A day in Chelsea

Because my life is insane and ridiculously adventure-ridden, I have had a highly abnormal work week. For various complicated reasons, today took me, not to New Jersey as usual, but to Holy Apostles soup kitchen in Chelsea. This feeding ministry is one of the oldest and largest in Manhattan - they serve over 1200 meals every weekday! That's not an entirely accurate reflection of how many people they serve, because, unlike in many other soup kitchens, guests are invited to go through the line as many times as they like. But then, it's not a conventional soup kitchen, any way you look at it.

For starters, it's in a church. And not just in a church basement, but in the nave itself - which is thought-provoking in a whole host of ways. Instead of pews, there are 20 or so tables scattered throughout the sanctuary, where groups of people from every imaginable demographic sit and eat. Off to the side is a station where a chiropractor offers her services, free of charge, to anyone who wants an adjustment (another highly thought-provoking way of practicing outreach ministry). In another corner, a volunteer plays background music on the piano. Above it all, a banner hanging from the choir loft proclaims: "There shall be no outcasts in the Episcopal Church." How's that for practicing what you preach?

Holy Apostles feeds people, yes. But more than that, it affirms the human dignity of every man, woman, and child who walks through its doors. As a result, the atmosphere is completely different from any other soup kitchen I've ever been to - sure, there are plenty of unhappy and unpleasant people, but for the most part, everyone I meet is surprisingly cheerful and grateful. Perhaps that's because there was no status difference between the several hundred guests and the 50+ volunteers, many of whom are homeless and/or jobless themselves. It was really an incredible opportunity for me.

And, of course, because I seem to have a knack for having ridiculous interactions with strangers, here is the take-away story of my day: there I am, serving what must be my 800th cup of lemonade, when a short, rather bug-eyed man comes over and starts staring at me.

"Do you want a refill?" I ask

Completely ignoring this, he gazes up at me and proclaims:

"Moles don't have eyes."

"Uh....really?" I stammer, completely bewildered.

"YOU have eyes," he affirms, points emphatically at my face, and then walks away. 

Really? Because somehow I wasn't clear on that one :)

All in a day's work

After a month of living in New York, I have come to the conclusion that it is truly impossible to have a boring day in this city. Stressful, chaotic, even terrible – but boring? Not unless you’re living in a cave, and even then it’s likely that some excitement will find its way to you. Below is a retelling of a typical (in a gloriously random and not at all predictable) day in the life of a culturally displaced, chronically sleep-deprived port chaplain/intern. Be forewarned, it's rather long - I wanted to put it behind a cut, but blogspot makes that absurdly difficult. Feel free to skip or skim as you please.

I wake up, as usual, not to my alarm, but to the roaring of diesel bus engines and the sound of car horns. It’s not fair to say that Harlem awakens, because that would incorrectly imply that Harlem ever sleeps. At 7:10, I leave the comparative quiet of our apartment and walk the 5 or so blocks to the 125^th St. ABCD stop. For some unknown reason, rush hour is worse than usual this morning. All this really means is that, instead of the A train being standing room only (which it almost always is anyway), there are so many people that it’s not even necessary to brace oneself as the train stops and starts – we’re all so tightly crammed together that not even I, who manage to fall over on the train with embarrassing regularity, have room to move. At Chambers St, I extricate myself from the throng with great difficulty and transfer to the much calmer PATH train to Newark.

My coworker, Jacques, who has braved the hellish Newark rush hour traffic to come pick me up, greets me at Penn Station with the news that two of our chaplains and our van driver won’t be in today. Since I still don’t have my TSA ID card, which would let me go about the port solo, that means we’re effectively down to one staff person. We fight our way through a throng of semi trucks to the Seamen’s Center, where we’re awaited by a group of burly Croatian seafarers who want to go to the mall. Preferably immediately. Meanwhile, the phone is ringing off the hook, and in the time it takes us to evaluate the daily ship list and don our attractive neon yellow safety vests, we have our day’s work cut out for us.

In the midst of all the chaos, Jacques decides that NOW is the time to teach me how to drive in the port. Granted, I have to learn sooner or later, but I’d been putting it off as long as possible because….well, frankly, the port still kind of terrifies me. The traffic is unfailingly horrendous because it consists, not only of cars, but of trucks, trains, straddle carriers, police jeeps, and any other kind of construction vehicle you can imagine. The port is also labyrinthine, and the Port Authority police are always creating and dismantling new detours as the container ship traffic ebbs and flows. All in all, you have about a 10% chance of getting where you want to go in any kind of timely fashion, especially if you’re a timid Midwesterner and not an aggressive New Jersey driver.

No matter. I shepherd the Croatians into a van, brace myself for imminent death, and head out into the fray. We arrive at Jersey Gardens Shopping Center and find 8 frantic Filipinos, who had somehow gotten left off our pickup list and were due back at their ship 10 minutes ago, awaiting us. That kind of thing happens all the time – there’s simply too much going on in port for anyone to keep track of it all. Port Rule #1: go with the flow. Port Rule #2: don’t freak out. We load them in the van and head back to port.

As I’m speeding (as much as I dare) to the main container terminal (there are 3) to deposit the tardy Filipinos, we get a call from our receptionist: the APL Arabia requires phones and phone cards IMMEDIATELY. This kind of thing also happens all the time. Ship-bound crews (often from Myanmar) that don’t have US visas are desperate to contact their families, and we’re their only resource. So we drop of our passengers, and head to container terminal #2, which has the maddening policy of requiring all visitors to be driven to ships in a security van (as it happens, our chauffeur is a lovely Tunisian man, who is thrilled to have even a 3 minute opportunity to speak French to someone). We climb the treacherously wobbly gangway, and are greeted by the chief mate, a lovely young man from Germany. “She sprichest dutch!” Jacques proclaims, butchering my native tongue, and shoving me at the astonished officer like some sort of human peace offering. I sheepishly admit that, yes, I do indeed speak German (not Dutch…seriously, people), and ask how we may be of service. The chief mate lights up with evident delight (having been the only German speaker aboard ship for 7 months, he’s thrilled to find a fellow countrywoman), and ushers us into the officers' dining room for an astonishingly gourmet lunch. Again, port life is like that: a day will transition from the insanity of double-booked crew pick-ups to a relaxed, jovial luncheon and back again. All you can do is go with it.

Clutching our stomachs, and stammering our inadequate thanks, we deposit the phones and phone cards with the chief cook, and resume our rounds. By 3:00, we have been to every terminal in the port at least once, and to the mall four times. We have transported about 40 people from about 10 different countries. Waving goodbye to a vanload of I-Kiribati (Wikipedia informs me that’s what people from Kiribati are called. You learn something new every day.), we head back to the center to fill out some final paperwork and, at long last, go home.

For me, the trip home is only the beginning of the day’s adventure. Working in NJ and living in Uptown Manhattan means I have a reverse commute, so the trip on the PATH train is always blissfully easy. But the minute I get off at the World Trade Center, the madness begins. Deftly navigating my way through the hoardes of Wall Street execs and jabbering tourists trying to catch a snapshot of Ground Zero through holes in the fence, I manage to arrive at the subway station without either tripping over someone or getting tripped over (I wish I knew how to impress upon you that this is truly the most remarkable thing about my day). I swipe my metro card and wait an appalling 15 minutes before a C train comes rumbling in. And now the fun really begins.

There’s one seat left, and I run to snag it. It’s only once I’m there that I realize I’m sitting next to the requisite C Train Crazy Person. In this case, insanity is embodied by an immensely fat woman wearing a rather impressive giraffe suit (in itself, not that odd for the C), who is muttering to herself with surprising aggression. It takes me a few minutes before I realize that she’s going systematically evaluating every person in the train and devising vicious insults for each one of them. Just as I’m beginning to wonder if and when she’s going to deliver these curses, she gets off. Not to be outdone, she’s replaced by a mangy homeless man, who’s wearing an orange, plastic, pumpkin-shaped trick or treat bucket on his head. The train rattles on. A disheveled old woman carrying an enormous mop sits down on my other side, and the empty space in front of me fills up with a flock of Spanish-speaking (or rather, screaming) high-schoolers. Normal.

By the time my stop comes around, mop woman has fallen asleep on my shoulder. Shoving her away as gently as I can, I fight my way out of the train, turn on my iPod, and begin my walk home. I haven’t gone 2 blocks when an 8 year-old pulls up alongside me on her scooter and motions for me to remove my headphones. Figuring she’s lost or something (there’s no parent in sight, after all), I oblige. “I like your hairstyle!” she shouts, and zooms off. Please bear in mind that I’ve been in a windy port all day, and the only word that’s appropriate for the state of my hair is ‘messy.’ At this point, I actually have to sit down, right there on the sidewalk, so that I can adequately laugh at the total randomness of my life.

And so it is. I could go on; the evening was only slightly less ridiculous, but I think that’s more than enough normalized insanity for one blog post. My greatest fear is that I’ll eventually become jaded to the glorious expression of human diversity that is life in New York City and I hope that, by sharing it with you here, I can continue to delight in it on a day to day basis.

On my favorite place in NYC

New York is an extraordinary city, with more marvelous buildings, parks, museums, and restaurants than I could ever hope to explore in my lifetime. It is therefore ridiculous to say that I have a favorite place in the city (especially after having been here for only a month), but ridiculous or not, I've found my haven in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. 

I know a church can't be defined only by impressive statistics, but indulge me for just a minute and let me give you a sense for the palatial grandeur of this place: even in its 2/3 completed state, the Cathedral is the largest religious edifice in the US, and the third largest in the world (after St. Peter's and some church in Nigeria). It is so tall that the Statue of Liberty could comfortably fit inside the nave. The gothic interior is breathtakingly beautiful, with stained glass windows, a stupendous organ, and, as if the main nave weren't enough, 7 fully equipped side chapels. 

I first set foot there on my very first day in NY, and have been unabashedly in love ever since. My housemates roll their eyes at my Cathedral obsession, and know that I can't go anywhere near Morningside Heights without making a detour to catch a glimpse of glory. I've even made a practice of stopping by for half an hour or so on my way home from work (now you know my other reason for switching to the C train...), just to maximize the amount of time I spend there. 

Without any doubt the best thing about the Cathedral is the music. I, who have been unhealthily obsessed with sacred music since age 12, have finally found a church whose choir meets my (unreasonably) high standards. Evensong on Sunday evenings is the kind of worship experience I've always yearned for, but never thought actually existed in the real world. The liturgy is carried out with impeccable high church pageantry. The congregation sits in the choir stalls, where the acoustics are at their best. The program changes completely from week to week, cycling through an impressive array of compositional styles.  Needless to say, I look forward to it with manic enthusiasm. But what really gets me is that the beauty of this service literally draws people from off the street - the congregation starts out sparse, but quadruples in size by the end, as tourists and passersby hear the magical singing and can't draw themselves away. 

This morning, I was finally able to make it to a Sunday morning service, and wasn't disappointed. I have never in my life seen such liturgical majesty in an Episcopal Church: not only were there 7 assisting clergy, a full choir, and a whole troop of acolytes, but there were also at least 25 UN diplomats present! The homily was given by a Muslim ambassador from Libya - a beautiful expression of the church's commitment to crossing cultural, political, and religious boundaries. I know it shouldn't take an enormous (and enormously wealthy...) cathedral to inspire this sentiment, but St. John the Divine, with its commitment to liturgy, the arts, and socio-political involvement, makes me proud to be an Episcopalian. 

And, if I needed another reason to love the Cathedral (and I think we can all agree that I didn't), I found it today as I walked out after the morning service: it has BELLS! Not a bell, not a cheap carillon, but a whole set of big, glorious, resounding bells that peal just like their European counterparts. I was so surprised and delighted by this discovery that I spilled an entire cup of coffee all over myself and stopped dead in my tracks, coffee-drenched, in the pouring rain, grinning madly until the music finally stopped. 

I have found heaven on earth. 

Don't take the A train

…take the C train instead; it’s much more interesting.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the NY subway system (a thing of great beauty, I might add), it’s important to know that, on most of the main traffic arteries in Manhattan, there are 2 overlapping train lines: a local and an express. As you might imagine, the local trains stop at all the stops, and the express trains only hit the major ones. In the case of my daily commute, I have a choice between the A (express) and the C (local). Motivated by the very understandable desire to cut back on commuting time, I usually take the A.

Or I did, until a few days ago, when, due to circumstances that are now irrelevant, I found myself in an uptown C train. There I was, innocently reading my book, when I looked up and witnessed a most extraordinary sight: without any clear reason, the woman sitting across from me (who, I might add, looked very sane and not at all suspicious by outward appearances) got up from her seat, thrust herself at one of the poles in the middle of the car, and started pole dancing with dangerous exuberance. So dangerous, in fact, that she wound up kicking a guy in the head, and nearly causing a full out fight. Needless to say, I was mesmerized. Who knew that such quality entertainment could be found merely by altering one’s commute?

Since I don’t exactly have a pressing need to hurry home after work, and since the C is considerably less crowded than the A, I decided to see what would happen if I took the C again. This time, I decided to throw in another variable by taking my Teach Yourself Hindi book along with me to pass the time. I wasn’t disappointed. Not 2 stops into my morning commute, a young Indian man got on, surveyed the relatively empty car, and decided that the logical thing to do was to sit uncomfortably close to me. He proceeded to badger me – in Hindi – for my number throughout the rest of the commute. Needless to say, my stop couldn’t come fast enough (and equally needless to say, he remains number-less).

I repeated the experiment on the commute home, and garnered attention of a far more pleasant kind. Upon seeing my Hindi book, a lovely older man from Kerala and an African-American MTA employee (both of whom were squashed up against me for completely legitimate space constraint reasons) engaged me in a fascinating discussion about linguistic and ethnic diversity in NYC. It was the first real conversation I’ve had on a train, and it renewed my faith that the inhabitants of this city, particularly those who commute at rush hour, are indeed human beings, and not manner-less boors. And then, as if I hadn’t had enough subway excitement for the day, my anthropological discussion partners were quickly replaced by a very distressed young German man, who had both accidentally been separated from his girlfriend and gotten on an uptown instead of a downtown train.

Truly, I tell you, there is never any shortage of adventure in New York.

9/11

This post is, obviously, several days late in coming, but I've decided to post it nonetheless.

Living in New York has given me a whole new perspective on the events of September 11th. Eight years ago, when the planes hit the twin towers and the Pentagon, I was as shocked and horrified as anyone else. But since I wasn't directly affected, and didn't personally know anyone who was, those events have steadily slipped into forgotten-ness. No longer.

As I've mentioned, I walk around Ground Zero (or whatever it is that we're calling it now) as part of my commute every morning. Sure, some of the initial chill has worn off as the commute has become more and more routine, but there's a definite inescapability about a giant hole in the middle of downtown Manhattan. Somehow, having that hole be a part of my new daily life, has forced me to come to grips with it in an entirely new way. 

On the anniversary of September 11th, I spent my workday helping out with several memorial services around the port. Conversations with many port workers who watched the towers fall from New Jersey drove home for me the reality that is painfully obvious to all of them: everyone was and is affected. Something else I didn't know: because the port is a TSA-secured zone, the entire place was locked down for two days. Thousands of port workers were literally trapped behind locked gates, many of them suspecting that their friends and family members had died in the attacks, but lacking any way of knowing for sure. 

But by far the most chilling 9/11 related experience came today, when, instead of going straight from the PATH station to the subway stop, I decided to go exploring for a bit. My wanderings took me to St. Paul's Chapel, which served as a refuge for firefighters and other aid workers for months after the tragedy. It's now a surprisingly effective hybrid of church, memorial, and museum - all around the perimeter are exhibits of firefighters' gear, letters of support from people everywhere, pews and cots where relief workers slept. The place was absolutely flooded with people; I had trouble getting in and out the door. Hours later, I'm still struggling to process what I saw. 

I hope you'll pardon what risks being a sappy reflection on things that most Americans probably realized 8 years ago (what can I say, I'm a little late in the game). Watching this city memorialize those events has been a truly inspiring - and humbling - way to begin my year here.

port life

I've been saying for years that I can't envision myself working at your average, 9-5 desk job. I have the utmost respect for people who do it, but knowing myself, I'd lose my mind within the first 2 hours, maybe sooner. It's a very good thing, then, that my current internship is about as far as one could get from anything resembling stability, orderliness, or consistency. I absolutely love it.

I've been on 6 ship visits so far: 1 car ship, 3 container vessels, 1 oil tanker, and 1 scrap metal ship. Each ship had a completely different character, and completely different needs. 60% of all seafarers are Filipino, and that proportion holds roughly true for most of the crews I've seen. The remaining 40% could be any nationality: Greek, German, Ukrainian, Polish, Indian, Sri Lankan, Jamaican, Romanian...it's amazing to me that the crews are able to communicate in English well enough to run a ship! I've seen some pretty substantial language barriers, but I guess the simple fact that the ships do run is a testament to the human ability to cross all manner of communications barriers.

The visit to the oil tanker was a particularly interesting experience, not least because I was terrified I was going to be blown up. The tanker terminals are in Bayonne, across the channel from Port Newark (NJ geography is incredibly mystifying to me, and I'm only just beginning to make any sense of it), largely because their cargo is so, well, dangerous. Security is incredibly strict, for obvious reasons - visitors can't take cell phones, cameras, or any other electronics aboard, because the tiniest spark might cause a chain reaction. The ship itself was a maze of pipes and hoses (I was convinced with every step I took that I was going to trip, disconnect something, and cause the death of the entire population of New Jersey), but home to one of the most hospitable crews I've met thus far. Perhaps because I was accompanying a Filipino chaplain, they were so enchanted by our presence that they fed us a feast including, but not limited to: dried, fried mackarel (surprisingly tasty), rice, squid, mashed potatoes, bean soup, cabbage soup, and homemade donuts. I'm going to have to learn how to say no to at least some of these delicacies; otherwise I'll be the size of a whale by December!

The other fascinating (and equally terrifying!) visit today was to the scrap metal carrier. Unlike the tanker terminal, where everything is painstakingly clean and regimented, the metal management terminal is utter chaos. Think cranes dumping deafening loads of every kind of metal imaginable, metallic dust everywhere (it was really quite difficult to breathe), construction vehicles scurrying about madly in the dusty haze...just walking to the gangway involved taking your life in your hands. The ship was similarly chaotic - the captain was in a towering rage when we arrived, and the crew were both painfully homesick and extremely frustrated that they had been denied shore leave. We were only aboard for about half an hour before the furious captain kicked us off, but it wasn't an easy situation to behold. 

It's the constant suspense and mystery that I love so much about my job - I love that you never know what you're going to find when you board a ship. Hell, it's impossible to know which ships are even in terminal at a given time (you would think, that with all our sophisticated technology, the NY/NJ Port Authority would manage to compile a digitized, up to date ship list, but no...Ships are constantly delayed or rerouted, and figuring out which one is where is an endless guessing game)! I love that, in one workday, I can feast and laugh aboard one ship and counsel (albeit terribly inexpertly and probably not that effectively) homesick crewmen aboard another. To continue the trend of total randomness: tomorrow, my workday will consist of singing karaoke with maritime veterans in the afternoon, and schmoozing with potential donors to SCI on a Hudson river cruise in the evening. As I said, I absolutely love it. 

Eat, drink, and be merry

I went aboard my first ship today, and made a rather surprising discovery: a huge part of my job involves...eating! It actually makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. We're working with people who haven't seen anyone but their fellow crew members (and Immigration officers, who come onto ships with guns in hand, and are appallingly brutal to seamen) for months on end, so one of the best gifts we can give them is accepting their hospitality. All the same, I can't help but feel like I'm getting the better end of the deal.

Immediately upon boarding the Hoegh Berlin, a car carrier with a crew of 20 Filipinos, we were greeted with coffee and cookies. As we got to work selling phone cards, and helping the crew members top off their phones (a lot of them have trouble understanding the English prompts), the cook bustled in with a tray of freshly-baked banana bread, still hot from the oven. Not ten minutes after we had politely refused thirds, insisting that there was no possible way we could eat any more, we were ushered into the mess hall for lunch. There, the cook wasn't satisfied until we had eaten more than our fill of his soup, noodles, and (perplexingly) fried chicken. I disembarked clutching my stomach and grinning from ear to ear. 

It was an overwhelmingly positive experience. It was clear that the crew were in desperate need of human interaction, and we had a merry time listening to them discuss their families, life on board, and the idiosyncracies of the various ports where they dock. We had a decidedly less merry time listening to them worry about pirate attacks (yes, friends, I get to discuss pirates - real ones - on a daily basis). I was told afterwards that the the crew was somewhat exceptionally cheerful and well taken care of, but I have been assured that feasting can be counted on as a regular part of the work environment. I think I can live with that!

first day of work: success!

I am pleased to report that I survived my first day of work. Given some of the variables that came into play, I am fairly proud of this accomplishment.

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 :)

lost

New York is big.

Don’t laugh; I’m serious. You can know in your head that NY is the biggest city in the US, but you can’t actually have a sense for that enormity until you try to traverse the metropolis for yourself. Having spent yesterday crisscrossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn to the Bronx and back again, and today going to all 4 corners of Manhattan, I finally feel like I’ve gained some perspective on size. A little too much perspective, if truth be told.

Today was our first full day off and, since it turned out to be absolutely gorgeous out, the 5 of us went on an Adventure. Goal #1: take the Staten Island ferry. In theory, that should have been a matter of taking the #1 train to the end of the line and hopping on the boat. In reality, it was a 2 hour odyssey. An important NY lesson: the subway lines frequently change and stop without warning or explanation. All of a sudden, we found ourselves standing on 14^th St. in Greenwich Village with no idea what to do. 90 minutes later, we were finally at the ferry, having learned important NY lessons such as a) it is not, indeed, possible to walk from Greenwich Village to the ferry launch, b) West Broadway and Broadway are 2 completely different streets, and c) interns cannot afford to buy food in SoHo. An educational day indeed. And that was just the morning.

The Staten Island ferry turned out to be a marvelous (and free!!) way to sightsee. As far as we could tell, only about 1% of the people on the boat actually got off on the island (if there’s anything worth doing near the port, we didn’t find it); the point is purely to gorge yourself on the view. It was breathtaking to see all the things I’d only ever read about – Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Financial District seen from the water. Pictures soon to follow.

In the afternoon, we explored Eastern Manhattan (and I mean that in the broadest sense possible). We disembarked at 42^nd St., spent 45 minutes trying to find the public library (it shouldn’t really have been that difficult, but it’s terribly easy to get lost when you don’t know which order the avenues go in…), which turned out to be closed. Our next adventure was the Guggenheim, which is pay-what-you-want for a couple of hours on Saturday night. As it turned out, the museum was in the middle of an exhibit shift, so there were only 2 open galleries. But for $1, who cares? It would have been worth it just to see the architecture. After ducking into Central Park to watch the sun set over the lake (pond? I confess to not knowing where exactly we were), I was more than ready to go home (I’ll spare you the exciting details of the bus ride from East Harlem to West Harlem. In a word, it was…colorful).

I apologise for posting a succession of long, rather aimless entries. I expect I’ll be able to focus them more as I become at least somewhat accustomed to the endless movement and excitement of my new home, but for now everything is still an adventure.

Home Again

            After two and a half days at Little Portion Friary on the Northern side of Long Island (a really cool place), we have returned to Harlem for the long haul. It was, I will readily admit, a good decision to send us away on retreat immediately after having arrived – I was so overwhelmed even after the little bit of the city I saw on Monday, that it was blissful to be in a secluded place where cheerful friars serve you 3 delicious meals a day.

            Not that it was all fun and games. Trying to turn 5 people who’ve only just met each other into an intentional community is no mean feat. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other, writing personal mission statements, and beginning the hard task of writing a community rule of life. Given the easy accessibility of this blog, I don’t expect to post much detailed information about my fellow interns, but I will say this – I think we’ll be a fabulous group.

            I can’t be sure (our schedule has been so action-packed and subject to change that the only thing you can do is go with the flow), but I think the rest of today will be devoted to practical things, most notably an orientation to how to grocery shop in Manhattan. Tomorrow, the 5 of us and our program coordinator are going on a cross-town expedition to visit everyone’s worksite but mine (NJ is too far away…). That’ll take us to: a foster care agency and an Early Head Start program in the South Bronx, a special ed preschool in Brooklyn, and an AIDS clinic right across the street. Should be an interesting trip, to say the least.

            Oh, and a quick note about pictures, since so many of you have requested them – I do indeed have a few (mostly of our apartment and the friary), but it may take me a while to post them. Our internet connection is unreliable at best, and I somehow doubt it’ll be able to handle uploading several-megabyte files. I’ll do my best.