Over and Out

The last few months have been a lot of travelling, awesome and not so awesome experiences with lots of wonderful people coming in along the way. Thank you everyone who made my time so wonderful in New Haven, and everyone who I meet along the way from Boston to New York. Adios!

Positively New Haven

Favourite Parts of New Haven- the essay.

The Food. So many restaurants, food carts, bars, dunkin donuts.

 

 

 

The houses and architecture.

East Rock (and West Rock). Parks at your doorstep with amazing views of the city

Soda in a jamjar.

The Book Barn. The ultimate book lover/cat lover/ coffee lover hangout. Not actually in New Haven but I'll include it anyway. Its just that cool

Markets! All your food, yum sandwichs and good italian-latino food

Just that this sign exists.

The Big City

Think Beyonce did it justice- its pretty much one big amazing concrete jungle of dreams.  Finally I made the trip to New York- having spent the last 5 weekends meaning to but never quite getting there. Its only a 2hr train trip from New Haven so no excuses really, but glad I saved it for its 30th of Dec madness- the place was completely alive.

Spent a day wandering, seeing where my feet could take me (generally away from the masses of tourists who were here pre-new years). Very fun night out with Rach and friends experiencing what life is like as an under-ager again (I was branded before entering the bar, with  crosses over my hands and wrists just to let everyone know i was still a child). As everyone keeps on reminding me- as a 20 year old I could fight for my country here, but not go home to have a beer afterwards. Crazy.

Got to recover and relax at the wonderful casa de Turkel's, who can totally claim they are Bill Clinton's neighbours (neighbours being a wide geographic distribution). We made awesome brownie, before Rachel and me embarked on the journey back to New Haven where we spent New Years.

There is a huge line of photos sorry, because I can not for the life of me work out how the formatting works for this blog.

Christmas in Framingham (with a touch of Boston)

Christmas preparations American style. mmmm.

 And BOOM its 2012! Holy potatoes time flies. So a bit of an update from the last few weeks in which I have been suspiciously quiet. No, I haven't quite gone underground- more just have been taking a rest from technology and enjoying this Dunkin-Donut filled, coffee worshipping, strange sport playing,  wonderful country

I was lucky enough to get to spend the Christmas with Becky's family in Framingham, outside of Boston. Awesome to spend time with some Brits, some Americans and the me being the token Kiwi. Ian joined us on Christmas Day, and managed to convert us all into poker players. Great game- although not so great for my dwindling supply of chocolate chips. Though that is potentially due to my munching of tokens more than anything else

Keeping busy we went into Boston one day- AWESOME city ( admit it New Yorkers! I'll write up about you soon), at least from what I saw in the 4 freezing hours we spent there wandering. A mix of new and old buildings, with lots of food shops and a big open park in the middle.Finally felt winter cold, although no snow yet. Damn global warming.

Quincy Markets

All wrapped up for Christmas

Most entertaining of all- Boxing day we went to watch Mission Impossible on an Imax theater... in a furniture store. And this wasnt just a normal Imax- all the seats had so called "Butt kickers" in them to give you kick everytime an explosion occured. So having watched Tom Cruise manage to avoid capture by driving a car off a cliff, we then proceeded to walk out, with sore butts,  through rooms and rooms of couches for sale. hahaha one of those only in America moments...

Why New Haven?

Thought I would take this opportunity to explain what I'm actually doing in the marvellous hamlethood of New Haven. The number of times people have asked me "so... why New Haven??" with a very confused look on their face is too many to count- to give a bit of perspective to Kiwis, a very well travelled local described it to me as "the Palmerston North of Conneticut". Conneticut is perhaps the equivalent of Clevedon crossed with Wairoa. yea.. it still confuses me too.

So... here it is.

About 18months ago, I became aware of an organisation called Unite for Sight, who provide eye-care surgeries for communities around the globe, particularly in Ghana. What is unique about this particular organisation is that they also do a lot of research in global health practice and implementation on a wider scale. They run a Global Health and Innovation Conference every year which over 2,000 people attend at Yale University, and are based in New Haven

It's an area that interested me, and over about a year's worth of email correspondance, I decided to come over and work in their head office for a few months. I had been looking to go on a bit of an adventure, and figuring that I didn't know a single person on the entire American continent was even more of a reason to go, I traded in a beautiful NZ summer for New England winter.

The area I am currently focusing on is Health Related technologies- I spend my days going through case studies, evaluating research that has been done into the development and implementation of effective designing for health. I think its cool.

If this sounds at all interesting to any of you folks, here are a few links which you may (or may not) like to follow. Your choice.

Unite for Sight
Millenium Village Project
Medic Mobile
ColaLife A really interesting example of combining coke and medicine

This next video is so worth watching if you have a spare 15mins- sums everything up perfectly. I can't work out how to embed it, but the link should work...

Kevin Starr- IIT Design Research Conference

Just a bit of a disclaimer thing (in italics to prove its officialness!)
anything I'm writing in this blog is my own personal opinion, and in no way represents the views of any organisation, company, individual, animal, material, plant... I'm only 20yo people- 50% of the stuff I write makes no sense whatsoever, and the other half is rubbish. Enjoyable rubbish i hope, but rubbish nonetheless.

Norwottuck Rail Trail

So I somehow stumbled accros this in my wanderings at Amherst. It's an awesome example of a multi-use road for bikes/skis/walkers/anything except a car. Went straight out of town into some conservation wetland- it seems a lot of the Conneticut, Massachussets area is swamp. Managed to see some wildlife and then had a conversation with two lovely older ladies who informed me that I was going the wrong way, and then proceeded to walk that way themselves. I took their word for it though, and ran back the way I had come, by this stage the water was turning to ice and I couldn't feel my nose, so the central heating back in the hostel was appealing.

It has it's own numbered exits!!!

And street signs!!

Imagine if we could all just get around using trails like this- commute to work through beautiful land every day. There seems to be quite a few old railway paths like this one around- in New Haven we have our own converted canal, 84 miles long which takes to you to Northampton, MA (right by Amherst!)

The Farmington Canal Trail
 - would be fun to do the whole length in summer sometime

The Year in Lego

I'm not one to post up ridiculous links for y'all, b/c lets be honest I figure I've already taken up enough of your bandwidth with this blog thing, but this is pretty cool

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2011/dec/13/2011-lego-year-news-pictures#/?picture=383194304&index=0

I particularly like Barack Obama. You can feel the Lego tension.