New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 3 (Metuchen and Princeton)

I took a smattering of pictures during this day; these pictures serve as accompaniment and supplement to this entry.

On Monday I explored Princeton. On Sunday I'd realized I knew a number of people attending graduate school at Princeton (besides the friend I was staying with) and coordinated meeting for lunch with one of them.

Since Bryson went to lab early and Catherine had work, when I woke up I was on my own. After learning about train schedules, I figured I'd explore downtown Metuchen for a while, catch the train to Princeton, explore it a bit, eat lunch with Scott and Bryson, and then likely explore Princeton more.

Freshly showered, I dressed as warmly as I could and headed out. Downtown Metuchen is cute. There are occasional plaques denoting historic buildings and describing historical incidents; this give the town a lot of character and credit in my book. It's clear Metuchen is also mostly a commuter town -- many store open bright and early at 6am so people can stop by before they catch a train. It was quite empty when I explored around nine and ten am. Besides the nice traditional main street (literally named main street) with its assortment of small stores of virtually every type, the only thing I recall about the street is the surprising number of beauty salons / hair cutting places. I asked Bryson about this in the evening and he suggested that there were many stay-at-home mothers in the area and they frequented such establishments.

During the course of my wandering, I grabbed breakfast at a good place: Bagels-4-U. I spent a while mesmerized by their assortment of cream cheeses that they appeared to make themselves and paralyzed by the decision of which bagel with which cream cheese, that I, not having noticed all the bagel bins, when the counter-woman asked me for the third time what I wanted -ah, "New York" impatience-, panicked and said pumpernickel. And even that bagel was good. (Why oh why can't I get good bagels on the west coast?)

On the train to Princeton, I stared out the window and contemplated the land as we passed. It's nice seeing such a high density of trees -quite different from the CalTrain or BART-, although it did surprise me that there was so much undeveloped land in New Jersey (especially so close to a commuter rail line). And some people claim real estate prices will inevitably rise because land is in short supply...

In Princeton first I wandered along the perimeter of the campus, examining downtown Princeton and the university. I found a neat park downtown; view the pictures. The university itself was gothic, filled with elaborate dark gray brick buildings (with gargoyles) giving the impression of timelessness. (They did have a few newer buildings in a different style, but those really felt out of place.) The campus appearance seemed appropriate for the weather, which stayed around freezing the whole day. Together, the university and the town felt like (old) money, similar to what Stanford would feel like if Palo Alto and the campus were actually adjacent. (But Stanford would feel like new money.)

In the middle of my wandering, I stopped to meet Scott and Bryson for lunch. We decided on an innocuous choice: Panera Bread. Panera Bread is my favorite sandwich chain -- other chains do individual items better but Panera Bread is fairly consistently good. It always leaves me filled, probably from the whole grain baguette I get on the side at every meal there. (Conversely, Bryson complained it always leaves him hungry. But he doesn't order the baguette.)

It was good to see that Scott seems to be doing well and is happily excited by his research. He's living the devoted graduate student life, working hard and wearing a jacket in honor of meetings with his professor. (I guess economists are more formal than computer scientists?)

After lunch I looked around campus more. As you'll notice from my pictures, I found a number of weird statues around campus. Later I found an list of all these sculptures.

I also took an incredibly poor campus tour. The guide clearly had her lines memorized and we didn't go anywhere interesting. By interesting, I mean places I hadn't already stumbled upon during my wanderings. And it felt artificial: for instance, many times when the tour guide was talking about a particular department or activity, she cited a roommate that participated in it. I swear I counted at least half a dozen roommates.

I took the online tour afterward and found it faster and more interesting. But I did learn that some dorm rooms have 11 people so I suppose her claims can be true (though I doubt it). Also, on the online tour I found a picture of an unusual gargoyle I wish I saw in person!

All the same, on the campus tour, I did learn:
* Princeton was the capitol of the United States for a while; a fact I verified online.
* Princeton originally was called the "College of New Jersey" and changed its name a few times, becoming Princeton University in 1896.
* A cute superstition involving the main gate to the campus. I wonder how many students listen to it?
* Princeton's mascot is the tiger but was originally the lion. Like me, when I don't think too deeply, I can mix them up. And indeed students and alumni did mix them up over time, donating tiger statues when the lion was still the mascot and vice versa. Eventually, so the story goes, the tiger became the official mascot because the colors -orange and black- look better than whatever they were doing before with lions and manes.

Because of my prior exploration, by the end of the tour I'd been outside for a number of hours and was quite frigid, so I called Bryson and we headed back to Metuchen. On the way Bryson showed me a neat feature of the train seats -- all the rows are on sliders and can reverse to make them face the same direction or face the adjacent seats. California trains should be built like this! It's convenient: face the way you want and/or restructure the train to better accommodate large groups!

Upon returning to Metuchen we hung around the apartment for a while (partially to warm up a bit). When Catherine told us she wouldn't be back for dinner, we debated where to eat for a while, generated a short list of ideas, and headed out to downtown Metuchen. It being a Monday, our first choice was closed, so we took the opportunity to further wander around Metuchen and see what else was open. I got my chance to see the one street besides Main Street that had significant retail. (Main Street is better.) We also learned (or I learned and Bryson remembered) that most decent restaurants in Metuchen are closed Monday nights. Our second choice was one of these.

We ended up at Afghan Kebab House #7. The first food item to arrive after ordering was the salad that comes with the entrees: a small lettuce salad with tomato slices, green peppers, lemon slices (!), and lots of ranch dressing -I like ranch dressing but this was a lot for me and way more than Bryson would put up with-. In short, one of those lettuce and ranch salads some ethnic places serve to make unadventurous dinners more comfortable by showing not all their food is strange.

We also got bread with the standard two Indian sauces (red and green); the bread had a little oil flavor and a slightly more crunchy exterior on one side than I'd like, but wasn't bad in the least.

For an appetizer we tried the aushuk and were served a few thin dumplings well hidden in a dish mostly filled with yogurt and spices. While the yogurt was fine, the dish was disappointing because of the effective lack of meaningfully sized/filled/flavored dumplings.

Our entrees, however, were good. One was a mix of chicken, brown rice, pine nuts, peas, and orange rind. The orange rind was a fairly prominent (good) flavor and worked well with all the other ingredients. The other was a lamb steak -juicy though not particularly Afghani or Indian-, much like (very good) lamb chops my parents used to make.

Although the restaurant was very slow, we still had the rest of the evening to kill and so we watched Annie Hall. I had a general negative impression of Woody Allen from other movies so I figured it would be good for my edification to watch one of his classics. I found, to my surprise, I liked it: it feels funny, witty, sad, and true. And now my opinion of Woody Allen is more nuanced.