Monday, January 5, 2009, Rolling through the Hudson Valley, New York
Dearest Weblog,
It’s been ever so long since we last corresponded. I’m riding a train in New York now, and rail travel made me think of you. The East Coast sure is a strange place. By now I’ve been to both Europe and Asia more than I’ve been to the East Coast, and last week was my first time ever to New York City – layovers of course excluded.
Things are similar here to California, more so than, say, Kansas. But something is still just kinda off about this place. People speak about the same as I do and even tell the same jokes, but then they talk about things like turnpikes. (Why “turnpike”? I imagine some sort of spirally roadway with gypsies careening hither and thither.) The architectural ambiance here is old, brick, and less than earthquake-ready. People dress kinda different and care about hockey. Snow is not a fun thing to play on in the mountains, but instead a nuisance on the city streets. There are pizza places on every block and none of them have Parmesan cheese.
New York is my first stop on my scenic Eastward journey towards starting a job, I hope, in the Netherlands. I have accepted a formal job offer, but the bureaucracy involved with getting my Dutch work permit is, appropriately, excruciatingly slow. All I can do for the moment is wait, and waiting any longer in Berkeley would be far too stagnant.
I’ve got my laptop, my snowboard, a few changes of clothes, a ticket via Iceland, and a Eurail pass. Everything else I’ve shipped to the house of my friend’s parents’ friends’ cousin’s son, who (if he really exists) happens to live in the town of Nijmegen, where I will (again, I hope) be working for the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics..
For now, New York is not just on the way, it’s full of old friends. Since I’ve been traipsing about the Far East, a great number of my friends have moved out here in the meantime, and they were all due for a visit. My goal has been primarily to spend time with friends long-missed, and I have not yet done much of touristing value beyond a trip up to Albany, from which I’m now returning. I’m 20 minutes out of Penn Station and I’ve got three more days in NYC. I suppose I’ll try to buy a hot dog on the street and take pictures of the Statue of Liberty of something.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Dag meneer
How long will you be in the netherlands?
January 7th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
My mother replies (via email):
“As you may have intuited, the turnpike is the long stick (hence similar to the weapon of that name) that blocked the road. After you paid your groat or farthing or ha’penny the attendant varlet would push down on the end of the pike , permitting you access. I suppose ‘liftpike’ would be more literal, but you must take etymology as you find it. This was, of course, in contrast to the ‘freeway’, a revolutionary concept of the mid 20th century which has apparently outlived its time.”