Sunday in Queens

This last weekend I had an opportunity to see something that I’ve honestly not seen before.
This picture is the front door of a church. I know, you wouldn’t think it just to look at it (I sure didn’t). The first thing that I asked the friend that I went with was, ‘Why is there a statue of an elk outside your church?’ Turns out the building used to be an Elks lodge, but now the church owns it. It’s been in my mind for awhile to visit some other churches here in New York, for a couple different reasons, and this one I went to with a friend that I’d taken a summer class with.
I’ve been in many different types of churches, but the atmosphere in this one was not like many I’ve been to. Striking a balance between spontaneity and order when it comes to singing is a difficult thing, but this church did a very good job. The preaching was ok, but the speaker was a visiting pastor, not the church’s regular pastor. Apparently, it is very common here in NYC for the senior pastor of a church to take the summer off.
But the thing that REALLY struck me was the sense of community.This church is in Queens, which is the most ethnically diverse of New York’s five boroughs. Now, from what I’ve seen, usually, churches fall pretty neatly along ethnic lines; you have a white church, a black church, an Asian church, so on and so on. Of course, lots of churches have scatterings of other races, but the only ethnic groups I’ve ever seen mix in large numbers in a single service at the same time are some white and Asian congregations. This church (and the service was fairly large, several hundred easily) had what appeared to be an almost even mix of whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. I’m completely serious. And they actually mixed; you could look around the room and see them blended in terms of seating, not sitting in large clusters. (Which, even the white/Asian mixed congregations I’ve seen tend to do, you’ll usually have large sections of Asians and large sections of whites.) Everyone seemed comfortable, everyone seemed happy, everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy being there around the other people.
Then it got really crazy. After the sermon the church had people who I assume were elders or deacons standing up front to talk to and pray with people. And the insane thing was, nobody seemed to discriminate who they went to talk to based on race! I wish I could have taken a photo of this (and if I didn’t feel it would have been somehow disrespectful to do so, I would have), but I seriously saw, at the same time, a white man praying with an Indian woman, a black man praying with an white woman, a Latino woman praying and crying with a black woman, and an Asian man praying with a Latino man. I’ve never, NEVER seen anything like that. It was extraordinary.
Then, after the service, the friend I’d come with (who is an Asian girl) invited me to come out to lunch with a group of friends, and I think the group (which was at least a dozen people and probably more) had again almost equal parts whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos. And everyone enjoyed themselves, and everyone had a good time, and everyone seemed to be enjoying one another’s company. Given that I’ve seen a lot of churches, I’d say in general it takes something unusual to impress me. This (in my own experience) was definitely something unusual.
The church is called New Life Fellowship, and if anyone is ever out in Queens and looking for a church, even after having been there just once, I’d recommend this one.

http://www.newlifefellowship.org/

MoCA

This summer, I’m doing an internship with the Weatherhead Institute, which is the East Asian studies department here at the college. More specifically, I’m working for a group within the institute called ExEAS, which stands for ‘Expanding East Asian Studies’. The work has been pretty standard so far (data analysis, random tasks, etc), but I wasn’t looking for something terribly challenging, and I’ve met some interesting people there.
On Friday our boss Heidi took us to MoCA, which stands for Museum of the Chinese in America. The museum is a kind of history of the Chinese experience here in America starting back around the mid 1800s. They also had a fairly extensive slideshow about the history of Chinatown here in NYC. Although the characteristics of the neighborhood have changed significantly and are much improved from 150 years ago, the area still serves for many as a kind of gateway for immigration into the country. Men & women from poorer families will come to Chinatown to begin working here, sometimes sending money back home and often eventually moving out to different parts of the country, and into better jobs.
One piece of history in particular that I didn’t know about was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, which severely limited Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese from becoming US citizens. The reasons for its passage were various, but mostly it seems to have stemmed from the same type of knee-jerk racism that has met a number of immigrant groups coming to this country. The Exclusion Act made life & times for the Chinese in this country difficult, and it wasn’t repealed until 1943 during WWII when China and the US were allies.
I want to particularly thank the museum for letting me take pictures of their exhibitions while I was there. The museum actually let us in for a private tour an hour before they normally open since we were from the Institute, but photography is prohibited. When I told the guy at the desk that I wanted pictures for my blog so that I could share it with people back home, he actually went and asked the managers if they’d make an exception for me, which they did as long as I didn’t use the flash. I took a number of really great & interesting shots; this one I felt represented the museum the best. I wouldn’t have been able to take them normally, and I am grateful to the museum for their generosity.

Weatherhead Institute
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/

ExEAS
http://www.exeas.org/

MoCA
http://www.moca-nyc.org/MoCA/content.asp

Weddings in Vermont

Had an interesting weekend this last week, a friend of mine and I went up to a wedding in Vermont.
The bride (in the picture) is a friend of ours; she and I took Calc III together, and I’m honestly not sure if I would have passed the class without her help. Plus, we had a great time working together. I met Noah, her now husband, a few months later, and he and I also hit it off; I don’t think there are very many couples you could honestly say that you’d be friends with both of them even if they weren’t together.
Michael is a fellow GS student and a mutual friend of the three of us, so he and I had planned to drive up to Vermont (a six hour trip) for the wedding on the 15th. He decided to bring his girlfriend Abby along, who was really cool and I’m glad I had the chance to meet & talk with, but it changed the nature of the trip in a few ways. I of course had to get a hotel by myself, and I did feel a bit like a fifth wheel at times. I think I’m not going to go to weddings by myself anymore.
The wedding itself was great, very short ceremony, and this may be the first time I’ve seen a wedding with more groomsmen than bridesmaids. (11 vs 7) Jenn & Noah have been together for awhile, so even though the wedding was really top notch, they were after short & sweet with the ceremony so that they could get on to the after party. The wedding was held at this great old mansion out in the country, really a nice spot, except that we were miles from an internet connection and even cell phone service was sketchy. Dancing and drinking lasted late into the night, and overall it really was a fun time.
Saturday night is when things started to get interesting. Michael decided he wanted to make a day trip out of the journey back to the city on Sunday, stopping by some state parks for fishing, canoeing, etc. I’m also getting the feeling he wants to spend some time with Abby, and I need to be back earlier, so I have to try and find a ride. Which I do, I find a guy going back to the city on Sunday morning at around 10:30, which should be perfect. Except that he leaves without me. So I have to scramble to find a ride AGAIN.
I find three girls who are going back and are willing to give me a lift, and although they were quite polite to me, I think they might have forgotten I was in the car 15 minutes after we got underway. So, I got to listen to six hours of uncensored ‘girl-talk’. I’ve always been curious what girls talk about among themselves, and now I know. Most of it revolved around their relationships with their past 2 or 3 boyfriends, their mothers, and other people’s relationships. It was a fascinating bit of insight, but after six non-stop hours when we finally got back to New York I felt strongly in need of some type of rough masculine sport like boxing or rugby.
It was a very insightful weekend, and I’m glad that I went, especially for Jenn & Noah’s sake, I think they would have been disappointed had I not come. I learned some very interesting things too, and I’ll bear them in mind for the next wedding I go to.

Fourth of July

Had a chance to go see fireworks here in NYC for the Fourth of July, and it was a good time.
They do fireworks in a couple of different places in the city, and it’s great because since the city is a port, they can set them off over the water, where it’s safe, and people can see them from multiple boroughs.
(Quick lesson in New York city layout, the city is divided into five major areas called boroughs; they are Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Easiest way to visualize it is to think of Manhattan Island in the center with Staten Island off its south tip, and the other three arranged around it.) So, if they set of fireworks on the Hudson, those fireworks can be seen from Brooklyn and parts of Queens. The fireworks are set up on barges on the water, and everything is controlled electronically. It was a good show, maybe not quite as spectacular as I’d thought they might be, but still very good. One thing to consider is that there are several barges stationed at different places in the city, so everyone can have a chance to see them, and each barge does a complete (and identical) show, which is the equivalent to a city fireworks show you’d see almost anywhere else. So, I suppose really it’s fair to say that NYC puts on 8 or 9 firework shows, instead of a single really extraordinary one. Interestingly, I found out the show is primarily sponsored by Macy’s, the same ones who put on the annual Thanksgiving Day parade.
It would have been cool to have gone and seen the fireworks barge down by the Statue of Liberty, but the place would have been a madhouse and that wasn’t where my friends were going anyways, so maybe next year. We got going a bit late, but we still found a pretty good spot. They’d closed down one of the major freeways by the water, so everyone just filled up and spread out there. We had a good time that evening.
My friends in the picture are, from the left: Ron Steckly (a fellow student and good friend), Will Melendez (another fellow student and DJ), his wife Caroline (not a student, she’ll be doing law school shortly), myself, and Bobby (friend of Will and Caroline, also not a student).

By the way, I think I may have found a way to share more complete sets of photos. Facebook is a site that connects current students and alums from different universities, it's a little bit like Friendster but more snobbish (I guess ...). Anyways, I've set up an album with more of the photos from this outing on my Facebook site (since the uploading app they have there is WAY slicker than blogger) and I think that this link should allow anyone to browse to it. Does it work? Let me know! Is it busted, does it not work? Let me know ...
Cheers,
http://columbia.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031119&l=d9398&id=121067

Picture, Tea and Tolkien

Here's the one of Tim Keller, the pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian.

Picture, #42

Finally ... man I don't know what has been up with this thing ... But, at last we get it up here after all.