En Route

Yesterday started comparatively early, with breakfast with RH, who was flying back to Tennessee for the fall break. Walked down to 108th street to grab a couple of great bagels with a most divine blueberry cream cheese. I realised that I hadn't been out of campus so early before, beyond that run that G and I did at the beginning of the term. After the work really started to come in in earnest, even my morning hops to the roadside kiosks for a bagel have been sacrificed in the name of more reading time. Mornings in Morningside Heights is something that I haven't had a chance to really experience, and it was good to be out and walking on the quiet streets, enjoying the bluesky morning and the emptiness. The city seems to give itself to you more wholeheartedly in the mornings; there are fewer people to share it with, and you can enjoy it at your leisure. Like in so many other cities, mornings are a more personal time: mornings belong more to the individual.

Anyway, in the evenings, went down with YR, Re, WL and JK to Greenwich Village to watch the world-renowned Halloween Parade. Needless to say, the entire stretch of the parade's route along 6th Avenue was packed with people. We ended up at the junction of 6th and Waverly Place, perched atop a stack of unused police barriers. It turned out to be a really good spot for viewing, because our elevated position put us above the heads of most of the crowd, and the police didn't bother us (while they did get people who had more precarious perches atop traffic lights and fire hydrants to get down). Next to us was a jolly old man out with his daughter to watch the parade (and every time an amusingly clad participant trooped by, he would give a rich laugh). All around us were other groups of friends milling around and pressing forward. Jokers (many, many Jokers - it seems like The Dark Knight made a big impact this year), Tellytubbies, Storm Troopers, firewomen and Indian chiefs walked by regularly, and for a time, there was a particularly elaborate Mad Hatter behind us, with whom we were quick to grab a photo.

The parade itself was marvelous, starting off in a big way with a procession of mounted police officers, followed by enormous and fluttery puppets, three-storey skeletons, block-long articulated dragons and swooping undead birds mounted at the end of sticks. And then, a spectacular treat came when at least a hundred zombies marched down the street led by a Michael Jackson lookalike. They stopped in the middle of the avenue, and then the music cued in, and they burst into the dance of the walking dead from "Thriller", to the uproarious approval of the crowd.

There were also many floats shuddering under the weight of the revelers dancing upon them, and many Obamas and McCains (and a particularly realistic Sarah Palin, accompanied by a walking Russia and Alaska, and a Joe the Plumber). Some of the ingenious jokes included a security camera, a lady disguised a a photo strip (the kind that you get out of a photo booth), another lady wearing a placard showing a dropping GDP graph, and several subprime lenders waving bloodied notes. It was great fun to just sit up there on our perch picking out the various costumes, and trying to figure out what the joke was.

It occurs to me, too, that something like the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade can never happen in Singapore. Where in our little island will we find so many people willing to invest hundreds of dollars into a costume that will earn them a few hours of fame, and then will become unwearable for a year at least (while other costumes are certainly one-hit wonders)? It was incredible to see so much spontaneous gameliness and ingenuity; and, after a couple of months of endless work that had totally circumscribed our ability to go out together as a big group like this, it was good to be out with this gang, and to feel like a part, however small, of all this pageantry and enjoyment.

*

And now, I make my way back to the City of Glass Towers. Such are the wonders of modern technology that this bus is equipped with free wifi, and suddenly I find myself with another two hours in which I can write and clear my correspondence. It is an intriguing experience; as I have been writing, the Manhattan skyline has slipped past outside the bus windows, the scenery has changed from urban to country, and the smooth long highways have soared through forests turning golden, red and yellow in preparation for winter. At this point, New York looked much nicer from a distance, especially with the morning sun glinting off the towers and the Atlantic shimmering in the distance. The Statue of Liberty, silhouetted by the water, looked like a promise: "you have arrived."

I have gone down this road before. The toll gates, the small towns that we are passing through right now, are all familiar from two months ago. And later in the afternoon, will hook up with Joel again. He had said something two weeks ago, when the UPenn people had come down to New York for their fall break: who would have thought that we would be seeing each other so often despite having come halfway across the globe? In fact, we are meeting more often now than we did when we were in different JCs on the same small island. It's an interesting outcome, this. But I am glad that this friendship, and quite a few friendships besides, still involves regular meetings. It would be very different to live here without these familiar faces from the past era.