Hippo

My plane touched down on Saturday afternoon, so I've had about 48 hours of New York and I guess that means it's about time I told folks at home what I'm up to...

It's Monday evening, 21:00 hours, and I'm sitting in Bryant Park, together with a thousand others watching the big HBO screen that will soon start showing the 1951 black-and-white movie "The Thing From Another World". Again, I'm impressed by the extremely friendly Americans, but although I'm sure they are, I'm afraid it's not just that, but also my standards that are horribly lowered by the blunt Amsterdam bar staff.

My time has been mostly consumed by writing slides in my room, going out for a cup of Starbucks coffee (with pie! with cake! with chocolate fudge brownie!), and riding up the elevators again to my luxurious temporary office. I've been sick for a week, unable to do any preparations for my presentation at the Enterprise Open Source conference tomorrow afternoon. Got the antibiotics just in time before I hopped onto the plane and arrived pretty healthy in the Big Apple. As a consequence, I'm seeing an awful lot of my screen and a lot less from this wonderful city.

And what a wonderful city this is. Living up to their right for their Pursuit of Happiness, the New Yorkers want every little bit of life to be as comfortable as can be. And because there's so many of them stacked in office buildings 100 stories high, every street block appears to be a little village on its own. As a result, nearly every block houses one or two Starbucks shops, several deli's, barbers, and everything else you could possibly need. And it's all so *huge*. Especially the cars; and the coffees.

My trip to Chinatown, yesterday afternoon, was incredible. I was afraid it would be crowded with tourists (as is Amsterdam Chinatown), but instead it's crowded by, guess what, Chinese. I had a pretty heavy beef noodle soup along with some pork chops (a specialty of the house that I couldn't refuse), which arrived in about 2 minutes, and cost me a total of 6 dollars (roughly 4 euro's). I wasn't hungry for the rest of the day, but apparently that is no reason to not keep thinking about food all the time judging by the permanent proximity of food. Although it's not as bad as in Austin, Texas, where you're supposed to be drinking soda's continuously as well. Over here, I don't see as much soda drinkers, most merely stick to the coffee. And somehow you can get away with drinking such incredible amounts of coffee, as I seem to have been able to do. Normally, I can't take more than 4 regular Hippo cups a day before I go shaking all over, ending my day completely unable to concentrate. Four of those cups is roughly about the size of 1 'grande' Starbucks coffee. Drinking coffee over here feels more like drinking warm chocolate: a cappuccino tastes like milk with a faint spur of coffee. But they stimulate you to raise your intake to such large quantities that eventually, you will take in some caffeine.

So far for the coffee. My next experience was Central Park, last night, where I was pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of the enormous amount of people in it. Apart from all the other niceties of the park, I really enjoyed the baseball fields where groups of young people, men and women, black and white, were playing their games. It was such a relaxed environment, with so many different people. Some were really good at it, and some were pretty horrible, but that didn't matter. They all had a fun time. And the nice thing about baseball is that you don't have to be an incredible athlete - if you're doing your best, you risk no more than a hundred meters sprint or so.

This day ends with The Thing ("Captain, it's alive!") in Bryant Park, a green open area in the middle of Manhattan, where a huge crowd is now enjoying the screening along with the food and drinks they brought along in their brown deli bags. And so am I, but I got to go now and get some rest. My jet lag is still around, and I need to get some sleep for tomorrow. Apart from my talk, Adam Steidley from Bluenog is supposed to take me out somewhere to a bar he 'used to play darts in'. Sounds like a challenge!