Polish Pride

This week was pretty crazy since, not only am I insanely busy with school, but my friend Cameron was in town visiting from Portland. Luckily she has several other friends around, so she too was busy.
On Fri I caught an early train and met her on the L platform at Union Sq. While I was waiting for her I ran into both Joe, a CS friend, and Laura, our roommate from last summer. This was remarkable b/c I never run into people on the subway. I also met a guy on NJ Transit who works for the Project for Public Spaces, which is a local non-profit that works to reclaim public space from the car. I ended up chatting with him the whole way and will hopefully be going in there for an info interview in the near future. My commute turned into a rather social one indeed.
I took Cameron to Lomzynianka, our favorite Polish place, which is also right around the corner. Here you can get dinner for two for $12. We ordered way too much, and ate the same and so out tummies were heavy with grease when we went to my place for drinks. We sat up on the roof and had some good conversations about cities and transportation (Cameron is an avid cyclist) over a bottle of burgundy. She kept exclaiming all weekend about how great NYC is.
After the wine we went down to Barcade to meet some of her friends. Games were played and beers were delicious as usual. I got to a new level on Tapper, which I didn't think existed. I felt like a little kid again, giddy with excitement. As usual, nobody cared. Brandy also came out and we all piled into a couple cabs to meet some more of her friends in the LES.
Besides a couple of places, LES is a complete piece of shit, and tonight was no exception. We went to two terrible places and I stayed out too late, drank too much.
Sat I got up too late and spent about 6 hours working on trying to finish the cycling research study for John.
That evening we went up to 117th & 8th to a little party that one of the friends was throwing for Cameron. We had a nice time hanging out with her the last night, and her friends are fairly cool despite not being the first type I would think to hang out with. I mean, shit, dude had a plasma screen TV. On the ride home we got into this huge discussion about social engineering. We determined that it is pretty much a terrible idea, both politically and the potential for abuse.
Sunday I worked ALL day. I had to spend a couple hours trying to finish up the cycling study, which is now almost done except for a couple questions. The Polish football team must have done something good because there were Poles dressed in garb and honking horns all over the neighborhood all day long. I was not so annoyed by the honking because it was celebratory vs. being impatient assholes.
After the cycling work had to go through some documents that discussed greenhouse gas emissions inventorying and allocation for regions and come up with questions and thoughts on it for today. The weather was fantastic so we decided to take our work outside. After failing to make lunch due to the beans taking way longer than expected, we ate a quick salad and headed to the park to hang out for awhile. There were some guys tossing a disc, but I was able to control myself and got some work done. Eventually some kickball guy started blasting really shitty rap music, which was the sign to move on to the coffee shop.
I have decided that I quite like El Beit. Their tables are really nice (good size and height, stable) and the chairs are pretty decent. It also seems like there is enough turnover that I can get a good spot by waiting only a short time and then zone completely out for hours.
I treated myself to a Clover coffee since I had been good about not having coffee all semester. Alas it turned out to be a little overroasted and watery, but still nice to have coffee. On one of my many piss breaks some guy was locked in the bathroom and I had to get the manager. He seemed pretty embarrassed.
I stayed up pretty late working and am now rather tired and trying to stay awake in GIS class.