I'm in New York until Friday, looking at apartments. Theoretically, I'm also studying for exams while I'm home, but that's mostly in theory. I got through eight pages of an outline for one of my courses. I need Cliffs Notes for the outline.

The Fung Wah bus from Chinatown to Chinatown ($15 each way) usually frustrates me by stopping for 15 minutes at a Roy Rogers en route, but this time I was starving... and it didn't stop. So when I got off, in Chinatown, I got a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich and ate in on the subway. Good stuff. 3 kinds of pork, marinated radish and carrot, on a baguette. It was good. And cheap. $3. I was thirsty and didn't want a normal soda, so I pointed to one of the foreign-looking soda cans. So it turned out I picked this. Grass Jelly Drink. The link is very critical of it, saying "I didn’t think anybody could actually drink this stuff but only in very small amounts" and "Urgh! It looked like there was actually gelatin in this stuff. Sure enough, I looked at the glass. The gelatin chunks were settling at the bottom. Totally gross. The rest went down the drain." But actually, I thought it was quite good. I liked it. The gelatin pieces were neat. In a bubble tea kind of way. I'd drink it again.

I feel bad for people who limit their food experimentation. There's so much neat food out there from different cultures that's really awesome. And some people limit themselves to "normal" stuff like burgers and pizza. It's sad. Grass Jelly Drink is good. Tom Yum Soup is awesome. Ethopian green vegetable stuff that's always on the plate is really good, whatever it is. Fried plantains are yummy.

I bought a cookbook last week, inspired by the BBC documentary on school lunches I downloaded. I bought Jamie Oliver's "Jamie's Dinners." It came today. It looks neat. I want to start to cook stuff once I have a real apartment with a real kitchen and access to real supermarkets. We'll see. It's on my list of things to do as a real person (as opposed to student).