Friday/Shabbat – 148/149
December 25, 2012
Friday I took it pretty easy, deciding that this was time for me to take my well deserved holiday. Montreal being in a French province (Quebec) actually had excellent food. Thus Leo and I went out to the supermarket today so that we would have ingredients to use in preparing lunch and Shabbat dinner. As Leo is vegetarian/vegan the selection was very eco-friendly and lunch was Tofurky baguette with Brie and assorted veggies (including plenty of avocado). Dinner was prepared pasta with a yummy Tomato sauce.
Other than that both days were spent chilling and reading as the snow pounded outside and made it hard to leave the house.Pizza was ordered in Motzei Shabbat and I read most of a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. Pretty decent.
Also, Montreal is freezing. -15 degrees!
Wednesday/Thursday – 146/147
December 23, 2012
Today was the day to see a show and we picked one that was on the cheaper end for rush tickets: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This was a light-hearted musical based off Charles Dickens’ tale that was left unfinished at his death.
But the first order of the day was obtaining breakfast from a nearby bakery (dual pastries for me, a pain au chocolat et un croissant) and the to pick up some documents I needed printed for my visa application from my cousin’s office downtown. After that it was a light lunch at a vegan/vegetarian fast food joint and then to the show!
The show opened with the warning that we would be voting on the ending for, as Dickens had let it unwritten, the choice would be left up to us as an audience. The show featured heavily non-naturalistic elements including partial narration and frequent breaking of ‘the fourth wall’ but this didn’t detract in the least from the audience’s emotive connection to the story, as frequently occurs. This is possibly because the strong character archetypes that Dickens employs are so designed to arouse a human connection that despite any theatrical additions, the core messages remained. Our audiences chosen ending was somewhat surprising and the actors did a find job of improvising the needed elements. Overall I highly recommend this show, especially given the price for which a student can obtain tickets.
The rest of the afternoon was spent collecting my belongings before eating a little sushi with mum and going to the Port Authority Terminal. Unfortunately with mum being slightly paranoid about me not missing my bus she accidentally ditched me an hour early after misreading the time! Thus, I decided to buy the paper, a book and, a magazine, to while away the two hours before the bus left.
Once on the bus I had a most unpleasant ride, with a large overweight individual of African-american ethnicity with large thighs and loud music sitting alongside of me, reducing my seat to more of a half seat and my sleep to null.
I arrived in Montreal at 5AM, greeted with frozen air and an icy wind that chilled my innards to stone. My nerves protested as I stood outside arguing with the taxis drivers over who would take me. Eventually I made it to 3527 Lorne, Ariel Z, a Melbourne friend’s apartment that he had vacated at the end of exchange just a day prior. His rent carried over for a couple of days and so he said it wouldn’t be a problem if I crashed there. Unfortunately the landlord was later to come and change that…
As I stepped over the front porch, I slipped on the sleet and landed in icy water that made my already burnt nerves scream, and the few minutes it took me to find the hidden key and open the door were painful. Finally inside, I was lost as to which room my key could open and after ten minutes of searching, I found the room, changed out of my clothes and crashed on the bed for a brief forty minutes of sleep I could allow myself before rising to get my visa done.
My visa appointment was at 8AM at the US Consulate in Montreal. It was meant to be a ten minute walk away, however with no internet and no map, it took me close to forty minutes to find the place. Out in the cold again, with not enough cover, this was made more difficult by the fact that I needed to hide from the cold inside apartment buildings along the way so as to avoid frostbite. Once at the consulate there was a line that formed and we were made to wait outside for around twenty minutes. The air was already warming and for that I was most grateful. After a good hour more of waiting I made it through consulate security, past the waiting line for visas and to my interview where I was charged over $300 in fees just to be assessed for the claim. I was then informed that my sponsor institution, the University of Pennsylvania had not paid the SEVIS fee, as was customary for host schools and, that they could not issue my visa until such was done. They took my passport, my I-20 visa application and supporting documents and was thus sent away with information on how to pay the $200 fee myself and also told to contact Penn to get them to pay it too.
From there I headed down the road to find a SIM card so I could call Penn, and a cafe with wifi, to make calls and pay the fee. During this period I was charged ridiculous roaming fees by AT&T. On the scale of $2/min of phone usage and $15/MB of data usage. This meant in 24 seconds of internet usage I was charged $4. Not very fair. I finally made it to the cafe and after calling Penn and being told they couldn’t help, I decided to pay the fee myself. However, on reaching the payment page for the SEVIS fee, was told I needed information from my I-20 which, if you recall, had been taken into holding by the consulate.
I thus raced back to the consulate, trying to make it before the 11AM deadline, only to be told by the security guard that without my documents I couldn’t be let in the building. The tears started to flow and I tried asking calmly if there was anyone else I could speak to about it and he directed me to another staff member who he claimed would tell me the same. She in fact told me to go right on through but the guard, on hearing this questioned her to the point that I was escorted from the building until such time as they could ascertain what to do. After a number of tense minutes, I was eventually readmitted, without any documents to the top floor, where a kind lady handed me photocopies of all my documents necessary to pay the SEVIS fee.
From there I found my way back to Ariel’s apartment and met with the single current resident, Leo from Melbourne Uni, a Bialik boy in my brother’s year and also a Melbourne High Old boy. We had a great many friends in common and hit it off fairly well. He then gave me access to the wifi in the apartment which was a great help and allowed me to pay the SEVIS fee. I then emailed the receipt off to the consulate and from that point just hoped they would approve my application without the 60-90 day administration period that they had told me could follow.
After that I fell right asleep, hardly waking up till dinner. At that point we went out to search for a place to eat. It was that evening that I had my first encounter with the cannabis plant, in this case, a delicious hemp-burger that was served at the vegetarian restaurant around the corner. Perfectly legal, perfectly safe and perfectly delicious.
After dinner I didn’t last much longer and was soon asleep again, finally a chance to relax a little after a somewhat harrowing 24 hours.
Monday/Tuesday – Day 144/145
Something I completely forgot about Sunday night that was rather significant was the trip to Marie’s Crisis Bar, a somewhat infamous gay hotspot in the center of the East Village. There Mum and I joined in the loud singing to broadway tunes played by the charismatic pianist, accompanied by a few excellent voices.
Monday was another lazy day, with the morning spent in a cafe with the family as we are known to do on holidays. Following that, it was back home to pack my bag and set off back to Philly in order to clean out my room in preparation for moving out. At 1PM I grabbed by backpack and set off to Penn Station where I caught the Bolt bus back to Philly.
On arriving back in Philly at 4PM I raced around campus, madly trying to get all I needed done before 5PM when things would close. First stop was to the Internation Student Services center where I picked up a new copy of the documentation I would need to obtain a new F1 student visa for the upcoming six months. Then it was off to the engineering buildings to try and meet with Kostas, my professor for algorithms, to discuss taking a job as a teaching assistant in the coming semester despite less than stellar marks on the final exam. He reassured me and also invited me to a end of semester party for some in the computer science faculty which I graciously declined.
After that it was a race back to my room in Rodin to start packing up my stuff. In the process I also changed into my Glee uniform to prepare for the gig that evening, awarding Dr Amy Gutmann a prize on behalf of the city. The gig was fine but took a little longer than expected so when I returned I was in somewhat of a rush. Unfortunately I allowed myself to be caught up for a longer than needed dinner at Hillel followed by a longer than needed chat with Aviva who, was storing some of my stuff over the break. After I made it back to my room for the last time where I spent the next hour in an insane dash to pack everything up before the last bus back to NYC left. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite successful and had to leave a large back under Anil’s care in the room.
When I got back it was unfortunately time to say bye to Dad who was going to North Carolina for work. But before that I was called upon as usual to fix up a piece of technology, in this case his phone that was years behind in software updates.
Tuesday morning was spent at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a wonderful gallery. Though our time there was limited, Mum and I managed to see a number of interesting exhibits including a great Andy Warhol one and another on early photographic manipulation techniques that were employed in the late 1800s to the early 1900s.
Following that we stopped off for lunch, this time at Pret A Manger, which wasn’t too bad. Then we received a call that I was most excited for. Family friends of our, who are close friends with a Mr Andreas Scholl, phoned us to let us know they were in a nearby cafe and that we should come to meet him and his wife.
Andreas Scholl is an opera superstar. A countertenor (the highest male voice) with a purity of tone and a richness of expression unmatched in the world. I had the pleasure of taking a public masterclass directed by him the previous year at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music where I study voice at home, however an opportunity to converse one on one with him I had never expected would come to pass. Eating croissants with him and his fiance, and discussing music, food and the good life, was probably one of the recent highlights of my entire trip and is certainly something that I’ll remember for years to come.
Andreas and I
After that we returned home to pack my bags for tomorrows trip to Montreal, where I was to apply for the visa and packing a bag to leave behind at my cousins’ place in NYC so as to eliminate my need to schlep it across continental America.
We were late to dinner with my little cousins but how adorable they were! Tzippy and Sophie were so excited to see me again and to be able to play with me again. Dinner was at the 2nd Avenue Deli; Raph’s NYC favorite. Amongst the things he ordered was Gribines: chicken skin fried in schmaltz (rendered chicken/goose fat). Not something that hugely appeals to me, but Raph (my brother) is the king of fried food.
After that it was back to the apartment to finish packing up my stuff and preparing for the trip!