Parsed Participle

The second leg of my sabbatical is just about done.

I'm at LaGuardia Airport, lamenting the lack of wireless Internet access, as I wait for my flight to board. I'd hoped to write about my days in New York as they rolled by, but I'll have to settle for a last-minute account. This trip has served its purpose as a holiday, and I managed to spend a good deal of time walking around Manhattan, meeting cousins, friends, and a lot of surprisingly friendly people. At least twice, complete strangers offered me a ride in the city when I was actually looking out for a cab; and everybody I asked for directions were extremely helpful. Needless to say, a great part of the trip was spent in long, desultory walks. The sublet culture is awesome; I'd say it's easily the best way to stay in Manhattan if you are there for over a week.

Yurika and me took a bus ride to Washington DC where we spent a couple of days with a friend of hers. DC is a nice city to walk around in, and I walked great distances both by myself, and with Yurika and Omura-san.

There are two restaurants that we recall best as part of the eating experience in DC - a seafood place called Legal Sea Foods and a concept Pizza restaurant called Matchbox, which seemed to be almost always full with huge crowds waiting outside throughout the day. We got to visit the Smithsonian museum at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (the other half of the National Air and Space Museum) when we went to see off Omura-san at Dulles Airport. The NASM was not as much fun as might have been had I actually visited when I was a child.

Back in Manhattan, I was lucky enough to attend a colloquium at the Courant Institute (Where the NYU Computer Science department is located), which featured a project that makes the night sky search-able. It implements a search engine for astronomical images that uses geometric hashes (as opposed to words) derived from the pixels of the patterns that stars form in random images. Got a taste of what a CS lecture might feel like (and there was breakfast as well).

Funk: The Headhunters (sans Hancock, whose absence was noted in many ways) were playing at the Iridium on Broadway. I dragged (my cousins) Aamer and Zafar to see the second set. Earlier on the same day, Aamer had taken me on a guided walk around the West Village all the way up to the Meat-Packing District;

His brother Zubair on the other hand, showed me the Lower East, and his symbolically located apartment which stands on the eastward-pushing demographic border of the lower east.

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