For those of you who don't know, I am working at the Seamen's Church Institute out of Port Newark, NJ. Yes, you read that right, I live and work in 2 different states. As you can imagine, that leads to a rather long commute and, I expect, no shortage of public transit related adventures. Bright and early this morning, I set out on my great expedition, accompanied by my one of my housemates, my program director, and her public-transit obsessed 8 year-old son (he can rattle off all the stops on all the lines of the subway system without hesitation, which is better than I can ever hope for myself). Together, we braved: a 7 block walk, 2 subway trains, a walk around Ground Zero (my first visit, and a surprisingly chilling experience), a navigational adventure in the PATH station, a 30 min. train ride to Newark, an hour-long wait for the bus, and a 30 min. bus ride to the port. It took 3 hours. Happily, my coworkers have concocted a plan to eliminate the final bus ride from my journey by picking me up at Penn Station, for which I am very grateful. Thanks to their help and my (slightly) increased proficiency with the system, I was able to cut the return trip down by half. Still, that's a long way to go, particularly when I have to leave the house at 6:45 am...
Port Newark itself is like another world, a science fiction-esque city in and of itself. Whereas everything is compact in Manhattan, due to space constraints, everything in Port Newark is about 10 times bigger than normal. If you've never seen a container vessel or an oil tanker, you're probably seriously underestimating their size. And then there's all the equipment - barges, cranes, trucks, storage units, etc - that accompany the cargo, all of which is equally ridiculously sized. It was quite the exercise in perspective. Even at my above average height, I felt like an ant. And then there's the cargo itself, which was far from what I expected. One of the first things I was shown on my tour was a building-sized silo filled entirely with orange juice. Nearby were the (kosher) canola oil silos, the jet fuel pipelines (which run directly to the airport, just across the turnpike), the mountain-sized pile of rock salt, and the field of jeeps. Never having thought too much about how foreign products reached the average consumer, I was fascinated to see this intermediate step in the commercial process.
Due to the transportation hassles, I arrived too late to go on any ship visits, so my first day's experience consisted purely of a port tour (which took several hours, simply due to the enormity of the space covered) and a staff meeting. I'm happy to report that the four chaplains with whom I will be working seem like energetic, friendly, and all around fabulous people. Even with the exhausting commute, I'm eagerly looking forward to going back tomorrow.
I'll be sure to post more about my employment adventures as they happen. For now, I'm off to readjust to my new 'adult' schedule and the early bedtime that necessarily accompanies it :)
I thought you should hear what we learned about New Jersey from our 3-year-old neighbor in DE. Rich was fascinated by the large, succulent slugs that crawled across our porch. There was much discussion of them and their slime. Our little neighbor, having vacationed on the Jersey Shore announced, "Swugs Wive in New Jersey." It's been our mantra ever since. Rich says he always pictures a long line of slugs carrying their little briefcases across the Delaware Memorial Bridges morning and evening. Let me know if you see any!
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