Apples, grown up

This past week was spring break and I spent it with my girlfriend in New York City. It always amazes me on how big of a difference there is between the Little Apple [manhattan, ks] and the Big Apple [manhattan, ny], and I really felt it after being there for a week. I am always amazed at the energy and power that the city holds, and I just love walking around and soaking it all up. My girlfriend is preparing a dress for a competition entry very soon, and this allowed me to have some free time to walk around the city and see some stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

This semester I have been doing some research on the architect Bernard Tschumi [see previous post], so I took the opprotunity of being in NYC to check out his work at Columbia University. He did the student center there, and really focused on the movement of the students throughout the space and how to make this an important event in their day. I had read about this project, but I didn't get a true sense of it until I actually visited the site and noticed how busy the traffic was both inside and outside of the glass curtain wall that contains the building envelope. If the glass were not there [it is practically invisible anyways], both versions of circulation would become one.



While I was there I also went to a famous restaurant [made so by Sex in the City] called Serendipity that had giant, delicious desserts. Below is just a sampling of the scale and decadence that occurs there.



The weather was decent while I was there, no rain or snow, but heavy coats all the time. There were several nights that we went out in Manhattan and one night we went to a place called Milk Bar that was decorated like the black and white bar in the movie, A Clockwork Orange; alas, they didn't have milk being served out of the various body parts of mannequins. We also went to the Bowery Bar, a bar which I had been to while visiting two falls ago with my studio; it was not as I remembered it however, as it was pretty empty and playing very mainstream, old music. I honestly wasn't expecting to see a bunch of white rich kids dancing to Juvenile's 'Back That Azz Up' while I was out clubbing in NYC, and it made me feel like I was back at Joe's Tap Room in Aggieville.

Now that spring break is over I am in the final stretch of my undergraduate career, and it is a little scary. In ~7 weeks I will be graduating and will be moving to New York whether I find a job beforehand or not. I know that I have marketable skills, but it can be quite a daunting task to try and find a job in New York no matter what kinds of skills you have. So, I am just going to give these last weeks all that I can and try and make the best of the short time that I have left here in the Little Apple.