Saturday, February 26

Fun in The Big Apple


I'd like to dedicate this blog post to my iPhone and 3G cellular networks, without which we might have been lost, dead, or incredibly hungry. And unable to document everything that happened (click on the pictures to see them full size. And yes, we took videos too, which I guess I should try to combine into a large movie clip before I try to upload)

Not sure exactly where to begin with this post, except by saying that I am sitting on the bus typing up a WordPad document trying to figure out exactly where to begin with this post. Long story short: Swetha and I made a spontaneous trip to NYC! It was incredibly exciting (it was her first time), tiring, stressful, and yet so wonderful. In fact, we are having a difficult time looking back at the skyline right now and not weeping. 

I usually go home for post exam weekends, and this has been one of the few times I have not since the fam has decided to go skiing. Skiing + me = pain so I figured I’d just stay instead. Friday night was the JeffHOPE ball, and if that were something that occurred later in med school (like 3rd/4th year), didn't require a $70 ticket, didn't require a new dress, and didn't require getting dressed up after taking exams for 6 hours, maybe I would have attended. But instead, we took a pleasant walk down to Rittenhouse Square Park on Friday night (60 degrees!), played ball, and came back home realizing that we had not done any packing at all. And yet we somehow managed to catch a morning bus out of Philly into NYC.

With minimal $$ spent (of course, this requires lots of walking and packing our own snacks) we hit up major tourist attractions while also avoiding getting mugged or killed.

Rockefeller Plaza

Our first stop was the Rockefeller Center. This is the location of NBC studios and where the show 30 Rock (watch it!) is set. Excellent things to do here include skating in the rink, touring NBC studios, climbing up 30 Rockefeller to view the city from an observation deck, and just walking around and immersing oneself in the wonderful upbeat atmosphere (just ignore the lame songs playing in the background). We visited the LEGO store, which contained a LEGO model of Rockefeller Plaza. Picture on the far right = dragon made of LEGOs!!





Times Square + Shopping

I think the best time to see Times Square it is on a summer evening when you can walk around, eat street food, have your brain addled by advertising, and get swept away by the glitz. However, it was pretty spectacular when we went too.



We visited a good number of the stores along 7th Ave and Broadway. The M&M store has three levels, all of which are filled with chocolate. Much self control is needed here and it's best if you visit on a full stomach. I had my very first taste of Peanut Butter M&Ms!
We visited a rival candy store after this, the Chocolate factory, or something (Hershey's). I had to be dragged away from various items made of solid white chocolate. We also visited American Eagle, the Hard Rock Cafe (took some pictures with actual instruments played by Maroon Five and Linkin Park!) and the Disney Store.




Time Warner Center, Museums
We walked a mile down Broadway, right through the Theater District and ended up in Columbus Circle, which contains the Time Warner center (photo below), which is just a really nice mall. To avoid passing out from looking at price tags, we did not actually step into any of the stores, but made plans to return someday when we had money or husbands with money. 







Museums



From Time Warner, we walked another mile or so up alongside Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History (an hour before closing time - when it's free!) and strolled through the galleries filled with animal models. Made me miss childhood (MoS!!). If anyone knows how they make those animal models, let me know because I am curious. It's not real animal hide, is it? Anyway, we culminated our visit by watching a presentation on the Big Bang Theory narrated by Liam Neeson. Just pretend that Qui-Gon Jinn is speaking and it’s cooler. We left the Museum of Natural History, and cut right through Central Park. We likely would have been lost without my iPhone's Maps feature.



Our next stop was the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art (The MET). Apparently they only recommend that you pay a certain admissions fee, so after solemnly swearing to someday donate money to the Met, we slipped right in for free. The museum is very very vast and three hours later, we somehow managed to briefly visit almost all of the galleries. I even let Swetha drag me through the gallery of Modern Art.
My advice is to not try to look at everything because that would be impossible. Instead, spend time looking at what interests you and take in the ambiance of each gallery. We almost had a high class dining experience at the Met (accompanied by live Jazz musicians), but it seems we needed early reservations or something like that. We especially liked the Temple of Dendur and the gallery of Egyptian art.





There was also this cool gallery just for South Indian art and I would have stayed there for longer, except it was almost closing time. At this point, the museum security staff started giving us looks and we felt it best to avoid their wrath, especially seeing as we hadn’t paid.






Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty

We took a ferry to Staten Island (also free!) which gave us an excellent view of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Be thankful for this video because I nearly got frostbite standing outside on the deck and filming this. Staten Island ended up being pretty deserted—it was actually kind of like a scene out of I Am Legend. Every eatery we looked for ended up being sketchy and all boarded up...weird, I know.


Statue of Liberty as seen from the ferry

The Financial District


We ferried back to Manhattan, making plans to visit City Hall and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, both of which offer free guided tours. But turns out these things are closed on weekends (why why why why why) so we had to content ourselves with walking around the Financial District. We did however get to visit Ground Zero, St. Paul's Chapel, the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site, and Trinity Church. These were, of course, free. And unexpectedly, we ended up having just enough time to walk Wall Street (THE Wall Street), past the New York Stock Exchange and other fancy schmancy buildings.


Me! And Wall Street!

And so ended our trip! Note: Total spent on attractions = $0. In fact, all the money we spent was on the Subway and on some food here and there. 


That's it! As always, thanks for reading. 

Tuesday, February 1

Re-enter the blogosphere.

Since the last time I blogged, I've become taller, thinner, wittier, and more interesting.
Of course, this is false. If anything, I've gained a slight humpback and a few lines on my face thanks to various stresses including but not limited to biochemistry, looking for summer research in Boston, and the slow but sure destruction of my apartment (more about that later). So I'm actually handwriting this blog post with hopes of typing it up later. If you're reading this, that means that sometime in the future, I will have overcome my laziness. Yay

By the way, my laptop is evil. I think it may have been assembled in hell by the devil himself. It's not even that old, but it's so pro at foiling my attempts to get work done while also devouring up my music, pictures, and documents leaving no hope that I will see them ever again. It's like one of those cars that cost so much to repair that it would be cheaper just to buy a new one. I've had to reformat this devil-machine at least three times during its life and even had to replace the hard drive once. The sound will turn off depending on the laptop's mood at the time. The fan utterly fails as a fan and as an added bonus, emits an asthmatic Darth Vaderesque rasp when you turn on the laptop. Anyway, at the moment the devil machine isn't booting up and I think it may have finally reached the end of its pathetic life. It won't even let me boot ubuntu, which I co-installed on the hard drive anticipating something like this would happen. I guess I could replace the hard drive again, but I won't because this laptop deserves to be taken outside and shot.

So recently, friends made me feel super guilty about abandoning my blog. And I realized that if I am ever to look back at my first year of medical school with any sort of fondness, I better record the memories, at least the un-unpleasant ones, while they are still fresh. If I actually blog about good memories, in the future when we read about them again, we may be able to fool ourselves into believing that all of medical school was fun (if you read old posts about penn state, they make it seem like such a riot).

I should mention that I am sitting on the megabus to Boston, indicating that we just finished an exam. Not just any exam, but the Biochemistry final! Out with a bang it goes, the hardest class I have probably ever taken in my life (thus far).

Valuable lessons taught to Sowmya by Biochemistry:
1. It is possible to survive on <3 hours of sleep a night for 5 days straight and then take an exam. Of course this is incredibly unhealthy, but it is possible.
2. Pregnant women should really take folic acid.
3. Coffee actually doesn't taste that bad if you drink it when its hot enough to scald your taste buds. Also, a caffeine induced crash can be warded off be preemptively consuming more coffee.
4. If you don't take folic acid when you're pregnant, you will have spinal-defect-babies.
5. The week before a final exam is the wrong time to decide that you want to learn how to play a new musical instrument.
6. Ignoring and trying to forget about the lectures that you have skipped while playing a musical instrument makes them go away. Haha jk. No it doesn't.
7. Take the damn folic acid if you pregnant. Just do it. 400 micrograms.

In additional to all of this, if I am to live up to the job of prog historian, I should definitely outline to you the few but memorable exciting highlights of the past month, starting with the most recent and going back in time.

Jan. 28 7:10 PM: I decide to make a new blog post.
 Jan. 28 12:30 PM: We celebrate the end of Biochemistry by going to Portofino for lunch.

Jan. 28 6:48 AM - 7:30 AM: I have the shortest "night" of sleep in my life (not counting all-nighters).



Jan. 25: My new electric guitar, a Squier Affinity Strat, is delivered.
Jan. 22: The last remaining teenager in our year finally turns 20!



Ramya's birthday dinner. I made fettucine with alfredo sauce. Everybody brought a dish (making it fattier than necessary since it was a party) and packed up all the leftover food into ziploc bags, to consume it over the next few days. We've totally become aunties.

Jan. 16: A large hole is made in the apartment wall.

It was a perfectly sane night of playing Catchphrase, eating brownies, and telling scary stories in the dark. And I had just gone downstairs for a MINUTE to buy some Red Bull. This is what I saw when I returned.

Harsha and Jon pose next to their work of art.

I think I'll stop here partly because I don't think many of you will make it reading this far and mainly because I haven't held a pencil in my hand and written continuously for this long since high school. If I continue, I may develop an open sore on my finger. Mad props if you read up until here. Actually, props to anyone who still reads this blog.
Thanks!
Sowmya

Photo credit: Jenny Mao