The next few days...

So, the rest of my trip was pretty nice-- I had good times in New York, hung out with Gavin on Tuesday, and then that night had dinner with my cousin Allison. I spent all day Wednesday at Fordham attending the admiited students day. It was really quite impressive.

THen I started having some real bad luck.

I should have known something was wrong when my laptop stopped working entirely on Wednesday evening. I was just sitting in Yerachmiel's apartment in Brooklyn surfing the web and it totally stopped responding. Cursor was frozen, alt-tab, ctr-alt-del, nothing. I finally did a hard shut-down, and when I tried to reboot I didn't even get a bios. I wasn't able to get any response out of it, no matter how I tried to reboot, restart, anything. I am pretty sure either the processor or motherboard just gave up. That was pretty disappointing. I'd had that laptop since freshman year and have replaced many components. I think now it's finally dead for good. Rest in peace, Little Computer that Could.

So, the next day another funny thing happened. I lazed around the apartment until about 90 minutes before my flight, then Yerachmiel and I started to drive to JFK. It was pretty nasty traffic, but we got there with about 25 minutes to go 'til my flight. I checked my ticket to see which airline I'd be taking so we eent to the right terminal, and it was about then that I realized I was supposed to fly out of Laguardia. Oh, shit.

Yerachmiel had no idea how to get there, and of course neither did I, but I broke out my handy subway map(which happens to ahve a few major surface streets as well) and frantically told Yerachmield to get on the Van Wyck, which would take us in more or less the right direction. Yerachmiel called one of his friends, and he told us which exit to take. We go to LaGuardia with about 10 minutes to go, I jumped out, ran to the front of the line, bolted through security and sprinted to the gate. I didn't check any luggage, so I was carrying everything--including my 10lb laptop which was now total dead weight. I made it with seconds to spare, got on the plane, and, of course we waited on the tarmac for about 40 minutes to take off.

When I landed in DC, I had to find transportation. There are signs everywhere at Dulles saying to only take authorized taxi services(I think the airport gets kickbacks), and at the taxi place there was guy giving out flyers, so I grabbed one, he wrote something on it, and told me where to go. I looked at the back and it said it'd be around $50(est.) to get to DC and they charge by the mile and by the minute. So I looked for other options, and found a huttle service hidden in the corner that would get me to my hotel for $27. It's a good thing i did that, because the 2 hour ride through the worst bumper to bumper traffice I have seen anywhere, Los Angeles included, would have probably cost me over $150 if I had taken the airport taxi.

My hotel was crappy, really more of a hostel than anything else, but I figured it would be since the room was only $50 a night. TO give a poignant example of just how run down it was though: the bathroom sink was the kind with a procelain base that is supposed to extend down to the floor. The procelain base on this one wasn't long enough, so it was sitting on top of a cut-down two-by-four. Really a classy fix-it job, if you ask me.

I went to a bar nearby for dinner and a beer, and talked to some of the locals. None of them really had much to say about American University, which I was going to visit, but they made DC sound a lot more livable than I had imagined. I guess it's gotten much better in the past few years.

Next morning, I cram onto the subway at 7AM to get to the American Law campus. Their presentation was nice, and it definitely gave me something to think on. I really will need to make a hard decision, because American seems to stack up to Fordham better than I though it might. I cut out early to go visit Mr. Cimino-Hurt, who was a teacher at my high school, my advisor, and also the Sensei of our Karate team. He lives in Virginia now, ao I made the trip out there by subway and he picked me up.

It was really cool to see him and his family. His wife was also a teacher at my high school, and really cool, and I'm friends with his sons Alex and Robyn, although only Robyn was home. We had dinner and he drove me to the airport, where I arrived with about 70 minutes to go before my flight...

well, i'm finally back in Eugene after