Category: Personal

I think most US domestic travelers are familiar with bus companies like Greyhound and the Amtrak trains. They also know how expensive and time consuming they can be. The more seasoned among us know where to get the cheapest plane tickets or the best deal on renting a car. But, short of hitchhiking, you can’t really call yourself a veteran of travel on the East Coast without having travelled on the mysterious “Chinatown” buses that operate between places like Washington D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

These buses, which operate under company names like Boston Deluxe, Fung Wah, and Lucky Star, can beat any price I have yet seen on trips between these major cities, with the 4-6 hour Boston to New York route that I just came back from being a mere $15 one-way.

On the way down to New York I caught the Fung Hua bus, that runs almost every hour of the day, on the hour, from South Station bus terminal which can be reached by the red line subway. Finding the place to board the bus reminded me of Harry Potter’s attempts to find his train to school. While I didn’t have to walk through any brick walls, Fung Hua and Lucky Star buses were operating out of gates 13 1/3 and 13 2/3 respectively. The line of waiting passengers was filled with mostly student types and young Asian Americans. You can buy the ticket there or show them your print out of the “e-ticket” from their online ticket order page.

The bus was decent and the ride would have been quite tolerable were it not for the Finnish college student sitting next to me whose cellphone battery was one of those marvels of Finnish technology that could sustain her many conversations for almost 5 continuous hours. I wouldn’t have minded so much were it not for the fact that I was annoyed at being constantly reminded of how completely foreign that language is to a Scandinavian like myself who has little difficulty in being understood in most other places in our blessed and most holy lands of the North (except Iceland, whose inhabitants have, of course, been linguistically frozen in time for so long that our students of ancient literature have a better chance of communicating with them than any of our more modern Nordic ambassadors of good will or, for that matter, Danes armed with a nostalgic colonial condescension).

About half way through the trip, however, a large hissing noise came from the front of the bus and our driver pulled the bus over onto the highway’s shoulder. We waited about 15 minutes while the driver called his bus tech support line. Without any announcement or attempt at repair he re-boarded the bus, and continued the drive to New York with the hissing still going. Judging by the hissing sound and the draft of freezing air that flooded the bus for the remainder of the trip, the front door of the bus was having difficulty in keeping itself closed. I tried to keep warm and drifted in and out of sleep before arriving finally at the “Confucius” tower apartment complex in New York’s Chinatown where my first trip with a “Chinatown bus” company came to an end.

I tried a different company on the way back. The “Boston Deluxe” goes only three times a day for the same price, but is convenient for Columbia University students and other New York visitors/residents who use the 1 or 9 subway line because it departs from 32nd and Broadway very near the Penn. Station subway stop, before making another stop at E 86th street and 2nd Avenue. I caught the 8:30 morning departure. The bus pulled in, with its Cantonese-speaking driver yelling into his Nextel walkie talkie and beckoning me onto the unmarked luxury bus he parked illegally in the No-standing zone by the road. I wasn’t sure I had the right bus to start with, since the bus door had a large sign upon which was hastily scribbled the Chinese characters for “Washington D.C.” (華盛頓). I asked the driver if he was going to Washington D.C. or Boston and, since I interrupted his yelling into the Nextel phone, my question was met with an irritated look before saying something sounding like the closest thing Cantonese can get to the word Boston. He waved me onto the bus and indicated I should take my luggage onto the bus instead of loading it in the bus’s luggage compartment, presumably since they weren’t expecting many passengers today.

The bus was completely filled with empty coffee cups and trash bags, probably left over from the Washington D.C. trip that was announced by the door’s sign. For the first hour or so of the ride, the bus belched a loud grinding sound so frightening that I seated myself furthest from the noise in the hope I would thereby survive any explosion of the engine. As I drifted in and out of sleep I counted two unannounced stops, one I believe was at a small Chinese operated grocery store somewhere near New Haven where our driver disappeared for a few minutes. However, unlike the Fung Wah experience, this bus also stopped for about 10 minutes so that passengers could get a bite to eat on the way there. I slept through most of the trip.

The Chinatown buses can’t be beat for their low price and I think they usually can get you there in one piece.

My family Christmas celebrations have concluded. I spent a warm and happy time together with my parents, my sister Carleen and my brother-in-law Mike. Since I don’t really send out Christmas cards or even 年賀状 (new year’s cards) I’ve decided to try to compile a sort of “year in review” on my blog. It will be somewhat longwinded but I’ll bold the more major event markers.

This is actually quite a challenge, since I suffer from a mild case of the “memento syndrome” combined with a more regular long term amnesia. However, using the techniques of a historian and detective I have been able to reconstruct the only true and, of course completely accurate narrative of my past year with the use of three important archives: My calendar application, my email, and my blog entries.

Continue reading Year in Review

I haven’t experienced this with people in my department (history) but based on my experiences so far, this is a very common first conversation with other Harvard graduate students (especially law school students):

A: What is your name?
B: Konrad
A: Where did you go to undergrad?
B: Western Washington University
A: Oh

Besides the fact that my undergraduate institution, which I’m very fond of, is not an elite ivy league school, it also fits into the ridiculed category of what my recent PhD graduate friend calls, “East Jesus Tech” or any schools where are “directional colleges”, religious/denominational, or technical colleges.

Ok, I just looked over some of my past entries. I seem to have a very nerdy blog. I don’t even have any recent anti-Bush bashing postings, more general political rants, or the jokes that I think are a common feature of even academic blogs. The only posting I have recently that has any direct connection of my life here is on my new carrel, and what can get more nerdy than that? From a more nerdy point of view, how can I justify the time I spend posting these articles on books I’m reading, talks I’m attending, and thoughts I have about history? The answer is surprisingly simple. I actually benefit from this in a real way. In many cases I’m summarizing talks, papers, or books—or at least reproduce what I believe are interesting points. This is very helpful to me for at least three reasons: 1) It is great practice in writing. While there are important differences between the “blogging mode” and the “academic paper” mode, I do feel like I’m getting lots of practice in forming and organizing ideas, something which offers very broad benefits. 2) When you are forced to reproduce arguments in your own words, or extract from them points which may have been floating vaguely at the back of the mind as, “something I hope I’ll remember” then you help to anchor those points and thoughts within your own mind. 3) I have serious memory issues and fairly bad organization skills. In the future, this blog will serve as a useful archive of thoughts and to a lesser degree, events in my life.

Well, sort of. Actually I have to share it with two other people. But this is not to be underestimated. I’m a real man now, or at least, a real graduate student. Even though I’m a lowly G1 (Gadfly Level 1) just starting out on my path to enlightenment in a history Phd, I have been granted a Carrel on the second floor of the musty stacks of Widener library. A Carrel, is defined as, “A partially partitioned nook in or near the stacks in a library, used for private study,” but I have always thought of it more as meaning something similar to the “sitting at the back of the bus” in graduate school terms.

The way I understand it, I now get to check out tons of books with my very special “Carrel library card” and then put them on my “Carrel shelf” (both on the desk and behind it) for my indefinite personal access. That is, until, of course, someone comes along and presses the “Recall” button in the online catalog of the library. Then I, reluctantly, will have to return to book to the control of mere mortals.

I also get a little combination lock controlled locker, just like high school! Ok, so I have to share that with two other people too. But I think there is more at work here than just a need to fairly distribute the carrels amongst the thousands of graduate students here.
Continue reading My Very Own Carrel