New Haven, CT

Leaving Manhattan by automobile is so incredibly difficult I don't even want to talk about it. But being the master of navigation and defensive driving that I have become, I make it out alive, through Greenwich (this is Greenwich?) and into New Haven. 

Driving into town, it's pretty evident that this a tale of two cities. Yale is beautiful, chapels and quads and courtyards and kids sharply dressed. On the edge of campus, parks and repertoire theaters and preppy shops and au bon pain. But elsewhere in town, very rundown houses and commercial buildings and roads that have probably been here (without renovation) for a couple hundred years. 

I meet Ben for a quick lunch on Chapel Street and a walk through the Yale Architecture building.  Twenty-somethings in rimmed glasses are working away building and drawing and downing Dunkin Donuts coffee (big in New England). Frank Gehry is here, listening to a student defend the experiential aspects of a beaux arts auditorium. If the models and renderings in this room are any indication, architecture is about to get all Bilbao on us...

I hang for a bit at Book Trader Cafe, it's a bookish crowd. Everybody's reading. The place doesn't even have WiFi. I doodle on a US map for a while, figuring my route. I talk to the guy next to me. Princeton undergrad, Yale Law, interning this summer for Justice Souter. We wish each other luck in our endeavors, he gets back to Torts, and I get back on the road. Meeting cousin Corey in Cambridge at seven.