Friday 31 July 2009

Today in my mailbox

Front side:

    It takes more than saying "God Bless America"

    If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
    - 2 Chronicles 7:14


Back side:

    How do you reach the households in your target market?
    Try PREFERRED MAIL ADVERTISING etc...


For one, I have no clue what either side has to do with the other - and to continue, if this is targetted advertising then someone really ought to have a look at his algorithm. (I suggest checking the minus-signs...)

Thursday 30 July 2009

New York - the City that Never Sleeps

When I thought of the Big Apple in the past, I was mainly focused on the Wall Street/World Trade Center type New York where businessmen in pin-stripe suits outnumber tourists and extreme high-rise buildings of glass and steel are the fundamental building blocks so that Spider man has high hideouts to tie his webs to. In the back of my mind I did realise, of course, that there must be some other side to New York because the Cosby Show clearly does not take place in a skyscraper. I found out immediately that the CBD is indeed far from the average New York, that there is much, much more to this city and that it's all great.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the first things I did in NYC was to walk straight through western Manhattan, carrying a suitcase in the mild rain, after midnight. Clearly this is a unique way of creating a first impression of a city - and a good one at that (if you can handle the late hour and like a light rain) - in the week that followed, I ventured south of Times Square (i.e. into the CBD of Spiderman and the evil bankers) only twice, and down to Times Square only about three times. Partly because the conference schedule was so terribly packed that there was no way one could find any time to see the city, partly because there's plenty to do and see in the other regions that are not shown in the movies.

Since I've mainly seen western Manhattan, let's stick with that for a moment. It is of course a busy part of a big city, but that doesn't stop most streets from being lined by trees - much in the way you see on the Cosby Show, indeed (even though that's Brooklyn and I'm talking about Manhattan). There are sidewalks (as Josh told me there would be in any decent US city) and while there are generally no bike lanes, there are quite a few bikers and they seem to be (seem to be, I haven't actually put this to the test) respected by the car drivers.

I was told that New Yorkers were always in a hurry, but as any relativistic physicist knows, velocity is a relative quantity. From my point of view there was no difference with any other city I've ever been in, I was still by far the fastest pedestrian around. I was also told New Yorkers were uncivil and maybe it's because I didn't interact with enough random people, but I didn't notice anything like that. (In fact, I could imagine random people being uncivil when interrupted on the street - in any city.) True, the one taxi driver I ran into was totally useless, unpolite and apparently in a major hurry, but that may well be a more common truth about cab drivers in general.

Two more things that stand out in a positive way are the subway system (which works incredibly well and all night long at regular intervals) and Central park, which is... Okay, let's have a bit of an introduction here: I am always very impressed if a city or town can manage to maintain (against the pressures of commercial development) some sort of green area or parkland somewhere close to the centre of the city. Most great cities have something like that: Sydney has the botanical gardens - as does Melbourne. London has (amongst others) Hyde Park, Paris has the Bois de Boulogne, Göteborg has Slottsskogen. New York's central park, though, is simply absolutely outstanding. For starters, while New York is either bigger or as big as all of the cities mentioned above, central park lies just as close or even closer to the CBD as in all of the above. Secondly, it isn't just a park - parts of it come closer to being a natural reserve than anything else - I'm not sure how to describe what I've seen from central park, but the fact that I failed every time I tried to walk across to East Manhattan, must tell you something. Also, it's not just beautiful and nearby, it's also huge. According to Wikipedia, Hyde Park has about 253 hectares, Central Park has 341. (The Bois de Boulogne is 2.5 times bigger still, but lies further from the CBD.)

Furthermore, New York has regions with very strongly varying character (some of which I've discovered along with George, so you may find some more details (and pictures!) on his blog - though I haven't found the time to read all of that myself yet): Chinatown, little Italy, Harlem, Westside, Eastside, you name it. Culturally it has a lot going on, too: besides the world renowned Broadway shows, a (seemingly) thriving underground cultural scene (reminiscent of Melbourne when seen through slightly nostalgic eyes) seems to exist. All of that really brings the city down from the sterile individualism of the masses to the close and vibrant personal level and allows you to have a good time on a much more intimate level. (I know that doesn't explain much and may actually not make any sense at all, but it's getting late here so I'm trying to tie an end to this.)

After Morgantown and (definitely) Green Bank, New York was obviously a big and sudden change and maybe that's why I started to feel, after a week, that the ever-busy hubbub started to wear me out. (Though the many late nights discussing pulsar astrophysics and God knows what more over many pints of beer in various bars across Manhattan might have had something to do with that as well.) The next two weeks I would spend in Leiden and Bonn, both much smaller cities on the other side of the Atlantic - but that's another story.

Catch-up time

And at long last I made it back to Morgantown - with a day's delay because apparently scheduling a 5-hour stopover in NY isn't quite sufficient. I didn't expect to have a 6-hour delay. Anyway. We're back.

Needless to say, a lot has happened in the past month - so much that I didn't even find a spare minute to keep you all informed (that, and the fact that access to internet doesn't come as easily as access to oxygen. Even if it might in some parts of the world, then that's most likely due to a local lack of oxygen - and besides, I certainly haven't been in those places, even if they do exist.)

But I'll make amends and try to rehash the important things in a mostly chronological order, starting with the next post. So stay tuned: with a delay of ~4 weeks, here's what I've been up to.