Hurricane Irene

Bad weather follows me around.  Katrina senior year of high school, the Great May Floods of Nashville senior year of college, and now... and earthquake AND a hurricane.  Irene hit the city early Sunday morning.  It was crazy!  Not the hurricane itself, but the hype all around it.  Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the city, the Subway shut down Saturday at noon until Monday morning (that is unheard of), the streets were completely empty, and nothing was open!  It felt like post-Katrina New Orleans for a day, just with much less water and not as hot.  All the craziness caused Columbia to change their orientation week schedule, which led to the cancellation of our first official event on campus - the activities fair.  So instead of standing by a table with 14 other religious organizations yesterday like we were originally supposed to, our team instead mingled around with the freshman first-years new students (seriously, this place is more particular than Vandy!) as they unloaded their cars and got acquainted with the campus.  It was fun, but definitely a challenge for me.  Today we go back to campus for round two.  Pray for us and all the students we will meet!

NYC

Well, I'm here!  I've been in NYC since Monday, and already I think I'm going to like it.  A lot.  At least for now.  It's been great fun getting to hang out a lot with my team and spending time with our very knowledgeable chaplain, Father Dan.  This guy knows the ins and outs of all things New York.  He showed us around Columbia yesterday!  Our apartment is not to small and quite nice (at least compared to the standards I had set in my head beforehand), but nothing compared to the boys' five story palace with a rooftop patio.  The view from our living room window looks something like this:

 

Not too shabby, eh?  Today the team made a list of all the places we want to see and things we want to do in NYC sometime this year, and tomorrow we are going to begin to tackle it.  Hopefully someone will bring a camera, because I seem to have misplaced mine (don't tell my mom).  If so, I will try to post some pics!

Oh, I was kidding about the view.  We do, however, have a great view of the Empire State Building, which is quite nice at night.