Like The Shining, but without all the scary parts

Good morning, Philly!

Like this, but less cool.

Fun fact: it snowed in Philadelphia. First snow of 2012! The windchill has been in the twenties all week, but the weather stayed clear until last night. I felt like such a nerd walking to school wearing my huge puffy coat and an overstuffed backpack. 

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was obviously "Hey! Let's trudge through the snow and go shopping in Rittenhouse Square!" (I had to run errands so I didn't really have a choice.) The streets and sidewalks were all relatively clear, but the slushy puddles on the street corners can be deceptively deep...

having a blast and a half

 

Afterwards I headed across the river to study at school. Penn's campus felt like a scene from The Shining, but without all the scary parts. The snow was mostly intact since there are no cars. And I can guarantee you I was not the only one taking pictures of everything like a total tourist. But now I'm tucked away in the library next to a huge window overlooking Walnut Street and pretending to study while in fact updating my blog. School is awesome.

 

Tips Appreciated

One of the requirements for my History of Planning class is to visit specific areas of Philadelphia and relate what we see to what we've learned about in class, in the form of a blog post. (Oh hey, how convenient!) The assignments are always due on the weekend so Katie and I have started a roomie-ritual of exploring the city Sunday afternoons. I'm becoming quite the tour guide, full of fun facts and scandalous stories about the City of Brotherly Love (or at least the planning of it). Our first destination was the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Philadelphia Water Works -- all designed during the City Beautiful Movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Next was Penn's Landing and Race Street Pier along the Delaware River and the Schuykill River Trail, examples of large public spaces in downtown areas. 

 

 Art Museum and the Water Works behind it

Most recently my class learned about the urban renewal movement and slum clearance. Sunday Katie and I walked to Society Hill, a historic neighborhood by the Old City and the site of a major renewal project where Ed Bacon and other planners cleared out blighted areas and replaced them with tower-in-a-park and 1970s Bauhaus-style structures. This is one of the few urban renewal projects in the U.S. where parts of the condemned neighborhood were still preserved, so these newer buildings were mixed in with the original Colonial era houses. Katie explained to me the different architectural styles and once I knew what we were looking for, it was like a bell that couldn't be un-rung.

Pictured: ugly.

The one good part about our foray into the Old City was that we discovered the Headhouse Farmers' Market, built in 1804. People still come to sell fresh produce and crafts every Saturday and Sunday during the warmer months. We'll definitely be coming back here often!

 

Lately Katie and I have also started connecting with our inner-chefs, staying in most nights and cooking dinner together. Sometimes we go all out with salmon from Trader Joe's; other nights it's back to basics with sautéed vegetables on a bed of couscous (the food so nice they named it twice!). I've been perfecting a black bean soup recipe for the crock pot, in preparation for the cold winter we both know is just around the corner.

 

 om nom nom

Earlier tonight Katie also introduced me to the wonder-veggie that is spaghetti squash. It's pretty much the coolest thing I've ever seen. You should google it. The end.

Send help!

Supplies are dangerously low. Morale is sinking. This could spell the end for both of us... Unfortunately it's expressly illegal for individuals to send alcohol through the mail. UPS and FedEx both prohibit it in their company policies. BUT it's okay to have it in your checked baggage at the airport. Good thing Katie and I are both flying home soon!

Overheard in Philly

Week 2: complete. Here are some of the more memorable quotes.

"Don't tell our moms about this."

Katie and I ordered some great poster prints for our living room, so we ventured out to Ikea for frames. The upside: a bus goes straight from our apartment to the Ikea/Walmart/Target/Home Depot shopping center along the Delaware River. The downside: it's a 40-minute ride each way through South Philly. We met some interesting characters on the bus though. The woman next to us started her phone conversation with, "Hey cousin Shawn died. Yeah cousin SHAWN. The doctor told him to stop drankin'!" and then the segued into stories about her own stint in rehab. Our other neighbor didn't have much to say, he just reeked of marijuana. 

"Maybe modern art just isn't my thing."

Sunday afternoon Katie and I joined my sorority sisters Claire and Jennifer at the Art Museum. First stop? The Rocky statue. Then we made our way through the exhibits: American Art (lots of furniture, boring), European Art (typical), Modern Art (just plain weird), the Armory (okay this is kind of cool), and Asian Art (Holy cow did you see that pagoda?! It takes up the whole room!). Katie and I are thinking about becoming members - $40 for the year for all the exhibits, plus free admission to the "Art after Five" cocktail party with live music every Friday. Because everyone knows that grad students and free drinks go together like peanut butter and jelly. Which is coincidentally all we're eating right now. 

"From Georgia, you say? You have to stop smiling. You're too nice. You have 'easy target' written all over your face."

Katie's orientation-extravaganza continued this week, with an especially thrilling public safety program given by the Drexel campus police. They asked for volunteers based on who was from the farthest away. Los Angeles didn't count because "you can probably fend for yourself just fine" so Katie was the lucky winner of this bizarre contest. In front of the group she got to learn first-hand how to look intimidating to strangers so they don't try to mug her. Apparently this is necessary, since eleven - that's right, ELEVEN - people got shot last weekend in three different neighborhoods of Philly. We've since learned that watching local news is always a mistake. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. (Dear Mom, I promise I'm not going to get shot. These all happened way out in north and west Philly, places I categorically avoid. Plus Katie taught me all her intimidation moves.) 

"The only good thing about being a developer in New Jersey? Bribery is a real bargain."

My classes continued this week, progressing at a pretty fast clip. One of my favorite parts of the week is Property Development, where Professor Landis takes at least one stab at New Jersey every class. And sometimes at Donald Trump, if he's feeling particularly witty. Quantitative Analysis always brightens my day because of our excessive reliance on Excel. I eat those formulas for breakfast. After class I go home and pretend to read the pile of assignments until I get bored and have a movie night with Katie instead. Every Friday the School of Design hosts a happy hour with free beer (see: free drinks, par. 2). I missed last week's, but made it out yesterday and got to meet more of my classmates. The City Planning program is a pretty close-knit group, it makes commiserating easier. 

"Some guy grabbed my butt in a bar so I turned around and clocked him. Turns out it was someone else."

Katie's program hosted a welcome party at the Academy of Natural Sciences with local restaurants offering promotions and tastings from their menus. She took me as her date, and I had a lot of fun meeting some of her classmates. We went out with some Jersey girls for drinks later and got some invaluable life lessons on how to act like a northerner. Conflict resolution is clearly not one of their strong suits up here. Another cultural moment: apparently "thank you" isn't a part of the local parlance, as evidenced by the look of dumbfounded shock on the sales associate's face at Anthropoligie when Katie thanked her for her help. Who knows how long we can hold out here in the land of rascals and ruffians, so I apologize in advance if I offend everyone at Thanksgiving with my boorish Yankee ways. 

more pictures

News from the North

Made it through my first week of classes, and the body count is still relatively low! 

Tuesday was just an orientation. Dean Marilyn Taylor gave a welcome speech then we spent the rest of the morning with our respective programs (Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City Planning, Historic Preservation, and Fine Arts). Within the City Planning group students and faculty introduced themselves and Professor Landis, the department chair, explained registration, required courses, and the available concentrations (Community & Economic Development, Land Use, Public-Private Development, Transportation, and Urban Design). Then we joined the rest of the programs in Houston Hall for lunch. The rest of the afternoon was open sessions about things like career services and financial aid so I ended up going back to the apartment for a little while. 

I came back to campus (in a torrential downpour) that evening for a lecture the school was hosting. William Cobbett is originally from South Africa and is currently the head of the Cities Alliance, a global partnership for urban poverty.  He talked about new ways to address slums in developing countries in the "global south" - places like sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia which are urbanizing much faster than North America and western Europe. He  explained why slums are created and how to formalize them so that the governments can capitalize on their potential. He focused mostly on the role of planners in the situation and not very much on specific examples (which I would have preferred to hear about) but it was still really interesting. 

Wednesday was the first official day of classes. My first class, Introduction to Planning History (required for all first years), was canceled. Professor Eugenie Birch is a apparently really famous in the city planning and was probably out at a conference so I guess I'll let it slide. The next class was Urban Economics. I didn't realize until then how much economics I had learned informally in my engineering classes at Georgia Tech. Utility curves? Production possibilities frontier? Pareto efficiencies? Owned it. My last class was Quantitative Planning Analysis Methods... ew, right? Except it was my favorite class. How typical. Despite the awful name, it's basically a class about the data sources that planners use. We're spending our first week of class on the Census, which is hilarious because that's all I did all summer at my internship. :)

Thursday I only had one class - Introduction to Property Development with Professor Landis. We mostly covered material that I had seen in my Real Estate and Construction Project Management classes, so nothing too scary. Afterwards I went back to the apartment and printed out the MOUNTAIN of articles I have to read for class next week. I tried to get a head start on the reading but ended up taking a 2-hour nap on the couch until Katie came home. Then we drank wine and watched movies until 1am. I'd say it was a productive week. 

Pictures of Campus

Auschwitz, Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana

Hey everyone, thanks for all the great responses to my previous emails. It's great to hear from you guys back in the motherland. I have a lot to update! We've been really busy on the road so it's been difficult to find time to sit down and write an email to everyone, but it's cold and rainy in Bucharest right now so it seems like the perfect time to stay in and catch up. I've split my photos into separate albums by city - you can see all of them here: Picasa Albums

Here are some highlights from the albums:

Auschwitz

Our second day in Krakow, Poland we arranged for an excursion to the concentration camps at Auschwitz, about an hour outside the city. The weather was cold and rainy, but it seemed fitting for such a somber place. We started our tour at Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp. In history classes I had learned a lot about the horrible conditions at these camps but to see it in person was a whole new experience. Most people only survived a few months at the camp. Hardly anyone lived over one year. They were given the most meager rations of food, forced to work 10-12 hours a day outdoors without proper clothing or equipment, and slept in overcrowded bunks rife with disease and insects. When anyone became too weak to work they were simply killed. Since everyone was underfed, weak, and spoke different languages, it was impossible for them to plan any type of rebellion. Those who disobeyed the officers in any way were subjected to the most inhumane and demoralizing punishments. It's really impossible for me to understand how these SS officers could treat fellow human beings like this without a second thought. 

From Auschwitz I, we traveled about 3km down the road to Auschwitz II/Birkenau (there is also an Auschwitz III/Morowitz but I don't think it's open to the public). When the Nazis learned that the Red Army was approaching they tried to destroy all evidence of the camps, so Birkenau mostly consists of the main building and the stone chimneys from the barracks. These living conditions were even worse than those at Auschwitz since prisoners were kept in poorly-insulated wooden stables without any heat. The entire camp was divided by the railroad tracks through the middle, where hundreds of prisoners would be unloaded from cattle cars and separated - the men on one side and the women on the other. Just like Auschwitz, prisoners were hardly fed anything and simply worked to death. 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana. This quote was printed on the wall in one of the blocks at Auschwitz, and was reflected in the fact that survivors from the camps returned just two years after liberation to collect evidence and establish the state museum. It was a long and emotionally difficult day, but an invaluable learning experience about the atrocities that can happen when human decency has been forsaken.

Prague

Jing and I arrived in Prague early from our overnight train so we dropped our bags off at the hostel and spent the first day exploring the main part of the old city. Of all the cities we've been to, Prague reminded me the most of western Europe - including the massive crowds of tourists everywhere. If you asked either of us at the end of our stay what our impression of Prague was, it would be one word: overwhelming. The first day we pushed our way through the main square with it's Gothic town hall and cathedrals to the river front where we found some breathing room and a quiet park to eat lunch. The rest of the afternoon we wandered along the far side of the riverbank through a city park with lots of art museums. We also rode the funicular to the top of the hill to see the gardens and get a better view of the city. The next day we made our way back up the hill to the basilica and palace, part of the old fortress. We lucked out and saw the changing of the guards at noon before we headed back into the city for the bus to Budapest.

Budapest

The country of Hungary is in a world of its own compared to the rest of eastern and central Europe. Jing is proficient in Russian from her stay in Ukraine and has been able to manage the Slavic languages of Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic. When all else fails I take a wild stab at translation using what I know about French and Spanish. But Hungarian was completely unintelligible to both of us. Fortunately I had visited Budapest in 2008 while studying abroad in France so I was a little familiar with the city. So we just set out on our merry way exploring the city and trying to stay out of everyone's way. Budapest is actually two cities, Buda and Pest, with the Danube river between them. The first day we spent in the older city of Buda exploring the hilltop fortresses and castles. We took a meandering path up the hill through a forested park, which was a really nice break from the hustle and bustle of the city below. From the citadel at the top we made our way to the other side with the palace, home of the president, and the old Fishermen's Bastion. All provided great views of the river and Pest on the other side. The next day was rainy so we stayed in Pest and spent most of our time in the Museum of Terror, with artifacts from the Soviet occupation of Budapest after World War II (no pictures allowed inside). Most of my history classes in school did not cover much material after WWII and I'm too young to remember anything from the news firsthand, so this was the first I've really learned about eastern Europe and the USSR between the 1940s and the 1990s. It was eye-opening to say the least.

Ljubljana

Before I left the States, my friend Peter contacted me about adding Slovenia to our itinerary. I'm so glad we took his advice - Ljubljana (the capital) has definitely been our favorite destination so far. Peter, the swim club president from Embry-Riddle University whom I met at our national meet, is from Slovenia and comes home every summer to visit his family. He invited us to stay in his sister's apartment, and his mother cooked us some great homemade meals while we were there. When we arrived in Ljubljana Peter was at a swim meet so he encouraged us to spend the morning at the castle in the old city. Afterwards we met up with Peter and his friend Miha (another swimmer) to see Lake Bled, a 20-minute ride outside the city. The views of the lake and the Alps in the background were absolutely stunning. Later we went to the national championship swim meet and cheered for Peter. On the way home we stopped at a food stand and the boys convinced us to try horse burgers! They tasted okay, but I'm not sure I would eat one again. It was Jing's birthday so while we were out Peter's mom baked her a cake. Then another of Peter's friends, Magda, joined us and we went out for drinks to celebrate with the birthday girl. The next day Jing and I spent some more time in the old city, and Peter took us to a park along a river in the afternoon. We hiked to the top of the hill where a restaurant served special concoctions of Union beer, brewed in Ljubljana. When we got back we thanked Peter's family for their wonderful hospitality, traded hugs, and headed out for our bus to Belgrade.  

L'viv and Krakow

Update: Jing and I are leaving in a few hours for an overnight train to Prague, Czech Republic. Here's what we've been up to the last few days.

The train tickets from Kiev to Poland were more expensive than we anticipated so we stopped in L'viv along the way. It took us a while to find so early in the morning (shops open later in this part of Europe) but we ended up at our hostel on one of the historic main squares not too long after breakfast. We dropped off our bags and promptly set out sightseeing across the town. First to the Opera House and through an outdoor souvenir market, then to the other side of the city past an Armenian church to the Royal Amory. Along the way we stopped for some traditional Ukrainian food: borsch, a bright pink beet soup, and vareneky, similar to Chinese dumplings. Delicious. We were pretty tired by the end of the day so we stopped at one of the many public squares and just sat and people-watched for a while. It was really entertaining.

That evening we met up with several other Peace Corps volunteers and their friends, whom Jing knew from her training or "staging". Since most of them were stationed in western Ukraine while Jing is in the east, it was a real learning experience to hear about the stark differences between the regions. For example, in eastern Ukraine people are much more likely to speak Russian and many of the public buildings have prominent Soviet symbols on display. In the west everyone insists on speaking Ukrainian, to the point that they will pretend not to understand you if you speak Russian. Things got really interesting when we finished dinner and one of the volunteers suggested we check out a "secret" (read: touristy and hilarious) underground Ukrainian nationalist bar near our hostel. When we knocked on the door, the bouncer behind it opened a tiny window and said (in Ukrainian) "Are you from Moscow??". To get in you had to reply with the passphrase "Ni! Slava Ukraina!" which translates to "No! Glory to Ukraine!". After this the guard opened the door and led us down the stairs to a labrynth of a bar where everyone was having a grand old time drinking honey beer and singing traditional Ukrainian songs. It was a great way to wrap up our time in L'viv before our early departure the next morning for Poland. Too bad the next day wasn't nearly as awesome.

Since international trains are kind of expensive, everyone at our hostel said the best way to get to Krakow is to take a bus to the Ukrainian side of the border, walk through customs, catch another bus on the Polish side, and then take a train the rest of the way to Krakow. Easy, right? False.

Getting out of Ukraine was easy enough. It was getting into Poland that almost convinced me to catch the next flight home. Between the two borders is a long, wide sidewalk bounded on both sides by a 6' fence, basically no-man's land since we w. At the end of the walkway is complete mayhem. Polish officers let small groups of people through the gate into the inspection area every half hour or so. The rest of the time you just wait in a massive crowd of very unhappy people. As soon as a guard comes out to let more people through, everyone starts pushing and shoving and yelling. It's completely barbaric. At one point Jing and I just started passing our larger luggage to the front to be passed over the gate where we could pick it up when we finally got through, because it was too big to manage in the crowd. When we finally got to the actual passport control the inspection officer made us open all our bags for him to look through. This is because smuggling alcohol and cigarettes across the border is very common since the taxes for these items in Poland are so much higher. Fortunately since we had American passports the officer did not bother with a very rigorous inspection, but the whole customs process, including the wait, still took about 3 hours. All of that... just for a stamp. On the bright side, I passed the half-way mark in my passport!

Past customs we met a group of university students who helped us find our way to the train station and buy our tickets to Krakow. We just barely caught the train with 5 minutes to spare, so we were really grateful for all their help. One of the students also sat with us on the 5-hour train ride as well and told us all about the city and what we should see and do while we were there. It was after 10pm and we were exhausted when we arrived in downtown Krakow so we just found our hostel and went straight to bed.

Pictures from L'viv have been added to the same Picasa album here. The next day (yesterday) we spent in the old city in Krakow, and today was an all-day excursion to Auschwitz and Birkenau. I haven't had time to upload those photos yet, so I'll have to send a separate email with those later on.

Cheers!