NYSE

Remember I mentioned that list of things to do while in New York City? One of them was to go and visit the Stock Exchange. I figure you can’t live here in the city and not go do that. Doing that has become harder, since the Exchange doesn’t give public tours anymore after 9/11, but one of the advantages of being a student at Columbia is getting the chance to do some things you normally can’t do. The trip was set up by a friend of mine in the junior class. Actually, it was supposed to be last semester, before Christmas, but at the last minute it fell through. My friend was persistent though, and they finally got it pushed through for the end of last month. They moved the date around on us a couple of times, and ended up doing it on a Wednesday, which I had to skip a class for, but when you look back over your life, what are you going to remember? That you attended one extra class, or that you went and saw the Exchange? Enough said.It took us awhile to get through security, which didn’t surprise me a whole lot. What did surprise me was that there appeared to be quite a lot of confusion about our group, we had three different groups of guards/officers/officials come and ask us who we were, who we were with, etc. Didn’t seem very well organized.The man who gave us the tour was actually hilarious once you got past the fact that he was quite rude to our group. It seems that he was under the impression that we were grad students from the business school; he kept asking if the guy who set up our tour was our professor. I thought maybe my friend had told him all this just to get us the tour, but I asked him later and he said no, he’d told our guide from the beginning that we were undergrads. At any rate, he was not very happy to be there with us, and through his tone and the kind of questions he asked us made it very clear he wished we weren’t there. At one point when he got up and left the conference table where our group was sitting, the whole table burst out laughing as soon as he stepped out of the room. The NYSE is undergoing some pretty significant changes right now; it was clear from talking to our guide there was a fair amount of angst & uncertainty about the future. The Exchange historically was a privately held company, and a few years ago it became a public company, which meant some important changes to the governing structure. The other big issue is the electronic trading system. Most of the other major exchanges in the world use electronic systems now, and don’t have what they call ‘market makers’, guys who work on the trading floor taking & making the individual orders. The NYSE recently set up an electronic system of its own, but it’s still running it side by side with the guys on the floor, though there are fewer of them now since the company is public. The trading floor itself was much less hectic than I’d imagined it; we were there midweek on an afternoon, so it could have just been the time of day, but it certainly wasn’t as berserk as the Mercantile Exchange was when I visited it. One good thing was we got to take pictures from the balcony, which we weren’t able to do at the other exchange. It would have been great if our guide had been more polite, but it was still very much worth doing.

One other note. This month of May is going to be very, VERY busy. I’ll be graduating 10 days from now, and with my girlfriend coming to town again and making preparations to leave New York at the end of the month, I won’t have much time to post. These two years have been an extraordinary and unusual journey, and it wouldn’t be right for me not to give this chapter in my life a proper ending. I won’t have time to put up the final posts from graduation until sometime in June, but stay tuned …

Breakfast carts

This post is about a very important slice of New York City life, and one I’m going to miss very much when I leave: breakfast carts. Breakfast carts like the one you see in the picture are operated all throughout the city (or at least all throughout Manhattan, I don’t know about the other boroughs). Most mornings on my way to class, instead of eating breakfast in my room, I stop by one of these fine carts and get a muffin or a donut. Some of the carts are larger and have a range, so you can also get eggs, but I don’t usually order cooked food from these guys. Granted, you must have a license to operate a cart in NYC, and if you have a problem with one of them you can just get the license number and report it to the city. I’m sure they don’t do a bad job; I’d just rather get eggs from the deli I live above if I’m in the mood for eggs. The best thing about breakfast carts is that everything is cheap; $1 will get you whatever you want, or $1.50 if you want coffee with your pastry. What makes it fantastic is that everything is sold in single units; it isn’t like the West Coast where you have to go and buy a whole package of muffins. You can just get one, fresh each day. In a city where everything is so expensive, I enjoy every morning I’m able to have fresh breakfast from the carts. Plus, you’ll usually hit the same one or two, so you get to know the cart operators, and they get to know you. It’s a great part of New York life, and I’m really going to miss it. Maybe I’ll see if I can start up a breakfast cart business back West …

Juilliard

The Juilliard School is one of the most well-known performing arts academies in the world, and it happens to be about 15 minutes (by subway) away from where I live. Going to see a performance there was another thing on my to do list before I left; I wish I would have had the time to see more than one. They put on some great plays and dramas, from what I understand, would have liked to taken in one of those too. A friend of mine from church was putting on a piano recital, so I went to join her for that. The school itself is undergoing some remodeling, so you can’t see much of it from the outside. But once Qing (pronounced “ching”) started playing, I could see why the school has the reputation that it does. She performed selections from Haydn, Brahms, and Schumann, none of which I was previously familiar with but all of which were extraordinary. One of the great parts about going to see a live recital is watching the performer. Being able to listen to a recording is nice, but watching the performer and the way that they play the music, the way they move their body, move their hands, the expressions on their face, gives you a greater sense of the feeling they put into their music. Being Chinese, Qing is a tiny girl, but she plays her music with an extraordinary amount of feeling. She shifted back and forth from playing softly, gently, with an almost featherlight touch to a furious intensity in other sections. I don’t play piano myself, but it was clear her technical skills are exceptional. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was that as far as I could tell from where I was sitting, she played the entire hour long set from memory, from her head. She didn’t have sheet music in front of her. Even the performer at Carnegie Hall had sheets, but Qing didn’t. A superior performance from an outstanding performer. I was glad to have the chance to see the performance there, and I wish Qing the best in her career going forward.