Shock Culture Reverse

I had a small shock at my health club yesterday. When I returned to the locker room after my workout, I saw the first sign that something was wrong: my lock was hanging off the door and one of the fixtures attaching it to my locker door had been ripped out.

I opened the door to find my clothes lying in a heap and my wallet -- which had been in my rear pants pocket -- sitting on top of my pants (Brit friends note: we Yanks call trousers pants).

Fearing the worst, I opened my wallet to find that every single dollar had been removed. There had been more than $160 in my wallet.

It could have been much worse. The thief could have taken my credit cards or -- worse -- taken the wallet and my driver's license.

The folks at the gym were upset and sympathetic. After I pointed out that I should be compensated in some way, they waived my fee for the next month.

A colleague who also uses the gym told me there has been about one such theft a month for the last three months or so.

Like him, I'm going to start leaving my wallet and watch behind when I go to the gym.

While in Philadelphia, we also:

-- Visited the teeming Reading Terminal Market and had a really good cheese steak at Rick's Philly Steaks (hmmm, wonder why my recent cholesterol readings came in so high ...).

-- Went to a fantastic tapas place, Amada. It was beautiful and had great food -- one great nibble after another: grilled scallops, pork chops stuffed with cheese, etc., etc. (hmmm, why is my cholesterol so high?).

-- Walked around the old part of town and took Jay to see the Liberty Bell in its relatively new center. The bell is now placed in such a way that, when you look at it, you're also looking at Independence Hall, where the bell once hung -- and rang. It gives it meaning.

We had a great time. Later in the week, we drove out to Long Island to see my brother, Jeremy, and my mom, who live in Suffolk County (Long Island consists of two counties: Nassau County, which is closer to New York City, and Suffolk). We had a good time, eating out, visiting a nature preserve and just generally hanging out. It was good to see both of them.

Anyway, that's our vacation. Hope this was not TOO boring a tale!

A British friend asked me if New York-area mass transit is as well developed as the trains and subways that serve London. The answer is yes. But there are some differences.

Unlike London, where the Picadilly Line, Metropolitan Line and others extend well into the suburbs -- and serve suburban commuters as well as the urban variety -- New York for the most part has a very clear separation between commuter trains and the subway (Although, to be fair, many subway lines serve New York's two major train stations: Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal).

Another major difference is that New York is much more dependent on commuter buses (Many suburban communities either don't have any train service). And a lot of us drive.

Finally, ticketing for subways and trains is separate -- in London, if you have a long-term pass for Zone 2 and beyond, you can get a discount on any train tickets. In New York, a subway pass -- we call it a MetroCard -- is good only on the subway. Commuter train passes are a separate purchase.

So, how does New York City-area transit work? First, there are the trains (New Yorkers, you can skip this unless you're a glutton for punishment or a commuter transit buff):

-- New Jersey Transit serves large chunks of New Jersey (like, duh). The trains connect commuters with Philadelphia as well as New York. I use the Gladstone branch of the Morris & Essex lines (Morris and Essex are two New Jersey counties). New Jersey Transit also operates commuter buses.

-- The Long Island Rail Road, or LIRR, serves Long Island, and is part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

-- Metro-North rail serves New York suburbs north of the city and Connecticut.

-- In addition to New Jersey Transit, various buses head into Manhattan from the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island), Long Island and points north of the city.

-- The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey operates a subway-like train, the PATH system, from New Jersey cities relatively close to New York. (PATH trains, which make a number of stops in lower Manhattan and Midtown, are $1.50, compared with $2 for the subway. One city-dweller trick for saving money -- providing you planned to go no further north than 33rd Street -- is to take the PATH instead of the subway.)

The MTA also runs the city's subway and bus systems.

And that's New York transit, not counting train systems serving Newark and JFK airports!

Apologies for the long absence. I spent last week on vacation, traveling here and there. And I tend not to blog when I'm away about my travels. Call me paranoid, but to me it seems like telling potential burglars, "HI! NO ONE IS HOME NOW. COME ON IN!"

Anyway, last week we drove to Philadelphia to see our good friend, Joann, for a couple of days. During our stay there, we visited the National Constitution Center, which has a great exhibit on Benjamin Franklin on now (ending April 30). The exhibit traces Franklin's life and amazing accomplishments: Founding Father, scientist, public citizen, printer, etc., etc. The exhibit includes hundreds of documents and artifacts such as bifocal glasses, a Franklin stove and numerous documents written or printed by Franklin.

More later. I gotta run.

New York's capacity to surprise remains one of the great joys of working or living in the city.

Today, on my way back to my Times Square office building from a break, I spotted a platoon of young women, dressed in traditional Japanese robes and make-up, reminiscent of geishas (for all I know, they were dressed as geishas, but I'm not enough of an expert on Nippon's culture to say for sure).

Delighted by this sudden burst of color amid a mostly drab early-spring tourist throng, I called out "konichiwa!" to one of the five or six young women as I rushed past. She smiled and said "hello" in Japanese back to me.

With the advent of spring and warmer weather, I've been seeing a lot more birds and different kinds of birds from the train to and from work, and at the Great Swamp Wildlife refuge.

From the train, I've seen a lot of Canadian geese and ducks, swimming in the lakes and streams of the Meadowlands, the great expanse of wetland that you pass through on your way from inland New Jersey to communities along the Hudson like Weehawken or Hoboken.

The Meadowlands, which bear the marks of decades of industrialization but still retain a trace of wildness, have a reputation for being heavily polluted.

When I told some of my co-workers about my commuter birdwatching, they joked that the ducks and geese glow in the dark.