no day but today
Apr. 4th, 2007 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenYesterday! Yesterday I went to New York City, and had a long, long, rather weird butultimately rather wonderful day. I got up at six am, for one thing, and we all piled in the car for the two-hour drive into the city, and we fought through the traffic and arrived into a glorious springlike day in Harlem.[1] Where Shubhra went off, complaining, to classes - she's my cousin at Columbia - whilst Shweta and I, equally ignorant, unleashed ourselves on Manhattan. I was last in NYC when I was thirteen, in the January before 9/11, and I can't really tell if it's me or the city that has changed since then. Probably me, to be honest: for example, I am now capable of navigating the New York subway. Which I do not like. Subway trains here are like District Line trains - big, clanky oversized sardine tins - and they're so large and dimly lit, and the stations this weird mixture between bustling and derelict, that they scare me. And they're kind of confusing, because you never know when the next train is coming and some are express and some are local and honestly, I positively missed the vast quantities of Central Line announcements. (Yes, I'm missing the BBC a bit. That really was a great experience.)
Enough of that. I managed to get us to Columbus Circle, where Shweta and I went window-shopping, took silly pictures of ourselves and ate hot dogs and ice-cream in Central Park. My first New York hot dog was a surprisingly pleasant experience. And the park itself is lovely, full of children playing and trees and birds singing and rustic bridges and all sorts of things which make it bizarre that the city was just a few hundred metres behind us. And I took pictures of things like street signs and buildings, because I am a tourist.
Following which, we successfully navigated the subway back uptown and went back to Columbia, where I sat in the back of Shubhra's class and pretended I wasn't ridiculously out of place. It was interesting, though, to see a little of how American universities work, with the system of classes and seminars, which really couldn't be more different from the lectures and tutes that I'm used to. (Of course, it's different because this is grad school I was observing, but still, an interesting experience, and given that Shubhra's field is therapy and social work, it involved talking about my feelings. At the end her professor asked me a few questions about Oxford, and said something about the one-to-one tute system being terribly valuable. She also asked if we wear sub fusc all the time, which made me giggle.)
More subway trains, and a walk through Times Square. My vivid memories of my time in Times Square are of the sheer bone-shattering cold - it was the first week of January then - and this time around, the need to shed coats and jumpers was a bit of a surprise. We had dinner and drinks with a friend of Shuhbra's called Nick, who is sweet and kind of camp, and whom I liked rather a lot. We had managed to find the only bar - and it was a nice bar, all glass and chrome and low light and ambience - in the five boroughs of New York (probably) that didn't ID. I got my glass of Chardonnay and was able to drink it in peace, feeling utterly mellow and content. There were more silly pictures.
Said bar was literally next door to the Nederlander Theatre[2], and the queue was beginning to snake round the block as we emerged into the dark, and I got tickets out my pocket and got yelled at for taking pictures and just generally got very, very excited. Because, omg, I've never seen a show on Broadway and I'd wanted to see this particular show for such a long time.
Rent. Rent, Rent, omg, RENT. It's hard to give a decent review of it which doesn't just descend into squee. I just sat there, leaning forwards with my mouth kind of hanging open, and... omg. Yes, it's a pretty spectacle, the colours and the glorious dancing - Angel! In the oh-so-high-heeled boots! - and the music is lovely... actually, let's stop and talk about just how lovely the music is. I love "Seasons of Love" with an unholy passion, especially as Pat and Ben sang it for one of their musical undertakings last term and rehearsed it constanstly whilst cooking dinner, but Ben likes "Light My Candle", and I'm a recent convert, as he tends to sing Roger's part walking to Jericho in the dark, while I try and do the other part with equal enthusiasm but significantly less musical talent. And of course we have the recording of it, but it's not the same as hearing it, as actually hearing it live and funny and sexy and romantic, and quite possibly my mouth dropped even further open than it was already. It was gorgeous.
But more than the pretty spectacle and the dancing and the music, it was real. It wasn't a piece of sugar-plum escapism, either in the fairy-story sense or in the overwrought gothic horror sense (because something like, I don't know, Les Mis isn't exactly fluffy, but it's far enough removed from real life to fulfull the escapist purpose, in a sense) - it was about real things and people and places. And the anti-corporate, against-the-grain feeling is something very palpable - and it worries me that if you replace AIDS with mental illness, these people are pretty much my friends. I don't know, I'm babbling. But I loved it. I was just blown away by it.
As it ended, I could hear Shweta sobbing in the dark next to me - no, I wasn't crying, I was just still sitting with my mouth open - and they finished with an appeal for a Broadway Cares donation to AIDS charities. I happily gave them all my change and wandered, wide-eyed, into the night. I didn't start babbling incoherently about how good it was until we'd made it onto a subway train filled with people who had also seen it, heading uptown and back to where we'd left the car.
We divided evenly, so it was just Shubhra and me driving through down dark, quiet roads at midnight back to Connecticut, and I was so tired, but chatting to keep her awake, about Rent, but then about life, and it was a lovely gentle winding-down to what had been a very long day. And that would be the appropriate point in the narrative to end this entry, the long ride through the dark towards home, were it not for the fact that four miles from home, we were pulled over by the police.
This, I suppose, was an authentic American experience - being stopped by a sour-looking, gun-toting police officer in the dead of night - but it was unnerving. It turned out that registration documents for the car had expired six months previously, and consquently it couldn't be driven any further. With frightening efficiency, they had a tow truck appear. (I resisted the tempation to ask if they have tow trucks standing by at one am just for this purpose.) I suppose we would have been stranded on the side of the road - certainly it didn't bother the cops one whit that we were being thrown out of the car in the middle of the night on a deserted road miles from anywhere - if it weren't for Nick and Shweta, who came to get us with minimal shrieking down the phone.
So, it was about two o'clock before I got to bed, but it was a lovely day nevertheless. I got up late and am still sleeepy. But yes. Lovely day, and today has so far been spent wondering how you get a car registered when you don't have a car to drive to the place where cars get registered. Hmmm.
[1]I keep trying to spell it as "Haarlem".
[2] Which is, indeed, spelt "theatre" and not "theater" - I wonder why?
Enough of that. I managed to get us to Columbus Circle, where Shweta and I went window-shopping, took silly pictures of ourselves and ate hot dogs and ice-cream in Central Park. My first New York hot dog was a surprisingly pleasant experience. And the park itself is lovely, full of children playing and trees and birds singing and rustic bridges and all sorts of things which make it bizarre that the city was just a few hundred metres behind us. And I took pictures of things like street signs and buildings, because I am a tourist.
Following which, we successfully navigated the subway back uptown and went back to Columbia, where I sat in the back of Shubhra's class and pretended I wasn't ridiculously out of place. It was interesting, though, to see a little of how American universities work, with the system of classes and seminars, which really couldn't be more different from the lectures and tutes that I'm used to. (Of course, it's different because this is grad school I was observing, but still, an interesting experience, and given that Shubhra's field is therapy and social work, it involved talking about my feelings. At the end her professor asked me a few questions about Oxford, and said something about the one-to-one tute system being terribly valuable. She also asked if we wear sub fusc all the time, which made me giggle.)
More subway trains, and a walk through Times Square. My vivid memories of my time in Times Square are of the sheer bone-shattering cold - it was the first week of January then - and this time around, the need to shed coats and jumpers was a bit of a surprise. We had dinner and drinks with a friend of Shuhbra's called Nick, who is sweet and kind of camp, and whom I liked rather a lot. We had managed to find the only bar - and it was a nice bar, all glass and chrome and low light and ambience - in the five boroughs of New York (probably) that didn't ID. I got my glass of Chardonnay and was able to drink it in peace, feeling utterly mellow and content. There were more silly pictures.
Said bar was literally next door to the Nederlander Theatre[2], and the queue was beginning to snake round the block as we emerged into the dark, and I got tickets out my pocket and got yelled at for taking pictures and just generally got very, very excited. Because, omg, I've never seen a show on Broadway and I'd wanted to see this particular show for such a long time.
Rent. Rent, Rent, omg, RENT. It's hard to give a decent review of it which doesn't just descend into squee. I just sat there, leaning forwards with my mouth kind of hanging open, and... omg. Yes, it's a pretty spectacle, the colours and the glorious dancing - Angel! In the oh-so-high-heeled boots! - and the music is lovely... actually, let's stop and talk about just how lovely the music is. I love "Seasons of Love" with an unholy passion, especially as Pat and Ben sang it for one of their musical undertakings last term and rehearsed it constanstly whilst cooking dinner, but Ben likes "Light My Candle", and I'm a recent convert, as he tends to sing Roger's part walking to Jericho in the dark, while I try and do the other part with equal enthusiasm but significantly less musical talent. And of course we have the recording of it, but it's not the same as hearing it, as actually hearing it live and funny and sexy and romantic, and quite possibly my mouth dropped even further open than it was already. It was gorgeous.
But more than the pretty spectacle and the dancing and the music, it was real. It wasn't a piece of sugar-plum escapism, either in the fairy-story sense or in the overwrought gothic horror sense (because something like, I don't know, Les Mis isn't exactly fluffy, but it's far enough removed from real life to fulfull the escapist purpose, in a sense) - it was about real things and people and places. And the anti-corporate, against-the-grain feeling is something very palpable - and it worries me that if you replace AIDS with mental illness, these people are pretty much my friends. I don't know, I'm babbling. But I loved it. I was just blown away by it.
As it ended, I could hear Shweta sobbing in the dark next to me - no, I wasn't crying, I was just still sitting with my mouth open - and they finished with an appeal for a Broadway Cares donation to AIDS charities. I happily gave them all my change and wandered, wide-eyed, into the night. I didn't start babbling incoherently about how good it was until we'd made it onto a subway train filled with people who had also seen it, heading uptown and back to where we'd left the car.
We divided evenly, so it was just Shubhra and me driving through down dark, quiet roads at midnight back to Connecticut, and I was so tired, but chatting to keep her awake, about Rent, but then about life, and it was a lovely gentle winding-down to what had been a very long day. And that would be the appropriate point in the narrative to end this entry, the long ride through the dark towards home, were it not for the fact that four miles from home, we were pulled over by the police.
This, I suppose, was an authentic American experience - being stopped by a sour-looking, gun-toting police officer in the dead of night - but it was unnerving. It turned out that registration documents for the car had expired six months previously, and consquently it couldn't be driven any further. With frightening efficiency, they had a tow truck appear. (I resisted the tempation to ask if they have tow trucks standing by at one am just for this purpose.) I suppose we would have been stranded on the side of the road - certainly it didn't bother the cops one whit that we were being thrown out of the car in the middle of the night on a deserted road miles from anywhere - if it weren't for Nick and Shweta, who came to get us with minimal shrieking down the phone.
So, it was about two o'clock before I got to bed, but it was a lovely day nevertheless. I got up late and am still sleeepy. But yes. Lovely day, and today has so far been spent wondering how you get a car registered when you don't have a car to drive to the place where cars get registered. Hmmm.
[1]I keep trying to spell it as "Haarlem".
[2] Which is, indeed, spelt "theatre" and not "theater" - I wonder why?
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no subject
on 2007-04-06 02:59 pm (UTC)