targets (and thereby extending to a large degree the reach of its messages). Garbage cans in public space usually try to attract people by way of a huge yellow inscription stating simply and plainly "Litter stops here".

Let me finish with another beautiful line from MTA. Waiting for a bus on 79th street today, we saw that two buses in a row were approaching our station, the first obviously not showing any intention of halting at our station. Looking for an explanation or an out-of-order indication, our eyes focused on the destination board at the upper front of the bus. There we read: "Next Bus Please".

 

No news and good news

The River – by Aristide Maillol (1938-39) at the MoMA sculpture garden

It used to be that having no news from people for extended periods of time would be the norm. Without going back to the pre-phone era, you would still leave for a trip, and maybe call home once a week. Your parents would have the latest news, and your friends could call on them to have updates "they saw the pyramids!", "they went to Times Square!". They would be the guardians of the knowledge about where you were and when you had arrived there.

Fast forward one internet revolution later and now it's almost surreal if you can't know where a person has been for the past 4-5 days. If your brother has not written on whatsapp in 2 days on his trip to India it's already grounds for some worry. Conversely, if you haven't provided any news in a couple of days, you start to have the feeling that people should know more about what is happening to you. If you keep up with the traditional means of letting people know that you are alive, then that's fine, but if you have elected to use a blog as the means of conveying your activities, impressions and experiences in your expatriate life, one week of no news starts to give you that "I should call mom" feeling. Blame it on the digital divide (my dad has expressed his opinion on the subject) or on my oversize ego, but it feels high time for an update.

The past week has been busy, yet productive. For my part the coding binge I started last week has not really ended yet. We're on full engines on a project with Pomelo, and to extract the best information and data, Guillaume and I, with the beta-testing contribution of a dozen of our students, have been working ceaselessly on extending, improving, expanding our software and code. So much so, that our code has changed by roughly 40'000 lines of code in a week and a half. Marion has been busy as well, taking on again a challenging formal proof of her axiomatisation, which has been bugging her for the better part of the past two years. She has more or less solved that, much to her elation, but only after several days of incessant mathematical development. Now she'll have the unenjoyable task of transforming a plethora of handwritten pencil notes into digital form…

The week, while very busy, has not been devoid of enjoyable moments, such as a visit at MoMA, or a walk down Riverside park for a view of  New Jersey's shoreline and Manhattan's urban landscape. And this afternoon, a talk on, of all things, the philosophy of communicative acts.

Uncultured Barbarians

 Balconies (Rings) of the 2586 seats of the David H Koch Theater

There is a stereotypical view from we of the old world, about the unmannered and uncouth nature of the people on this side of the pond. While by and large I tend to disagree with the sentiment, it might be grounded on some elements of truth. Yesterday we went to see Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at the Lincoln Center, one of the most illustrious stages in the world for such a performance, next to the Julliard School, arguably in the most artistic city in the world. The architecture of the building is awe inspiring (Marion has more on this), the dancers were stunning, the choreography was, for the most part, breathtaking, the décor was impressive. And yet...

There seems to be a habit in NY to applaud at every dance sequence, be it a devilishly fast exchange between two dancers, an emotional solo by the main character, a farcical entrance by the court's jester and his 3 young apprentices. It feels as if, in an effort to be politically correct and acclaim each performer equally, the public should applaud every one of them as they finish their number. This does not only have the unfortunate consequence of eliciting a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt at basically every scene, but it reminds me of the tradition of circus performances, where each number is greeted and saluted by the crowd. Making abstraction of the extremely irritating fact that we did not hear one single time the beginning of the main theme of the Swan Lake because it was drowned in furious clapping, this attitude completely breaks the atmosphere and the magic that the composer, choreographer, designer and dancers are all building together.

Spectators waiting before the Swan Lake dance performance

To this add the lady who, 20 minutes into the first act, shouts "IS THIS ROW N?" while looking for her place, which is answered by the whole of the public on the 4th Ring with a hissing and deafening "SSSSHHHHHHHHH". The lady, in a spirit that is very american and in any other circumstance would be appreciated as the reason why americans are such a tightly knit society, wanted to call for help to the entire community, instead of discreetly asking the person next to her, sottovoce, "Excuse me sir, is this row N?". While I cannot fault her entirely for the misguided desire of togetherness, I wonder if we should all be richer and be able to afford tickets on the Parterre, or if there as well we would find the upperclass equivalent of the same phenomenon.

I cannot fail to make a comparison with the Salle Blanche at the KKL in Luzern, where an episode of this type could never happen; where the audience would observe in rapt silence, with maybe a sudden exclamation or two in the moments of brilliant physical and artistic prowess (there were several yesterday), until the end of the act, and then congratulate the performers for a long while at the end of the spectacle (here the final applause lasted a mere couple of minutes).

Final applause and salute to the dancers

It is not that Americans are unable to create art and culture, yesterday's performance and its venue are proof that they do that better than anybody on the planet. But, to borrow a leaf from the saying about the capital of France, the only problem with american art performances seems to be the americans attending them.

When we got out, thunder and deluge greeted us once again. While we waited downstairs at the subway station, debating whether to brave the storm or wait for it to subside, several people ran toward us, to take shelter in the station. No one failed to smile, laugh, joke (!It is NOT dry out there!…") or somehow interact with us while they did. 

They might be unrefined brutes while in the theatre, but americans are a lovely bunch to be around the rest of the time!

Sublime Lincoln Center

Yesterday evening we went out - for the first time since we arrived in New York (unless of course one counts last weeks talk at the Jewish Institute of Columbia University that we attended). Our first vespertine outing led us to David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, where we saw a New York City Ballet performance of the Swan Lake. Needless to say that we were taken aback by the sublime beauty of what we saw, starting first and foremost with the Lincoln Center architecture.

Lincoln Center is a temple for architectural modernism, and a masterpiece of the ecclectic 1950s style that brought together the modernist elegance and purity with classical and art nouveau elements. In the early evening, when dusk has fallen over the city, Lincoln Center appears as an isle of light and calm, enclosed in itself and beautifully lit from the inside of its transparent main buildings. Accessing Lincoln Center from the north-west as we did, one arrives via its northern plaza that has been reshaped and restructured only recently. A beautiful esplanade now connects the strongly individual buildings constituting Lincoln Center by way of an inviting public space. In its midst one finds a rectangular shaped black fountain giving shelter to two monolithic Henry Moore sculptures (a piece of luck for the Henry Moore fans that we are). On both sides of the fountain newly created spaces invite the visitor to rest and to observe the bustling esplanade where elegantly dressed city dwellers head to their evening programs. While we chose the tilted lawn on the top of a café to sit and observe the plaza, we have already planned that next time we should take a seat in the elegant chairs under the canopy of trees at the fountain's opposite side.

On high spirits we then entered the David Koch theater for our evening performance and again we were startled by the elegance of its classical-modernist interieur culminating in a golden sky-like ceiling. Swan Lake was a pleasure, although two of its main parts were definitely too narrative for our post nouveau-roman mindsets. Nevertheless, Tschaikovsky's music, the abstract expressionist stage setting and the ephemeral dance of the white swan and its companions were of an enthrancing beauty.

We won't forget Tschaikovsky's Leitmotiv for a while and as if he had read our thoughts, the saxophonist at Lincoln Center subway station played it for us again when we started heading home.

A cup of code

I used to code a lot. Nowadays this happens less and less frequently, and I take the times where I HAVE to do so as a kind of vacation from the analysis, report-writing, study-design and other activities that punctuate my working days.

Marion is at university, the laundry is drying out (have I mentioned we have a portable washing machine that you plug into the kitchen sink? New York Survival 101!), I am listening to indie video games soundtracks (all courtesy of the Humble Indie Bundle) and solving a bunch of issues we haven't gotten around to fixing because we were swamped with other stuff to do. 

I drink my hot tea in my new double-walled classy glassy mug and I code. Sometimes life is that simple.

Our portable washing machine, fitting snuggly in our very tiny kitchen

Colours and Light

The Guggenheim museum by Frank Lloyd Wright

To celebrate my birthday, Marion – in addition to gifting me with a yearlong membership to the MoMA, and a modern art class over several weeks in november – accompanied me to the Guggenheim Museum, where we finally saw James Turrell's installation (more on Marion's post on the subject!) after our very enjoyable failure last week.

Contrary to the trend in most contemporary museums, the Guggenheim still forbids the taking of pictures within the museum proper. While this has not been an issue for photographing the inner hall in the past, in this case, the whole of the inner space was taken by the Aten Reign, and was therefore off limits to cameras. The thing pained me; so much so that I snuck out my phone to take some illicit images of the wonderful play of colours and lights.

Aten Reign installation by James Turrell

A walk back through the park in a splendid autumnal afternoon and now the prospect of a nice evening with friends. I am content…

Basilio's Birthday!

James Turrell skyspace at the Hotel Castell in Zuoz

Today has been Basilio's birthday. This is one of my favourite days of the year and so I have been waiting excitedly for it to arrive. I started the day chatting blithely to my brother, who gave his wishes to Basilio even before he was allowed to get up from bed and arrive in the living room where I would prepare the breakfast and then celebrate Basilio for what he means and brings to me every day.

Today Basilio has accomplished several things. He has become a moma member, has gotten some work done, eaten a browny for breakfast, chatted with Jean-Baptiste, taken notice of his moma art classes, strolled through Central Park, marvelled at the Guggenheim Museum architecture, happily received many whatsapp messages, and finally savoured a magnificent Turrell installation (and exhibition) in the Guggenheim rotunda. It so happens that last time we saw a Turrell skyspace was just a couple of weeks ago in the remote Zuoz situated in the Oberengadin. There we found Turrell's skyspace aloof from any important traces of civilisation in the midst of a hayfield high on the hillside. What a contrast to the spectacular installations at the Upper East Side that we visited today. Here and there Turrell's art is highly ephermeral, although in different ways. While the skyspace in Zuoz reminded us of a chapel and seemed to be most about contemplation, the playful and sophisticated Aten Reign in the Guggenheim inner hall was just as much about perception, gathering, and perhaps deception as it was about introspection.

Turrell's art is about light in the first place. Via changing light patterns or intense spot-like illuminations light shold become visible by itself. We never see anything but light, yet we hardly ever acknowledge that what we see are not objects, events, structures, but light in the first place. Turrell tries to change this misunderstanding of light by displaying it as his sole object of art. He paints with light, so to speak, and thereby explores fascinating technical possibilities.

Being a photographer and a geometrician (in Plato's sense), Basilio shares much of his fascinations with James Turrell. It wasn't surprising therefore that the Turrell installations did not only connect to his artistic sense, but also to his technical interest in light. This became most visible when he started mentioning the technical difficulties in recreating virtually some of the light patterns that Turrell creates with the use of simple projectors.

Back home we have started preparing the evening of this fabulous day, which we will share with our favourite New Yorkians Virginia and Fred. Happy Birthday, Basilio!

First impressions from Columbia University

Columbia University flagship building and former library

It was high time for me to publish my first post on this blog - and finally here it is. While Basilio has been multitasking efficiently - working in fields so different as technical development for Pomelo, managing students remotely, photography and blog posting - I have taken my time to settle in smoothly at Columbia and (not unimportantly) to start seriously the business of writing my thesis. 

'Columbia' has long been for me one of these awe-inspiring names of an all too admired and (because of its elitism and exclusiveness) slightly despised foreign academic institution that seemed somewhat out of range. Now that I belong (temporarily) to its community, I have sufficient time and opportunity to scrutinise and double-check my theory loaded view on this institution. As this post is going to be overtly subjective, I shall start with some statistics and facts. 

Initially founded in 1754 as King's College, Columbia got its current name in 1896. It is a private Ivy League University accepting as little as 7% of all applicants to its Colleges which currently host approximately 30000 students (graduate students included). Tuition fees vary but average around 50000 US$ a year. Columbia University is the second most important land holder in the city of New York (just after the catholic church), with most of its possessions being located at the northern end of the Upper West Side. From our apartment at West 78th street, subway train number 1 takes me in 10 minutes to the University where I meet my professor to discuss my thesis, attend two interesting classes, frequent various libraries to do my writing and exploit the university's sports and cultural facilities. 

From a more subjective point of view, Columbia has so far revealed itself to be an interesting and complex phenomenon. First and foremost, Columbia is sustained by an intense and highly successful branding machinery. Columbia's trade mark (a white crown on a blue flag) emerges at every possible and impossible spot of the campus: The undergraduate students' t-shirts, the soap dispenser, the concrete wall in the shower cublicle at the sport's center, and so on. The community spirit (which also builds on exclusiveness) is further strengthened by access control to most buildings - only Columbia card holders can get in. (In contrast to my unofficial stay at Columbia in January 2012 when I was only eligible for a library card, my current status as a visiting scholar provides me with full access rights and I therefore not have to wait for the opening of the library at 9am to be allowed to enter the main building any longer.) Columbia has its own sport teams that regularly compete with those of the other Ivy leage Universities (whose flags all hang in Columbia's basketball hall). 

Does exclusivity entail quality? This is of course an interesting question and in some sense it must certainly be answered in a positive way. Columbia students work hard (libraries are crowded already at the semester's beginning) and their school performance must have been very good. Nonetheless, students at Columbia are not exceedingly surprising. Some of them are, of course, but others aren't. They ask more questions than students in Switzerland, but more than few questions seem to be asked for the sake of asking a question: finding some remote connection between the class's material and some loosely related topic and exploiting it for a question is not too difficult a task. Admission to Columbia seems to foster self-esteem in many positive, but also some negative ways.

Columbia is furthermore an interesting arena for various ethnic minorities. Compared to their share in the citywide population, Asian-Americans seem to be overrepresented by far, while there are only few black students. Jewish students constitue another important group at Columbia. On the occasion of the recently celebrated Jewish New Year (rosh hashanah), some Jewish students have installed a stand in the midst of the campus where they advertise free birthright travels to Israel (i.e., a travel to Isreal open to all Jewish human beings living outside of Israel before the age of ~25).  I am struck by this public display of a right which is completely based on ethnicity (or religion), although I must admit that I have not tried so far to enter into a dialogue with the people at the stand. (And of course I must remind myself of all the less visible privileges we have as we belong to a specific ethnicity, nation, group, etc.) For the sake of completeness, I also need to add that when the different Columbia associations could promote themselves on Campus at some day last week, I discovered (to my surprise) a small association of students fighting for free Palestine. 

So far, Columbia has shown itself to be many things. It certainly is as exclusive as its reputation implies, but surprises me on many other aspects. Most importantly of course I appreciate Columbia as an excellent research institution. Choosing classes out of the curricula of my favourite departments (economics, maths, philosophy, and so on) proves to be very difficult because of an excessive supply of interesting courses. And listening to those classes that I have finally chosen is nothing but a pleasure. If only there wasn't my thesis to write, I could easily spend the term as an academic tourist rushing from one interesting class to another.

And of course it is but a question of time until I get my own Columbia sportswear.

Butler library seen from Alma Mater

No Free Lunch

There's no such thing as free lunch, and there's even a theorem that says so. Nevertheless, hapless and innocently naive as we are, we walked to the Guggenheim for the "Pay what you want" ticket entrance (available every saturday, 5:45-7:45pm). Needless to say, half of New York had the same brilliant idea. We saw the queue in front of the building and decided to put ourselves in the line while we waited for Virginia and Fred to arrive, so we walked by the people waiting, turned around the corner, walked along the museum block, still people, turned around the corner again, walked along the museum block, turned around the corner again, yet more people, we walked our way almost to the end of the building again, which would have brought us full circle to the entrance of the museum, there the line ended and we could probably have put ourselves in line at that point, and maybe by next week we would have had our "pay what you want" tickets.

We were not the only ones finding the situation funny, and in very newyorky spirit, people started chatting and joking about the queue situation. Our friends arrived and we all agreed that we were not going to do the line, and will be visiting the James Turrell installations another time, and probably pay full price for it.

Nevertheless, to avoid Museum Sadness, we decided to walk south about 500m to the MET, where we saw a peculiar exhibition by Ken Price, and, incidentally, paid what we wanted (as the MET always functions on that interesting business model). We went for a beeline through ancient and modern art to get to the contemporary part of the museum, quite conscious of our appalling disregard for masterpiece after masterpiece of painting and sculpture. We passed by Modigliani and O'Keefe without a second glance, but we did slow down, on our way back, for a Hopper or two, with the knowledge that we are artistically spoiled in this city.

The highlight of the evening was our arrival on the MET rooftop terrace, with a mind-blowing view of Manhattan and the park at sunset, and the realisation that we are in a city of beauty, of art, of thought, where you can get away with spurning great artwork today because you're living 15 minutes away from it and you can just come back whenever you fancy. And pay what you want at the entrance to boot.

There might be no free lunch, but dessert is sometimes complimentary!

Meeting old friends

I had the chance of catching up with Ali, whom I hadn't seen since he finished his PhD in Lausanne and left for Columbia University almost two years ago. A great photographer and victim of his own academic success (his rate of photographs on flickr has greatly diminished since starting his post-doc at Columbia) he showed me around on my first visit midtown since our arrival, proved to me that every type of beverage has not only its own appropriate bar ("If you want a juice, we'll go to a juice bar!"), but there will be multiple instances on the same street and you'll have the luxury (burden?) of choice.

An outing for drinks and catching up transformed itself into a photo shoot through Times Square and Central Park. The former a quagmire of people, cartoon characters, scantily dressed pin-up ... something (she had 2m wide angel wings and NY painted on her butt, one letter per cheek), and a ton of people waiting around and queuing to get tickets for Broadway. The latter a very enjoyable oasis of tranquillity, of random encounters with interesting people and of abundant opportunities for pictures.

Anecdotally, a couple of hours after we left Times Square, there was a shooting where the police accidentally shot and wounded two ladies while aiming for a running man. A small reminder that this is a big city in America. To me, however, it was a nice afternoon walk in the park with a friend.

Rain

Rain at the M1 station on 79th and Broadway 

After 2 days of serious heat the inevitable rainstorm that will, hopefully, freshen things up once again, struck just as we were coming back from a "welcome back" celebration for the beginning of the academic year (the french word "rentrée" is so much more convenient to describe this!).

It is interesting to see the different approaches to the sudden onslaught of water. Some run, others, resignedly, walk and will get soaked, others yet wait at the bottom of the stairs exiting the subway station. Friendly conversations start on the relative benefits of waiting vs. running. Smiles, frowns, self-deprecatory comments from those who didn't remember to bring an umbrella (I was the designated person tonight and utterly failed on that account). You spend 5 minutes sheltering under a doorway and will be a spectator, alongside your temporary neighbours, of the decision process of people who have to deliberate whether to go bear through the deluge, take cover somewhere, or find a compassionate pedestrian with a large enough umbrella.

Dynamics you can see during any summer storm in Lausanne, but here the sheer amount of people passing by on any given street makes the observation all the more intriguing.

Oh, and the drainage of water on the sidewalks here is almost as bad as in Paris…

Never Forget

How do you commemorate September 11? More importantly, how do you commemorate it in New York, 12 years after the event, with the 9/11 Memorial newly opened and the tower formerly known as Freedom Tower basically complete? This is a very difficult question, and it would seem that nobody really has a clear idea on how to answer it.

MSNBC News Anchors preparing
to go on air in front of WTC 1

The Memorial is closed to the public on 9/11. You see masses of people outside it who clearly acknowledge that a day such as this warrants an effort, a presence, a gesture. And yet, not really knowing what to do and how to do it, they wait around, snap a picture of the new tower from below, and then wait some more. The atmosphere has a clear element of contemplative silence, quiet thoughtfulness and wondering wandering. The lady at the information centre tells us that nobody has a clear idea of what events for the commemoration there will be: "they were so preoccupied about security until the last moment that they didn't release a schedule".

The firefighter memorial wall has two uniformed men keeping stalwart guard in front of the names of the first responders, with american flags on buildings and walls; the mural relief on metal depicts firefighters running into the tower ruins. This morning at 8h46 a choreography of dancer silently marked the moment with a contemporary performance in front of the Lincoln centre. One a very concrete, explicit, honestly direct way of showing the support, the memory, the loss; the other an abstract representation of ethereal aesthetics that tries to convey the feeling of sharing, of togetherness, of completeness that connects everyone. Two diametrically different attempts to express a similar feeling, that speak to different audiences.

Celebrations of the first responders at the World Trade Center

And maybe this is the only way you can commemorate September 11, by using the words, images and concepts that resonate with what this date represents to you. You find a way to answer to your sadness, your anger, your surprise, your feeling of vulnerability, your anguish of impotence, or your sensation of guilty indifference to the human loss, your acceptance that bad things happen, your hope that it won't happen to you, your conviction that these are things of the past now. You find a way to answer, be it with a silent dance, with a prayer, with flowers on the sidewalk, or with a small flag planted on the grass.

Commemorative flags on the Columbia University Campus,
photo by Marion

A trip to the island

Downtown from the Staten Island Ferry

Yesterday we had our first excursion in the lower part of the city. We took the traditional ferry ride to Staten Island, with a gorgeous weather (some clouds that disappeared while we were on the island). The open spaces, the water dotted by many small islands and platforms, the waves accompanying ships small, large and humongous, give a stark contrast to the city grid we have been immersed in this past week. The parks uptown are very nice, mind you, but you don't get the same feeling of openness and vastness.

Obligatory picture of the Statue of Liberty

When you arrive back downtown you are welcomed by buildings that dwarf the tallest churches and housing projects that you find up here, which gives all the more weight to the dichotomy of landscape and cityscape.

An extremely enjoyable experience, and a change from the working routine of the weekdays.

9/11 Memorial and Pier on Staten Island

Customer Service

Street vendor in front of Columbia University

One thing you notice very quickly in the US is how nicely and politely you are treated when you enter a store, call a service, buy a hot dog or interact in any way with the customer relations end of a b2c business. The locals will explain that the competition for any kind of business is so fierce, and the prices battles have been fought so thoroughly already, that all that is left to gain an edge is customer loyalty and, by consequence, ‎customer service.

Needless to say it feels quite nice coming from a country that has made monopolisation of its services a semi-religious mantra for the better part of the last century. To name one example that is still fresh in my memory, the swiss post sports angry teenager girls at the counter that will tell you that you are a moron for not knowing that the handwritten and signed procuration is not valid anymore to fetch someone else's mail ("Tout le monde sait ça, bordel!"). But as a general rule, even when they are not downright rude, the people who tend to your consumeristic needs back home will not exhaust themselves in polite chitchat.

Here it's all about you, you should feel well served, you should feel heard, and you should end your business transaction well satisfied and with a smile on your face. And so for now we can bask in the wondrous feeling of being treated excessively nicely by our temporary servants, and even if we understand that it's business as usual for them, we will still enjoy the feeling of being pampered.

If the customer is indeed king, by God I'll feel regal and I'll enjoy it as long as I can!

Jogging at the park

Downtown from Central Park

The good part about retaining some sort of mild jet lag is that we can get up at 6h50 and be awake enough to go jogging in the park (sorry, The Park) by 7h30. While my running performance is up to my usual low standard (ever since my very first running performance ever…), the scenery is stunningly beautiful, and the september sun paints a gorgeous light on the cityscape.

Left: Joggers in Central Park – Right: Marion (in pink) running around the pond 

I left Marion to do a couple more laps around the pond (one was enough for my poor appendages) and ran back through the 3 blocks that separate our apartment from the park (yup, thoroughly spoiled, we are!) realising that even a city like New York suffers from the Sunday morning syndrome. Stores are closed (for once!), the streets are more or less empty, the cars are so few and far apart that the swiss in me can safely cross on a red light (not that I truly had serious qualms on that regard), and there is a quiet in the city that we had not yet seen around here!

The city might never sleep, but the people in it sure seem to like their lazy mornings in bed!

The stories we carry in our pocket

After much expectation and a little waiting, my new phone has arrived. It's the latest BlackBerry model (Q10), with a fancy physical keyboard and, what probably endears it to me, a perfectly square screen, and a camera that takes square pictures.

What I was not expecting was to find the footprints of the phone's previous owner (it's a refurbished phone). The phone came complete with several streams of messages, a couple of pictures, some web bookmarks, all of which give small details in the life of Tamanna, a 30-something Arab-American girl from southern California, who enjoys food, is very religious, and is trying to find an eligible bachelor who is arab but plans on staying in the States.

The phone is quite new, and was with Tamanna for only one month, and her messages with several of her girl friends lead from the obligatory messages of "new phone, haven't added you yet, who are you?" up to the organisation and finally the celebration of Eid al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan). During that time she exchanges brownies recipes with friends she met at a pool party, she meets a man from Oman (the meeting is arranged by  a friend and the man's mother), she has some trouble at her work as a food critic, and finally manages to organise the trip to another city to celebrate Eid with her mother and friends. The last day she sends greetings to many friends ("Eid Mubarak!"), and finally seems to misplace her phone.

I can imagine a writer finding this phone and filling in the blanks. From the messages he knows that the arranged meeting with the guy did not lead anywhere, and that she eventually quits her job, and she has a court hearing coming up for some reason. What the writer would speculate upon and develop are the inner thoughts of Tamanna, her reasons and her reactions, her dreams and her dreads, that mixed together somehow leave behind the messages we find in the phone. The book ends with the phone being misplaced amidst the chaos of the Eid al-Fitr celebration, going from the Mariott hotel where a big Imam was presiding for the first two prayers, to the place where Farki, Tamanna's BFF, is waiting for her friend to get coffee before going to 3rd prayers. "be there in 3 minutes!" is the last message on the phone...

I have now wiped my new phone clean, Tamanna is gone and so is the material our writer could have used to sketch out a possible life-story. What remain are the bits of arab-american lore that I've discovered (like the use of inshallah in most english messages) and our sincere wishes to Tamanna for a happy and rewarding life.

The economics of food

Westside market on Broadway

We are slowly realising that we live in a very expensive city, at the very least if we plan on maintaining our habitual lifestyle. We knew that the rent was going to be nasty, however we did not expect the expensiveness to extend to other aspects of daily life such as transportation and food. Regarding transportation I would say "faire enough", NY is a very big city with a very dense network of public transports that needs to serve millions of people (although I still can't for the life of me understand why they don't have any line going horizontally through or above central park).

Food, however, is more surprising. Compared to switzerland:

• Meat is almost 3 times cheaper
• Vegetables and fruits are almost 3 times more expensive.

Indeed, $1 for a tomato is crazy. And so is paying $5 for a kilo of apples. And this is found across a number of organic food markets such as Zabar's, Whole Foods, Westside, Citarella, etc. I will not delve into the ludicrousness of distinguishing food with the organic and non-organic terms (the closest parallel we have in Switzerland, in theory, is BIO, but I somehow have the impression that the standards for non-organic food are different here than for non-BIO products back home... but I blame this on culture shock – see previous post). However, if one wants to eat healthy food that would be entirely affordable at home, here it becomes a luxury that you need to be able to afford. (There are a number of cheap(er) options, which we might look at, but that are not very convincing at least from the outside.)

Discussing the topic with our favourite local inhabitants (Virginia&Fred!), we noted that you need to be in a dire economical situation to not be able to afford doing your grocery shopping at Migros and Coop (in which case you would have to *shivers* resort to Denner). Here the tune is different: if you can afford it, you can eat your greens and live healthy, paying hefty sums for local produce and branding yourself as a Localvore (the fact that local could mean half a european country away does not seem to be an issue here). And yet, if you are a happy carnivore, you will be able to buy meat at incredibly low prices, in the very same stores where you were ogling at the tomato prices. 

All of which makes you wonder about the question of social inequality: the economically-challenged, health-conscious european family (if it exists) will forego meat and other expensive products; the american counterpart will have no choice and will end up with a not-so-healthy protein-rich regimen based on meat and non-vegetable products. Of course you can eat cheap crap in european cities just as well, but at least there you might have a better choice.

The small village in the big city

 

Stores along Broadway avenue

New York presents very interesting urban dynamics. You walk along any avenue, and you see shops that cater to any possible desire you might have. You want a portable washing machine? It's in a 3.5m wide shop cramped just next to the cellphone operator's shop, and next to the indian Deli, and next to the clothes store, and next to the organic food market. Walk up two blocks (one should get acquainted with the Manhattan distance after a couple of days in its eponymous city) and you will see the same stores reappearing, just distributed in a slightly different pattern.

You then realise that it is possible to serve all your needs within a very limited geographical space, following the important rule of "you shouldn't have to walk more than 5 minutes to get anything you need". The phenomenon is interesting in the sense that it partitions this huge seamless expanse of large residential buildings, commercial spaces and transportation hubs into small villages that are self-contained. I could spend a month around W 80th street in between Broadway and Riverside Drive, and I'd actually have a nice park to visit (not Central Park, which to my shame I only visited today for the first time), coffee places to hang out, a barber shop, an electronics store, a nail club (wtf!?), and a laundromat (we still haven't deliberated on the use of the latter, more to come on the subject?).

Settling down

Our apartment in W 78th Street

Moving to a new place, battling jet lag, discovering the pro's and con's of living in a small place in a big city, the noise, the heat, the sticky kitchen counter...

The Columbia University's website gives plenty of advices to newcomers and international students. Among these, there are tips on how to recognise that you are suffering from culture shock. The symptoms that struck us the most are "irritability for small details" and a "need for extreme cleanliness"... If we're not suffering too much from the former, we definitely are from the latter, although I peg it down to different standards and expectations rather than culture shock...

That said, the apartment is growing on us, the naked bricks and (some of) the furniture are very charming, we have a fancy fireplace, mirrors at every corner and we're one block from Broadway and 50 meters from Riverside Park. Yesterday we got the missing kitchen equipment, accessories and tools, to get the place running, we've identified our future favourite shopping spots and we've solved half of our american cellphone problems (we got a prepaid plan for Marion, my new cellphone will arrive tomorrow, a post will follow on that...)

Marion has started officially going to the university library and working on her thesis, while I'm working extended mornings at home for Pomelo, and will decide what to do with my afternoons in the next couple of days!