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adventures already!
May. 24th, 2010 12:17 amOn Friday, Lindsey and I drove up to Ithaca. In the morning, we hugged Mark and the kitties, and headed on over up the highway. It went really smoothly, but it's just a long way.
Lindsey's place is really cute! It has tasteful decals on the walls with birds and trees and flowers. Ithaca seems to be made of giant hills, with Cornell at the top. We found the Engineering building, and it's gorgeous, with a big airy open space with tables to sit at. Ithaca seems like it's going to be a cool place to hang out; it was in super-party mode when we were there. Probably the school year had just ended.
Yesterday, after some bagels, we got in the car again and made our way to NYC. That was a pretty smooth drive, too, until we got to New Jersey, at which point traffic got ridiculous. But we made it across the George and, amazingly, found a parking spot right outside my building!
Once we moved my stuff in (which took about five minutes), we met up with Chris![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chrisamaphone, whom we'd never met before in real life. But we went for Indian food with her, and then some great bleepy-boopy music in the theatre district. Electronic music can be pretty hard to perform live, but this went really well! The visuals really added to the show, although I would have been interested to see what kind of interfaces the performers were looking at, too... (laptop musicians: thoughts?)
This morning, we (incl. Chris) had brunch with my cousin Robin: delicious pancakes and waffles.
To get Lindsey back to Ithaca (she's successfully back in Ithaca, to start her internship tomorrow!), we came up with an interesting manœuver -- we drove out to Hackensack, NJ, and dropped me off at a train station. Lindsey took it from there, without having to drive in the city, which is admittedly pretty harrowing. At the train station, I spoke with a nice lady who told me about how she worked for RCA and NBC before she'd retired, and now she takes classes about literature for fun. It's been a linguistic adventure being here: she has "sore" as a past tense for "to see". Other notable English speakers with that inflection include my father.
When I got back to Manhattan, I walked from Penn Station down to the Google office, just to make sure I remembered where it was, and then all the way back up north to 111th street. Along the way back north, I got a dumb sandwich, and a DVI cable. And I walked along the edge of Central Park, and it's lovely and I'm excited about running around it (haven't done this yet).
The DVI cable, I got at B&H Photo Video, this wild electronics store on 9th Avenue. My impression on stepping in the door was, "my goodness, that's a lot of men wearing yarmulkes and sidelocks!" ... it turns out that a lot of the employees are in fact Hasidic. And now I'm pretty glad I brought my desktop, and that my sublessor left his big o' monitor.
My other linguistic adventure today: I stepped out the door looking for soap, because I didn't bring soap. I found a little corner store just a few blocks from my place, which turns out to be Santiago's Mini-Mart, where they mostly speak Spanish. I asked where they had soap, and the fellow working there mapped that onto "sopa", "soup". I explained: "jabón, para lavarse." But I think that's the wrong verb: should have said "bañarse", probably. And we tried to talk, but I was having trouble with his accent, but I ended up with soap and toiletries, so success!
OK! And tomorrow morning, I'm starting work. (hooray New York!)
Lindsey's place is really cute! It has tasteful decals on the walls with birds and trees and flowers. Ithaca seems to be made of giant hills, with Cornell at the top. We found the Engineering building, and it's gorgeous, with a big airy open space with tables to sit at. Ithaca seems like it's going to be a cool place to hang out; it was in super-party mode when we were there. Probably the school year had just ended.
Yesterday, after some bagels, we got in the car again and made our way to NYC. That was a pretty smooth drive, too, until we got to New Jersey, at which point traffic got ridiculous. But we made it across the George and, amazingly, found a parking spot right outside my building!
Once we moved my stuff in (which took about five minutes), we met up with Chris
chrisamaphone, whom we'd never met before in real life. But we went for Indian food with her, and then some great bleepy-boopy music in the theatre district. Electronic music can be pretty hard to perform live, but this went really well! The visuals really added to the show, although I would have been interested to see what kind of interfaces the performers were looking at, too... (laptop musicians: thoughts?)This morning, we (incl. Chris) had brunch with my cousin Robin: delicious pancakes and waffles.
To get Lindsey back to Ithaca (she's successfully back in Ithaca, to start her internship tomorrow!), we came up with an interesting manœuver -- we drove out to Hackensack, NJ, and dropped me off at a train station. Lindsey took it from there, without having to drive in the city, which is admittedly pretty harrowing. At the train station, I spoke with a nice lady who told me about how she worked for RCA and NBC before she'd retired, and now she takes classes about literature for fun. It's been a linguistic adventure being here: she has "sore" as a past tense for "to see". Other notable English speakers with that inflection include my father.
When I got back to Manhattan, I walked from Penn Station down to the Google office, just to make sure I remembered where it was, and then all the way back up north to 111th street. Along the way back north, I got a dumb sandwich, and a DVI cable. And I walked along the edge of Central Park, and it's lovely and I'm excited about running around it (haven't done this yet).
The DVI cable, I got at B&H Photo Video, this wild electronics store on 9th Avenue. My impression on stepping in the door was, "my goodness, that's a lot of men wearing yarmulkes and sidelocks!" ... it turns out that a lot of the employees are in fact Hasidic. And now I'm pretty glad I brought my desktop, and that my sublessor left his big o' monitor.
My other linguistic adventure today: I stepped out the door looking for soap, because I didn't bring soap. I found a little corner store just a few blocks from my place, which turns out to be Santiago's Mini-Mart, where they mostly speak Spanish. I asked where they had soap, and the fellow working there mapped that onto "sopa", "soup". I explained: "jabón, para lavarse." But I think that's the wrong verb: should have said "bañarse", probably. And we tried to talk, but I was having trouble with his accent, but I ended up with soap and toiletries, so success!
OK! And tomorrow morning, I'm starting work. (hooray New York!)
