Deja (D'Asia) vu

Most Korean places include all of these little dishes with your meal, placed in the middle of the table for sharing, and this place kept them coming. They were all delicious, and almost all impressively spicy. Good thing I built up a tolerance in Thailand!

So after making Shama's acquaintance at McSorley's, as well as her friend Seint, also in the clinical psych. program, I received an invitation to their joint birthday party (they were actually born on the same day) which took place on Wednesday. There's a street in downtown NYC known as Korea Town, or K-Town for those in the know. After a tasty dinner of Korean BBQ (with a specially ordered tofu bowl for the party pooper vegetarians in the house), we headed off to karaoke.

Seint and me, digesting.

I've done karaoke once before in the city, and it's fantastic because it reminds me so much of Japan. I'm sure there are traditional, American-style karaoke bars around the city, but in K-Town you can find the kind of karaoke they have in Japan: rooms of varying size that you rent for your group of friends only. The people at the front desk give you a few microphones, sometimes a tambourine or two, and let you have at it. It typically costs around $8 per person, per hour. In Japan, both of these things (Korean BBQ and karaoke) were some of my favorite things to do, and we had an absolutely fantastic time. Each person gets to sing much more often with this kind of set up, and it's not nearly as scary to sing in front of friends. It helps that most karaoke bars serve up liquid courage as well, to sort of loosen things up. I had an absolutely wonderful time.

The next morning, I got a text message from my friend Eddie, whom you may remember from my Halloween blog, inviting me to do karaoke with some of his friends on Friday for his birthday. Eddie was born and raised in Manhattan, and I met him in Japan where he was also a teacher. He was a musical theater major at Ithaca. Before that, he went to a high school with a focus on performing arts. His sister had a role in "Spring Awakening," a hugely popular musical on Broadway, for about a year before she headed off to college. His dad won a Tony. So his social group consists almost entirely of obscenely talented people, and I can't even begin to describe how impressive a scene I found myself in the middle of last night. One girl I met is an opera singer, and she performed an operatic version of "Like a Virgin" that would have left Madonna pretty impressed. Another guy toured for four years with "Cats" and "Oklahoma!" I'm not sure about the bios of any of the other attendees, but it was clear that they were all professionals. Another girl I met had directed some production that Eddie had been in recently. She's a dancer, not a singer, and she and I talked about how we felt like we should have bought tickets for the night. It was one hell of a show. At Shama and Seint's birthday party, I did a lot of singing. There were only about ten of us, as opposed to the 30 at Eddie's, and I was better than the majority of them. At Eddie's party, however, I was not about to grab the mic in front of that crowd. I was more than content to just watch the show, however.

"We were here before you were born."

This is the slogan at McSorley's, and no matter who you are, if you're walking through the door, it's true. McSorley's Old Ale House is an Irish bar in downtown New York that has the distinct honor of being the oldest bar in the city (that is, the one that's been operating uninterrupted for the longest stretch). It first opened its doors in 1854, and I have to imagine it didn't look all that different then. Women weren't allowed to drink there until the 1970's, but Irish bartenders, straight from the emerald shores of Erin by the sounds of their accents, still sling mugs of home-brewed beer at patrons who rub shoulders over sawdust-strewn floors. I didn't have to wrangle with the decision-making process when ordering here; there are only two choices, light beer or dark beer, or one of each if you like. The mugs aren't very big, so to make up for it they come two at a time and cost $4.50 for both. Quite a deal. Visitors to the bar can put it away pretty handily, and so the bartenders and waitstaff have massive forearms from hoisting so many glasses at once - the glasses have handles, and our bartender told us he can lift approximately ten with each hand. Yowzah. If you feel like you want something a bit more solid, there are sandwiches, fries and that sort of thing available, although my friend Shama and I spent about 20 minutes scrutinizing the area behind the bar trying to determine just where these dishes would come from. We didn't figure it out. I never saw anyone order anything other than a sort of combination platter consisting of huge chunks of cheddar cheese, crackers, slabs of raw onion, and pots of mustard. Tasty.

The most interesting feature hung above the bar, luckily not the part where my group stood. A light fixture was adorned with shapeless fuzzy gray forms. Someone commented on the perilous state of the mugs resting on the bar below this fixture, and a member of our group explained that he'd been to McSorley's before, and that the gray forms were actually wishbones. It seems that when the United States first began to send troops to fight in World War I, local boys preparing to be shipped off would meet in McSorley's for a few final mugs of beer. They hung wishbones on the fixture, vowing to remove them once they returned from the war. As the dust-covered remaining wishbones attest, not all of them managed to keep this promise.

We arrived around 10 P.M. and the place was packed. In fact, we had to wait in line outside for about ten minutes. Once inside, we had to stand for the first hour or so until some of our more resourceful group members managed to snag some seats at a long table in the crowded back room. The waiter made sure that each person had at least two glasses, which were in the process of being emptied, in front of him/her at all times to ensure that we weren't taking up valuable real estate without shelling out money for it. People at other tables kept popping up and challenging anyone who'd accept their offer to chugging contests. It was unfathomably loud and festive. Perhaps it was the beer, but I felt a strange sense of camaraderie with the other drinkers squeezed into the bar on all sides of me.

My group had assembled in honor of my friend Jeff's birthday. While in line, I made friends with a girl named Shama, who is in the clinical psychology program with Jeff. We hit it off, and I ended up at her birthday party not too long after, which will be the topic of my next post.

Cheers!

Undressed

After lunch with Frank, a friend of ours from Japan, and his girlfriend, Dave and I went to the Bodies exhibit near the South Street Seaport. The area reminds me of Cannery Row - clean, touristy, kitschy.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last few years, Bodies is an exhibit in which real cadavers have been dissected, preserved, and positioned to show different structures and systems. Pamala, Frank's girlfriend, told us that the bodies were all from China, which explained why they seemed so small.

My student ID card got me a $10 discount on the price of admission, which I was crowing about until Dave made a sarcastic comment that my thousands of dollars of tuition were really starting to pay off. Hmph. It wasn't terribly crowded, and the people that shared the exhibition with us were hushed as they walked around, looking at the figures from all angles and reading the placards. Different rooms were devoted to different systems: skeletal, muscular, nervous, reproductive, etc. I'd seen this sort of thing before on a much smaller scale when I was a faculty advisor one summer for the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine, but I was responsible for a group of kids then, and this time I could give my full attention to the specimens. After the initial ew-that's-actually-a-real-person weirdness (faces still have eyelashes and eyebrows, and most of the complete bodies weren't behind glass so you could get quite close), it was really interesting. Dave made a few comments comparing different parts on display to various meat dishes, and I was glad to be a vegetarian. Each room had at least one complete body, stripped down to different degrees to show bones, cartilage, muscles, organs, or whatever. Aside from that, there were lots of display cases with isolated parts like a kidney or a pelvis or a brain. Often, there would be two of something with different parts removed, like a shoulder joint with tendons and one without so that you could get a clear look at the bones underneath.

Most impressive, I thought were the displays showing the circulatory system (see the circulatory system in a pair of lungs above). Apparently the cadavers used were injected with a polymer, and once it had hardened inside the veins and arteries, the tissue was removed (otherwise it would be too delicate and complex to remove and display). The first time I looked at a map of the Tokyo rail transit system it reminded me of a diagram of the human circulatory system, and I was reminded of that experience today. The complexity (of both) is really amazing.

Dave, a smoker, said that the slices of brains of stroke victims made him want to quit more than the blackened lungs did - and since the cadavers were all from China, most of them had blackened lungs. There were also kidneys with stones in them, tumors, and various body parts with cancers. A liver with cirrhosis. Polyps along the inside of an intestinal wall. Pretty gross. From an educational standpoint, I'd have loved to see more on obesity; there was one plump-ish cadaver, and I didn't feel that they explained the risks of being overweight very thoroughly. That would shock people into thinking twice before supersizing at the drive-thru (although I guess scare tactics weren't the principle purpose here). I would have been interested to see other ailments too, more common ones, like arthritic knuckles perhaps. And there was no space devoted to the eye, although if they wanted to use only real bodies and no larger models, I guess that would be sort of tough to do.

All in all, a very interesting exhibit, that I'd highly recommend.

Snow in Central Park

February might actually be the cruelest month. After a relatively warm start, we had a snowy cold snap and now it's beautiful and warmer (highs in the mid-40s!!!) with more snow/rain predicted for Monday. Yuck. I went running on Friday with only a tank top and jacket on top - no long-sleeved shirt layer in the middle - and was actually too hot.

Now that I can take pictures and listen to podcasts with one handy device, I pause during my runs occasionally (hey, sometimes a girl needs a breather, right?) to snap a few pictures in the park. I apologize for the not-so-great quality. My BlackBerry's camera has about half the megapixels as my digital camera does. C'est la vie, it's better than nothing.

Appropriately enough, I took this picture right outside the Metropolitan Musuem of Art.

This is a waterfall (well, more like a trickle) in warmer weather.

So Happy Together: My CrackBerry and me

After nearly three years of faithful service, my trusty Verizon flip phone bit the dust. I opened it one day and the plastic around the hinge cracked. Courtney, who used to have the same phone, assured me that I couldn't just live with it because the plastic would continue to crack until the metal joint the connected the top part with the bottom part fell out. Oh dear.

I'd never felt the need for a fancy phone; as long as it made calls it was fine with me. But recently, I've become completely dependent on an application on my computer called iCal. It's a great tool for managing one's schedule - I can assign different colors to different events, import information from Facebook, make notes, attach websites, and basically indulge my borderline OCD to my heart's content. The problem was that, unless I had my laptop with me, I couldn't add anything to my calendar or even check it. So I decided that I needed a phone that I could connect to my computer and thus load my calendar onto it. This decision narrowed the pool of possibilities considerably. Macintoshes are notoriously finicky about with whom they will associate, and of all of the phones available through Verizon, only the BlackBerry would provide what I needed. So be it. I ended up with the BlackBerry Tour.

After a brief getting-to-know you period, during which I flipped through an instruction manual the size of a novel and watched a DVD about my new phone, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on how to use at least the most important features on this thing. It's much bigger than my other phone, but aside from that I really can't think of any other cons. Obviously, first and foremost, I can load my calendar onto it, adjust my calendar, then transfer the changes back to my computer. Ditto for my address book. Another thing I particularly like is that I can load music onto it. Now I don't have to carry both an iPod and a phone when I go out, and when you're walking around a city all day, every ounce counts. An added bonus: When I go running with my BlackBerry, I have not only music but a camera with me at all times, which was not the case with my iPod. The pictures I take are not of outstanding quality, but they're more than sufficient. I can also access the Internet directly from my phone, and my email account is synced so that I get email messages in both places. (This is actually a blessing and a curse.) If I want to write an email message or a text message, I have a full keyboard to use instead of only the nine number keys, making typing a great deal easier and faster. They keys, however, are pretty tiny and take some getting used to. And ridiculous as this is, I'm endlessly tickled by the fact that I can set any song I want to be a ring tone instead of having to choose from the inevitably annoying, overly electronic-sounding options available on the phone. (Currently it's "Boy with a Coin" by Iron & Wine, a song I like so much that I sort of don't want to answer it when it rings so that I can keep listening.) I'll admit readily that it's not nearly as cool as the iPhone, but I'm sufficiently impressed by what it can do.

Am I addicted yet? Don't think so. But I may be on my way.

It keeps America together!

Q: Why is duct tape like the Force?

A: It has a dark side and a light side, and it holds the universe together.

Use #7,924 for duct tape: preventing blisters from forming or from getting worse. Dad and I learned this handy trick in the wilderness medicine course we took last summer. Go figure that my shoes never gave me a problem until the day I decided to run the half marathon.

Wile E.?

It's wild out there: article