Sunday, November 27, 2005
On 23 November, just as I was rushing to catch a bus to New York City, I came upon my first snow outside the university mailroom.
And nice snow it was too - delicate, crystalline flakes that melted on your fingers in a heartbeat, not compacted lumps of ice, or disgusting slushy stuff. This was
real snow.
Winter is setting in. I returned from New York to find the branches of the gingko tree outside my window well and truly bare - which was somewhat depressing, since it had held out for so long.
I would post more photos from my NYC Thanksgiving trip if my upload limit to Flickr for the month hadn't run out. It was a great trip, even though I did not have the time to properly visit the major attractions. But I managed to see Wall Street and the WTC site (albeit at night, so no photos, sorry), watch 'Syriana' at the Angelika Film Center (during which I got offered popcorn by a guy sitting next to me), wander Times Square in the -4degC cold, amidst gusting winds that made it feel at least 5 degrees colder, be awed by the majesty of the Grand Central Terminal, get myself tangled up in the subways in the wee hours of the morning by virtue of oversleeping and missing my stops (yes, multiple stops - I amaze myself sometimes). Oh, and I was there for the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, but not for the M&M balloon's unfortunate crash into a lamp post. Scientologists accosted me at the Times Square station purportedly offering a 'free stress test' that was really an advertising pitch for their book on some 'stress relief' technique called 'dianetics' (but who trusts these religious cults?). People kept asking
me for directions - which pretty much goes to show how cosmopolitan New York is: it's hard (at least for the tourists) to tell the locals from the tourists. And as I went my meandering way through the city, my brain was constantly generating movie /TV references. It couldn't be helped. It was New York, New York.
words were spilled on Sunday, November 27, 2005