Jono and the Giant Apple: American Football History X

I'm into the swing of things. Classes are proceeding as expected, I'm working hard to get my assignments done ahead of time, and I'm punctuating the work with occasional trips to museums or friends' houses.

A quick recap of the past few days:
- Lots of accounting, statistics, corporate finance, economics and strategy (reading ~100 pages a week in cases)
- I have had a throat infection for the past three days, but it's winding down
- I'm going for $2 beers and sushi tonight in Hell's Kitchen
- I've signed up for a lot of clubs, but I'm intending to be a bit more selective about actually paying fees for them (I can be affiliated without being a member)
- We had our first Happy Hour (a communal get-together with the whole business school, with free food and drinks). At the first happy hour for our cluster we have to make a grand entrance to a whole song and dance routine - we were by far the least melodic and the loudest...
- Uzayr and I went to the Met Art Gallery (in the eastern midsection of the Park) and spent a few hours in the South-East Asia section

The SuperBowl was on Sunday, where the Ravens narrowly beat the 49ers. I was accosted by numerous classmates who wanted to explain the illustrious history of American Football, and how it is a great allegory for America (notably: high specialization, high commoditization, high production value, somewhat pointless to foreigners). It was a very exciting game (most of our cluster got together at Lisa's house in the Upper East Side). This place was incredible though, the views are the loveliest I've ever seen, thanks to the location at the south-eastern corner of the Park and the 43rd floor elevation. It was a fun night, but my throat infection unfortunately precluded going out and having fun afterwards, so I went home and slept instead.

Things here are starting to resemble a routine - some of the shine of being in a new city has worn off, but it's still fun and exciting and I'm really enjoying the experience. That said, I'm missing people at home and sunshine, so I'm compensating by occasionally wearing my Bafana and Springbok jerseys.

A little bit of accumulated wisdom from my (almost) one month here:

Five things they don't tell you when you move to New York (that they should)

1) Buy a humidifier

The heating turns the air into the equivalent of a stray gust across the Sahara - I woke up once or twice with bloody mucus before buying a humidifier (don't stress, Mom and Dad, it's just a natural product of desiccated sinuses).

2) If it's less than 20 blocks, try to walk

If you take the subway everywhere, your grasp of the city's geography and architecture is limited to little vignettes that take a long time to become contiguous if you don't walk the bits that join them

3) Mints

New York runs on coffee, it seems, drunk largely black and with sugar. That means a lot of people with bad breath. Don't be one of them, carry mints with you (thanks to Jo for the Smints that have been invaluable here)

4) Double your estimated travel time

Going from one place to another takes longer than you think. For example, the train take 8min 40 to go from 86th and Broadway to 116th and Broadway (my apartment to Columbia). On a few days I've gotten caught out thinking I can get to campus in 10 minutes. What I haven't been including is two minutes to walk to the station, three minutes spent waiting for the train, three minutes to walk to class, and 16 minutes are gone.

5) It's perfectly ok to have downtime

As someone who has plumbed the depths of relaxation, I've been feeling surprisingly anxious about not doing anything. As a result, when I got sick, it was discomforting to turn down offers of going for drinks, meetings for clubs, dinners etc. The downtime was necessary, and has, to some degree, lessened my feeling of frustration with not being able to do a million things every moment of every day. I think this is exacerbated by being a foreigner with a ticking clock in terms of leaving NYC - it doubles the pressure to make the most of the time here. I like to think I gleaned a bit of healthy perspective from my unhealthy perspective.

My cluster t-shirt