Ahhh, Coney Island!
October, 2000
Craig-
We are long overdue to write a letter. Our last family letter was after our wedding,
and since then we've moved across the country, changed jobs, and flown at least 10 times
all over the U.S. and to 3 foreign countries. This is our year of travel. Geoff's brother
and sister-in-law Max and Valerie spent 6 months travelling around the world not long after
they got married, and our friends Ann and Mark did a similar trip as their honeymoon. We were inspired by
their example and the constant travels of my Uncle Bob and his wife Lexi. However, as much as we love to
travel we also love to spend enough time to really get to know a place. So we decided to live in New York
for a year to experience this amazing East Coast city (my first time living on this coast) and use it as a
point of departure for travels on this side of the world (particularly Europe and the Eastern U.S.) We love
and miss San Francisco, and will be moving back there (home) at the end of August, 2001, once I finish my
M.S. program.
Geoff-
We have the added benefit of being near my brothers and father for a short time as well. Both of my
brothers live in Park Slope (a neighborhood of Brooklyn) with their partners. The six of us have had dinner
a few times. They also invited us out to a mid-summer outdoor concert by a funky female vocalist, Susan
Tedeschi, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which was a lot of fun. A real highlight of the summer for me was a
morning when my brother Josh rang up because he was in the neighborhood running an errand. I gave him a
hand and we grabbed lunch together. The casual incidental get together struck me as particularly special to
this year. In other ways I've appreciated being nearer my family. In early September my grandfather, who
has
been steadily declining in acuity for the past year, called my brothers and asked for help. Josh and I flew
down to Fort Lauderdale and brought him back to New York with us. We moved him into a nursing residence and
we
visited him often. Four weeks later I ended up spending an evening with him in the emergency room because
he
wasn't feeling right. Two weeks later he died in the hospital. This move to New York has been hard, but
those
special moments with my grandpa make it all worth while.
Craig-
The one big piece of news I should share that was post-wedding and pre-move is that I helped our friends Deb
and Sue get pregnant. You may remember that I've been a sperm donor for them since I think it was the end of
1998. Pretty much every month since then I would come over to their house a few times during the prime week
to inseminate. None of us expected the process to last so long, but we persevered, and after over a year of
Deb trying to get pregnant, they decided to have Sue try instead. She got pregnant quickly, but miscarried.
After a month's break we tried again the week before our wedding--our last opportunity before the move to
New York. Amazingly enough, it worked (keep your fingers crossed). So Sue was 1 week pregnant when she
officiated at our wedding, but none of us knew until the following week, when her period never came. That
was the week before the two of them departed on the California AIDS Ride (7-day bike ride fundraiser I did
in 1997) in which Deb rode and Sue worked on the crew. We didn't tell anyone for a few months, because we
wanted to wait until the chance of miscarriage was lower. But everything looks good and Sue and Deb are
eagerly awaiting their new family member. The baby is due in early February, so I'll try and make a trip out
to SF soon after to see a little bit of myself.
Our move to New York in mid-June was hectic and stressful. After a fantastic week of post-wedding bliss together and with our friends, we had a week to pack our house of 3 years, sell most of our worldly belongings, and put the rest either in storage in SF or boxes and luggage for NY. It was pretty crazy in retrospect. The worst in my mind was our final all-nighter of packing and storage-container-filling which got more frantic as the night turned to day. Our landlord didn't appreciate the amount of stuff we left behind, but we did what we had to do and smoothed things over with him later. In our exhausted state we got to the airport with more luggage than we could carry, only to find our flight was delayed. We ended up being stuck in Minneapolis for 2 days after missing our connection. Northwest Airlines was appallingly unaccommodating, but the silver lining was that our good friends Ann and Mark live in Minneapolis and were happy to put us up. So we had a couple of mellow days to visit with them in mid-move. Then it was on to New York and the details of buying cheap furniture, moving in, and getting to know the neighborhood, etc.
Geoff-
A few days after arriving I was still interviewing feverishly when my former e-business professor called me
up and asked me if I was interested in working with him. He is an angel investor and he had a few ideas of
starting some companies. He had more work then he could handle and he wanted my help. I was flattered and
after some short negotiating we agreed to a contract position. In exchange for his low risk of no minimum
guarantee of work or monthly salary I receive a relatively high hourly rate for consulting. We've been at
it for five months and the flexibility and freedom has worked very well for me. The work has been varied
and interesting, although the lack of structure has been stressful at times. It has afforded me two trips
back to San Francisco since moving here. I am now officially looking for a full-time position in New York.
I head to San Francisco on my last foreseeable business trip this Saturday.
Geoff-
A basic outline after we moved here was two weeks adjusting and moving in, one week in Provincetown with
friends, two weeks exploring New York, one week in San Francisco, two weeks in New York with a few
excursions in Connecticut, ten days in Europe, one week in San Francisco, weekend in New Orleans, two weeks
New York, five days in Montreal. A few people have asked how we're adjusting here and the answer is we have
not yet set a routine - and now you can see why. However, we have taken advantage of the city. We've been
to five Broadway shows including Les Miserables, Kiss Me Kate, The Real Thing, Dirty Blonde, Copenhagen.
Off-Broadway: The Donkey Show, The Laramie Project and the Crumple Zone. We went to two outdoor concerts:
Susan Tedeschi in Brooklyn and Natalie Merchant in Central Park. We went to one concert at Radio City Music
Hall: The Gypsy Kings -the tickets were a wedding present from our friend Ernesto. We took the D train from
just outside our door to Coney Island one warm Saturday. We had intended to lie out on the beach after
walking the boardwalk but we somehow found ourselves at the New York City Aquarium. Perhaps it was our
longing for nature, or our desire to escape the tacky and rundown boardwalk where they have the worlds last
official "freak sideshow" that drove us to become annual members. We did enjoy ourselves; the Beluga whales
were my favorite. We've seen surprisingly few films as they run about ten-dollars here and the screens are
all very small. We did see "Chuck and Buck" which we both found very interesting. We spent much of our
first evenings enjoying warm summer nights (something we don't get in SF). Each evening we would head out
in
a different direction from our house. We bought a Zagat guide and would sometimes use that or sometimes
cross reference that with a restaurant discount card that gives of 25% off certain restaurants. For the
record, New Yorkers have this idea that San Francisco is equally or slightly more expensive than New York -
NOT TRUE. New York is expensive. Four months later Craig is still experiencing sticker shock although even
he is starting to look at restaurants with $15 entrees as "reasonably priced."
Ahhh, Coney Island!
Craig-
Our first trip after moving was a week in Massachusetts. After a night with Sittu and my Aunt Olly in
Westport and a couple days in Boston with my college friend Joe Chen, we went to Provincetown for 4 days
over July 4 weekend with a bunch of friends:
From left to right (and
light to dark): Curtis from New York, Noah, and Paul from SF, Geoff, me, Joe from Boston, and Robert from
SF. It was a really fun time for everyone, I think. They were all friends of ours, but didn't necessarily
know each other. Nonetheless the group gelled really well and we enjoyed the beaches, the clubs, the mobs of
gay tourists, and even a jazz concert (with Lea DeLaria and her "butch" band). I can't wait to do another
trip like this with a group of good friends. It was an excellent time.
My only summer commitment was a class at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus. It was an intensive graduate-level class that was scheduled for six hours a week, so I expected it to keep me busy. But the professor seemed to think the class only met four hours a week (he always let us out early) and it was a relatively easy class of material I've had before. So I had a lot of free time.
Geoff-
Craig's free time combined with my working at home in an incredibly small apartment made for a tense summer
between us. For the first few weeks we rode on post-wedding bliss. By August the bliss was beginning to
blister. That was about the time we packed our bags and headed to Europe for ten days, starting with three
days in London.
We arrived in London jet lagged and tired and like so many weary travelers found that our hotel room would not be available for six more hours. We were staying just north of Kensington Palace and so we headed through Kensington Park towards the castle. A few hundred yards in front of the castle is a large pond with overfed geese grazing noisily. Craig, who too tired to sightsee, headed to a chair by the water and I toured the gardens of the Palace. Clearly much money has been raised in the name of England's late adulteress princess. There is an enormous playground with a beached life size pirates ship and a "Diana Princess of Whales Walk" winding through the parks of London marked by huge bronze plates. We napped in the park and then walked around the neighborhood of our hotel. Not a particularly known area,
Craig-
Hey, I liked Diana. Anyway, the thing I enjoyed about the neighborhood we stayed in was its large Arabic
population. There were lots of Middle-Eastern restaurants, and we saw lots of Arabic-language newspapers
for sale at the newsstands. I thought of you, Sittu. London felt surprisingly similar to New York on our
first day, particularly as we walked through the crowds of pedestrians in Soho and Chinatown. But in other
ways it is completely different. On our tour of Buckingham Palace, we met a British guy who gave us an
education on the Crown and how attached to it the people can be. We were both astonished at how this young,
liberal, critical thinker could be such a supporter of a system based on heredity and class.
Another highlight of London for me were the two shows we saw. Our second night in town we saw "Mama Mia", a musical built around Abba's hit songs. It was cheesy, sometimes bad, but overall fun. Our favorite was a pre-diving scene where the chorus came out dancing in flippers! On the other side of the spectrum, we went to Shakespeare's Globe the following night for a performance of "The Antipides" which was written by a contemporary of Shakespeare whose name we forget. Our groundling tickets (standing just in front of the raised stage) were only $7.50, and gave us the best view in the house (and tired legs). I got a charge out of seeing this centuries-old play that was written for this city and a performance space like this one.
I was thrilled by the architecture of London's new Tate Modern Art
Museum. The building is an old brick behemoth that used to house electric generators in the huge room you
see here. Both the inside and the outside of the building have several of these lit-up rectangles with
windows, which contrast strikingly with the old industrial building. In the background you can see one of
the pieces on display: a huge wrought iron spider.
After 3 days in London we flew to Amsterdam, where we met up with our Swiss friend Marc (who met us last year in Rome). Amsterdam is a relatively relaxed city, so much so that Geoff got annoyed with the slow service in restaurants. I enjoyed it more than he, though. One of my highlights was an afternoon I wandered through town on my own and stumbled upon live bands and crowds of people in the streets. Apparently it was "heart's day" for those blocks of Zeedijk street. One of the bands was a more traditional German-Dutch-style (I can't tell the difference) group, and the other was a younger group including some outrageous drag queens playing American and other pop music. The crowds enjoying the two groups were quite similar, a mix of all kinds. I got to chatting with some guys who were very friendly and gave me lots of info about Amsterdam, etc. They also bought me a beer each time they brought out a round for their friends.
We were inspired by the entrance to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum
I love this picture of Geoff. The contrast of the dark sky with the
light on the trees was stunning.
Amsterdam is filled with canals and small, quiet streets. Much of
the tranquility is due to peoples' use of bicycles instead of cars. Many narrow streets in Amsterdam and in
Haarlem were for bikes and peds only. The most stunning example of bicycle use we saw was at a beach
outside of Haarlem where one path over the dunes from the beach led to a bicycle parking lot and a system of
bike trails, not a car in sight. I would love to go back and rent a bike and explore that way. Our 4 days
in Holland didn't allow time for that.
Geoff-
One of the great things about traveling in Europe is seeing the world of the great Master Painters. It
totally makes sense that the great Dutch painters like Vermeer would master playing with light in this land
of long shadows. We haven't made many friends in New York, but we have made them outside of New York. In
Boston, on our way to Provincetown, we met Jeb at a night club. Jeb actually became our first house guest
when he came down to
visit a few weeks later. In England we befriended Philip in London and Tom in Swindon. In Amsterdam we
hung out with Serge and Martin. In New Orleans we became friends with Andre and Mark who hosted us in
Montreal two weeks later. In Montreal we made the acquaintance of Basil, Mario, Stephane, Francis, and
Donnie of Boston. Donnie came down to New York a few days later for a visit. My brother Josh thinks it is
a crazy way to live, being so trusting. I love it and I take great pride in it. Obviously some of these
friendships will last longer than others but the point is not in the pudding but in the process. We enjoy
living a life open to people, extending our hospitality to others and enjoying it when it is offered. It
has afforded us some unique views on our travels which we treasure. In London we got to a club we would not
have thought to find and a delightful Italian restaurant we would have past up. In Amsterdam we saw a local
home and enjoyed a locals breakfast of apfel tarts. In Swindon Tom took us to a blue collar Pub, followed
by a typical Curry house, and pointed us the next day to the Stones of Avebury (contemporary ritual stone
circle of Stonehenge without the crowds or the fences between you and the stones), and Silbury Hill (Photos
Below).
A circular ditch the size of a football field surrounds these enormous stones.
Can you imagine the power and people it would take to move this rock 4600 years ago?
Silbury Hill is one of the largest artificial hills in Europe, built
around 2500 BC. (No one knows why)
In New Orleans Andre took us for a drink at the home of some locals in a charming old French Quarter home. In Montreal we got a glimpse of the tight social network enjoyed by locals as we had dinner with one group of ten followed by a Sunday brunch two days later with a group of twenty at someone's house. And more importantly than these superficial items we have had amazing conversations. Tom is a blue collar guy trying to start his own business and our discussions of his troubles with the banks made the British class issues very real. Martin works for the Ministry of Agriculture in The Hague and he gave me a much better understanding of the political issues around growth hormone bans in Europe. He assured me that there are no scientific reasons for the ban. The guys in New Orleans showed us what living in a party town is like - they knew how to party. Andre, who has a masters degree in History and has a family tree he traces back to 1635 with the founding of Montreal, taught us much about the Quebecois and their desire for independence. These are the reasons we travel - to broaden our perspective and discover the differences and similarities in cultures.
Lest you think New Yorkers completely antisocial we have met people here whom we have enjoyed hanging out with. Of course, it is we who have been gone so much that it has been difficult to cultivate new friendships. Recently, with Craig starting school, we met some cool guys through gay student group events at NYU and I've been making friends through the gay synagogue.
Craig-
Of course, in the midst of all this travelling, I've started grad school. I'm enjoying it more than I'd
expected. NYU is a fun place to be. One thing I felt I'd missed from my undergraduate experience was the
feel of a big campus and vibrant student life like in Ann Arbor or Boulder. So I'm enjoying a bit of that
now. With 50,000 students, NYU is the country's biggest private university. And it's incredibly diverse.
I hear all kinds of languages being spoken by students in my classes and on the streets. I feel like a bit
of an outsider (a commuter) since I live off campus and I'm not an undergrad, but I still enjoy the
environment and have made some rewarding contacts. Academically, I feel quite a bit more motivated than I
did as an undergrad. I feel like my work experience has given me a lot of perspective and a good sense of
what I should know and why. And I'm learning some valuable stuff with sufficient challenge. My favorite
class is a Java programming class, taught by a part-time professor whom I like a lot. He's demanding and
knowledgeable, and seems to have struck a good balance between keeping current and gaining experience with
the technology and teaching it at NYU and privately. I plan to e-mail him to see how he does it and get
some advice for my own career. I'm also taking eCommerce, Algorithms, and Operating Systems.
Geoff thought I was silly because the fact that we spoke English everywhere made our most recent trip to Europe seem less exotic and interesting to me. But I really enjoyed the opportunity to brush up on my French in Quebec. I used it more there than I had in France, since much of our time in France was with English- speaking hosts, whereas we struck out on our own quite a bit in Quebec. We found the Quebecois to be very friendly, particularly our hosts, who invited us to stay at their house after we'd only spent a few hours together in New Orleans.
Here's Craig in front of Quebec City's Chateau Frontenac and the St. Lawrence River.
Other than the friendliness of the people, the thing I value most from our trip to Quebec was learning about their culture and history. It's so easy in the U.S. to overlook the cultural diversity and history of our closest neighbors. We found both Montreal and Quebec City to have a European feel in culture and appearance, which we enjoyed.
Quebec's lower town is in the background in this shot taken from the upper town.
Here's the view of Montreal from the landmark that gives it its name: Mont Royal
The cool, modern olympic stadium from the 1976 games.
A big priority of ours this year is to keep close ties with our community in San Francisco during our year away. So we're committed to visiting frequently (at least once every few months). An opportunity came up for me to teach some corporate training classes in C++ at Microsoft WebTV in Mountain View, CA (as I've done sporadically for a couple years). They were willing to pay me enough to cover the cost of flying out and still make it worth it, and we were able to make it work with my schedule, so I did it! I'm writing this from the plane on the way back after having taught the last of the three classes. The classes I taught were on Thursday October 5th and Friday the 6th, and on Friday the 20th. I stayed for both weekends, visiting with Geoff's mom and a bunch of my friends. Both visits were very much worthwhile. I really enjoyed the time with my close friends. As Cliff said, in many ways it makes it feel like I never left. This move to New York has been emotionally difficult and disorienting for me, and I feel like it has really brought home to me how much I value the connections I have in San Francisco. So in some ways I now feel closer to my friends there. I was almost teary-eyed watching my beautiful city as my plane flew away at dawn.