I heart NY.

Yes, not doing work here was such a change that I became too lazy to even update my journal.

The Sarah Lawrence campus resembles a small Utopia compared to AMH. I've been revoltingly touristy and taken a lot of photos of it, which I promise will eventually go online in the same way as the last lot did (they didn't). The grass is adorned with vague works of art consisting of bits of wood nailed together, some with stairs around them. Even the dining hall is amazing, charging the equivalent of about four pounds a time for an all-you-can-eat meal - with no fascist kitchen staff ready to kill you if you take too much food. People here just don't appreciate its fantasticitude.

In fact, I've even found a couple of decent things about the Mac that I'm using just now. The first is that it seems to be able to cope with peripherals with no drivers whatsoever. I'm sure there was another thing, but it's escaped me now. Some differences are still sublimely comical, though, like the way that pressing Enter on a file doesn't open it but instead renames it. The way that it types in Hiragana if you hold down Ctrl was also a bit of a surprise, but excusable considering what it's used for. But I seem to be talking about the computer rather than what I've been doing here, so I'll stop that.

On Wednesday, I visited Whitney's Japanese class and was used as someone to practice introducing oneself on (they must have loved me for that). After that we went in to New York, the museum, Central Park, and so on. It sounds strange, but I was most entertained by seeing places of the world in real life that I recognised from films, like the place where they jump out of the park in Die Hard: With A Vengeance. The Empire State Building came next, where I terrified Whitney by leaning through the railings on the top and taking photos of the city eighty-six floors below. Most of them just got the green lights on the sides of the tower, but there are some fairly impressive pictures. The last place we visited, Times Square, is overwhelming - I thought that the images were projected on to the buildings from somewhere, but I was wrong - they are just plasma screens. No TV should ever be that big.

The evening after, we went as one half of a double date to see Polar Express. With the four of us making up about 50% of the entire audience, it wasn't the best attended film that I've ever been to, but it was entertaining. There weren't really any intentional laughs for adults like in the classic Disney films, but some of the rendered scenes are amazing... although the point of the film is to shove GRAPHICS! in your face. It would have been great if it wasn't for the song that they decided to put in the middle. In that respect it was quite like the last film I went to see with Whitney, Mona Lisa Smile - that would have been great if they hadn't put the whole film in.

And last night, with me wearing a skull-cap at a jaunty angle, Whitney took me to synagogue for the first time. As most everything was in Hebrew, which I can't read, I was reduced to alternating between humming and singing random syllables. I did meet someone who accurately recognised my accent as "not Aberdeen but not far off", which was fairly amazing.

Right, I'd better start to pack. I'd like to say how much I'm looking forward to going back to St Andrews and writing about automata and software engineering, but we all know that would be an utter lie. Still, I'll be back in two months.