11 June 2011
Arrival
I arrived at JFK Airport in New York City on a cloudy drizzling Saturday morning. The weather was pretty cool at 19 degrees Celsius, one of the lows for summer. As I do not have a room to stay yet, I went to my boss’ apartment in Park Slope to stay for the time being. Since I’ve been NYC before, I had no problems navigating the complicated subway system, which is unlike Singapore’s friendly and clearly labelled one.
Park Slope is a nice slightly upper class neighbourhood with many nice brick houses and old stone churches in every other block. My boss’ apartment is quite big and he allowed me to coach surf. After making a few calls to various potential listings on craigslist, my boss kindly drove me around 3 houses to take a look. Actually, he was very nice, he actually helped me look at one house before I came, but he thought it wasn’t that good. The first two houses were in Bed-Stuy, and were in slightly dubious-looking areas. The rooms were nice, one was unfurnished and without a window, the other was large and came with a bed. However, the house is like hidden behind a long garden. The last house was in Kensingston and it was the best choice: the guy is subletting to me for 2 months as he was flying off, and is letting me use all his furniture: bed, study table and everything. It is a nice basement room, hence is kept cool for the summer, no aircon or fans needed. The best part is, it is just across the street the subway station exit. Thus, without much ado, I accepted that apartment and moved in on Tuesday.
13 June 2011
Work
My workplace is located in a cool neighbourhood called DUMBO: Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, just near the harbour. It is a very small office, with only 4 desks, but there are many interns. The first day of work at Armistice Media was a little more like orientation, listening to what was going on in the company, and talking to the various interns. Most of the interns were part-time, and there was a very professional guy doing the programming and he talk more computing lingo than I could understand. There was a meeting and I sat in, and we talked about plans for our upcoming website, Newsmotion. Working hours are very comfortable, about 10am – 7pm.
The next few days was spent working on my boss’ personal website, JulianRubinstein.com. I helped to design a new background, and to transit all the leftover pages to the new design. It was quite simple work, and often involved trial and error, and also verifying to make sure my boss is satisfied with it. Also, it trained up my html handcoding skills which were a little raw as I was used to using Dreamweaver. I also assisted to do a press kit in Photoshop.
Around NYC
Given the few days I was here, I have not really travelled far. However as I was quite familiar with certain areas, hence I tried to explore areas which I have not been before. On Sunday, I went to meet Hans, one of the other interns here, at Upper West Manhattan Church of Christ, and then we went to visit a huge old church – Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I also went around Union Square, and visited HillsongNYC Church at Irving Plaza. At Union Square, there were a large group of people gathering around a street performance, in which a guy jumped over a girl standing up, and then jumped over like 5 girls later. It was amazing.
I love shopping at those mega superstores, like Target, K-mart, and Best Buy. They are cool places to buy groceries and whatever you may need.