Land of the free...

That thing where you don't work...

Remember that thing where you don't work for a few days? Or where you should not have worked? Or where you wish you hadn't worked, but you did anyways?

That thing is called "vacation". I don't know what's happening this summer, but it seems like the entire City of New York has collectively decided that no "vacations" will be taken in the summer of 2006. "No vacations for you! Two years!" Now if you really do feel the need to take some time off, I'd recommend you try a weekend without working. Huh? Say that again? "A-weekend-without-working", it is called. It's very a confusing concept that dates back to the Enlightenment in Old Europe. If you Googled it, it would break down like this: People spend their Saturdays and Sundays a) not going into the office, b) not reading work emails, c) not answering work emails d) ditto for voice-mails e) not attending company events and f) not updating their f-ing resume. Wow!

Wait, there's more... I heard about this secret sauce for New Yorkers' time-off. Here's the gist of it: You try taking one of these weekends-without-working, and then you add an extra day. Yes, that's right. An extra Monday or an extra Friday. Pretty awesome. Now if (make that capital IF) you manage to maintain that rigorous regime of not-working for a whole extra day, you will, in fact, have taken a "3 day vacation". Congratulations!

Singapore Summary

There were very few things I knew about Singapore before I landed here last Sunday. Very, very, very few things, in fact.

1. I knew Singapore that was close to Malaysia.

2. I had heard stories about severe penalties for spitting your chewingum onto the sidewalk.

3. I knew that one of my old New York friends, Marc Ikels, had been living here for about 3 years now. We hadn't stayed in touch.

Today is Friday evening here, and the only reason why I am sitting in the hotel writing this piece is because I am waiting to take a 10 am call in the US. It's 9:10 pm here now. By now I've spent a week in Singapore and what have I learned?

1. Singapore is an island, but they have 2 bridges to Malaysia

2. Singapore used to be part of Malaysia for a while, but with Malaysia being a muslim country, that apparently didn't work out.

3. The place is spotless clean, infrastructure is top notch, streets are not infested with potholes like in New York.

4. I suck at remembering Chinese names. It's embarrassing and I hereby apologize to my colleagues...

5. The restaurant scene and food here is outstanding and incredibly diverse. Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, Singaporian...

6. In 2004, my old friend Marc Ikels met a flight attendant from Singapore Airlines (on a flight to New York) and is now engaged to her. They are getting married next year. True story.

7. We're just a few degrees latitude from the equator here. It's hot and humid here.

8. Singpore is NOT right next to Hong Kong, as I thought it would be. It's a 3 hour flight. It is however, close to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

9. People are fairly young here. And the life expectancy is better than in the US with 75.9 years for men and 80.3 years for women (it's time for male emancipation guys: women seem to live longer anywhere in the world).

10. They're exactly 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. I am starting to develop some compassion for people in Asia who are always considered last when we schedule global conference calls in the US. It's 9:43pm now and my 10am EST call is coming up. With that I'll wrap up....

All of the pictures contain random people except for the top one. They're my IBM colleagues Chee Khiong, Jie Ying and Janine. I hope I spell the names right this time.

The Bowery and my Brother Jan

Have you ever heard of the Bowery? And have you ever heard of my brother Jan, the veterinarian? The two aren't necessarily linked, but with a bit of imagination they just may be one day.

New York City has a funny way of giving multiple names to the same street. Walk down Third Avenue south of 8th Street and you'll be on Cooper Square, which is where I live. Walk down two more blocks and you'll no longer be on Cooper Square, but you'll be on the Bowery. "The Bowery", what a beautiful name! A name with a lot of history behind it. No lecture on NY history here, but the Bowery appeals to my roots in such as special way I thought I should mention it here. To make life easy...here's what Wikipedia says:

"The Bowery is the former location of both the farm (located where East 15th and East 16th Streets today cross The Bowery, with the farm house located on the same line, at what today is 1st Avenue), and the road built by Peter Stuyvesant that takes its name from an old Dutch word for farm, bouwerij (the modern word being boerderij).

George Washington is noted for having refreshed himself at The Bull's Head Tavern before riding down to the waterfront to witness the departure of British troops in 1783. Not necessarily for that reason, The Bowery became, by the end of the 18th Century, New York's most elegant street, lined with the mansions of prosperous residents and with fashionable shops."

Now back to my brother Jan. You should know that, for 9 years, I've been engaged in a relentless operation to convince the guy to come to New York for just a few days. So far, I haven't been able to win him over, since he comes up with all kinds of seemingly valid excuses, such as a fear of flying and the fact that his patients, i.e. the cows of Watou, don't really respect office hours and scheduled vacations when it comes to giving birth to calves.

But having just demonstrated the fact that I live on a street named "De boerderij", I may finally convince Jan and his wife Chantale to get on that plane and experience the Bowery and New York for a few days...

And the winner is...

The award for best street-light-pole-flyer-ad. A real gem from the East Village.

I ran into this one this morning on the corner of Stuyvesant Str. and 3rd Av.

Hanging

Of all neighbourhoods in NYC, there is no place like the East Village. Why is that?

The East Village is the place where people go to "hang". Yes. That's what they do when they come here. They "hang". Or "hang out". Like, you know, yeah. That's right, man. There is no other primary purpose for people coming here, than just "hanging".

Take the Upper West Side now. Why do people go to the the UWS? To go to the park, to go to Lincoln Center, to go to the Gap, or maybe to the Banana Republic. People don't go to the UWS to "hang". They go there to DO stuff. They may hang in the park, but then it's all about the park, the "hanging" is definitely secondary.

Take Soho. People go to Soho to shop in fancy stores and buy $220 jeans. People go to Soho to see whatever galleries have survived. But they don't go there to hang either.

Take Downtown or Midtown. People go there to work. If you end up hanging in Midtown or in the Financial District, you urgently need to redefine your idea of "hanging". It is fact against the law to hang in Midtown. *

Take the Upper East. Only paintings go the the Upper East - to hang in the Met.

So, if people really want to spend an afternoon of real, focused "hanging", there is only one place to go: The East Village, where hanging is an art by itself, where people dress up just to hang, where punkers hang, bums hang, intellectuals hang, students hang, pseudo-intellectuals hang, pseudo punkers hang, where we have people who have evolved into street fixtures, merely by their persistent hanging efforts...

In the next weeks I hope to shoot some pictures of the hood and get you some flavor of the best months of the year.

* I was officially reprimanded by a security official in front of the UBS building on 6th Av this morning, for "sitting on the edge of the fountain". Yes.

A good day at the ER

If my friend Jen can blog about car accidents and airbag explosions, let me tell you a good sailing accident story. One that happened to me, more specifically.

We had our first race on Sunday. I was totally psyched because we had been prepping the boat all spring and this was going to be start of a great season. All the improvements to the rigging worked out beautifully. The boat ran really sweet and the helm was much more balanced than last year. We had a warm-up with 10-12 knots of wind and a very calm first race with maybe 6-8 knots. After the first race the wind died completely. We were all sitting out on the water waiting for the race committee to cancel the second race. It was quiet. Not a sound. Very eree setting. You could feel the next front coming closer by the minute.

Then the wind picked up and the RC started race #2. Within minutes it was blowing like stink and we were screaming around the marks, double trapped. When tacking toward the upwind mark again, our rudder tiller broke. Boat spins out of control and we capsize. After a little swim, we go hang on the righting line and the boat comes back up. As it comes back up, I grab the dolphin striker to keep the boat from turtling the other way. The rotating motion of the boat is so strong though that I rips my arm right out of the socket - dislocation....

Now what? In 55 degrees water, with one arm (and fortunately a pfd), I can't get myself back onto the boat. I don't know how long it took, but at some point my crew Erik just pulled my full 200 pounds out of the water, just enough so I could roll the rest of me onto the trampoline.  Eh...Erik...thank you, mate. I owe you eternal gratitude for that one, and then some.

The story goes on though. We were still rudderless and heading straight to the open ocean, still blowing like hell and no way to turn the boat around. Finally Erik and I  worked out to have 1 rudder back in place (instead of the usual 2) and made some sort of crazy kamikaze gybe that miraculously worked out fine. I found that we stayed remarkably calm through the whole episode. We were heading back to land and an eternity later we hit the beach again.

At the ER it was business as usual (this was my 2nd dislocation in a few months). It took some muscle power and anesthesia but in the end they popped it back in. However not for long because when I put on my sweater again it popped right back out for a second time that day (the nurse called me a "bad boy" for sneakily trying to put on my sweater while no one was looking).

The bad news of the story is that my season may very well be f*%cked. The good news is that Erik and I got back on land allright. And that we had a great teambuilding exercise for the start of the season.

Embarrasing returns

You are familiar with the concept of returning stuff to the store. For the Europeans, this may sound a bit unusual, but here we can buy stuff and then return it to the store when we don't like it anymore. This type of customer service takes on extreme forms sometimes...I have a friend for instance, let's call him Sal (which happens to be his real name), who decided to build a deck a few years ago. Before starting the job, he walked into Home Depot (a hardware store), and drove off an hour later with various serious tools loaded in his truck. A few weeks later, when the job was done, Sal would decide he wasn't all that satisfied anymore with the tools and so Home Depot would happily refund the full price of the used tools...

I was recently reminded of two types of embarrassing returns, one in Europe and one in the US. You decide which one's more atypical.

The other day, I found myself in line at Home Depot (again). In front of me was a 40 year old, tall, well dressed hispanic man pushing along two carts. One was his mom in a wheelchair and the other was a shopping cart piled with hardwood floor boxes wrapped with yellow-ish plastic. His mom was putting in a new floor, and in the process of doing so had remembered that she still had a few boxes leftovers from the last floor. So they decided to bring it to the Home Depot returns. The cashier carefully inspected the receipt that went with the returned floor. "Sir", she said, " you bought these boxes in 2003". Apparently there are limits to Home Depots' goodwill. They only accept returns up to 90 days after the sale. Just so you know. Go tell your friends.

Last December I was Xmas shopping in my home town, Leuven, in Belgium. I bought someone a teapot. About a day after I bought it, I found a better gift for that person and so I decided, rather naively, to return the teapot to the store. The owner of the store, a very proper Belgian lady in her fifties, who knew all about teapots, was perplexed when she heared my request. This was unheard of!  She went through an emotional shocker made up of disbelief, insult and sheer amazement at the audacity (or rudeness) of my proposition. Other customers in the store supported her by staring at me. Finally, she asked me if "I had lived in the United States", with a touch of pity. I said "Yes, in fact I still live there". She looked at me as if I was lost for humanity. But she did accept my return. Don't go tell your friends.

Next

Quintessential New York: Last Friday, I go for an early lunch at the deli on Broadway and 23rd. They have a good self service buffet. I fill up, walk to the cashier and pay. While I'm receiving my change, she yells "Next!". I look around. There's no one else in the deli.