5,000 miles from Ghana

Boti Falls in the Eastern region of Ghana

In the fall 2009, I took MAP 103, a math class given at Stony Brook University. In this class, I met Abraham, a young Ghanaian boy who has refused to give his last name. In class, he always seemed to be eager to learn, more than the most of the students in the class. He takes his studies very seriously and tries to take advantage of the opportunity that studying in the U.S. has given him.

A Night Out in Hoboken, Jersey’s Redeeming City

Hoboken, N.J. is a 15-minute train ride from Manhattan, sitting between the Lincoln and Holland tunnels directly across the river from Chelsea Piers, with a clear view of the Empire State Building. The quaint European-style buildings generally get no higher than five or six stories, and Washington Street is rich with pubs, shops, and restaurants that give the place a charming suburban feel despite such close proximity to America’s busiest metropolis.

The population seems noticeably young, with most people my friends and I passed on the street looking to be in their twenties or thirties. The city is known for its nightlife, and there are plenty of bars and pubs to keep up the reputation.

One offers a free limousine pickup, which we took advantage of. We smugly postulated how superior we would appear when we hit the scene as we waited, and felt grand as we stepped out under the looks of everyone waiting in line at the door until we noticed  Free Limo Service scrawled on the side of the car in cheap neon green letters.

A Day at the Newseum

Over spring break I went to Washington D.C with my dad to visit family and graduate schools. While most of my time was spent touring campuses, talking to admissions counselors and professors, there was some down time to explore the city. Like almost any other city, you can spend numerous days in D.C. without repeating a thing. On this trip, I made a point to do something I hadn’t done before.

This made the decision to spend a little extra dough on tickets to the Newseum pretty easy. I must say, I was happy with our decision.

Spending Spring Break with Every Family in America at Universal Studios, FL

Me and my boyfriend traveled down to Florida over spring break last week and spent some time in Orlando, Cocoa Beach and Jacksonville. We rather stupidly bought 2 day passes to Universal Studios, without realizing that literally every family in America would do the exact same thing that week. On the third day of our trip down south, we decided to brave the crowds and hit up the theme park. Despite the massive hoards of people that surrounded us, the weather was wonderful, steadily hovering in the mid-eighties, and we came prepared with bottled waters and buckets of SPF 30.  After paying $14 to park our overpriced rental car, then walking half a mile from the parking garage to the front gates, then having our bags searched, and of course waiting in monstrous lines to validate our pre-purchased tickets, and finally waiting in more lines to have those tickets scanned, we were ready to have fun (actually, we were ready to go back to the hotel and go to sleep, but we couldn’t turn back at that point). The first thing we both wanted to do was go on the Back to the Future ride so we beelined it to that part of the park, only to find that the old familiar De Loreans have long been replaced by the famous yellow-faced family, The Simpsons.

Rio de Janeiro, a paradise in the heights

Brazil is the largest country in South America and the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas. Because of its history, Brazil was one of the largest South American countries exporting and importing of slaves. Nowadays, most Brazilians are descendants of the country’s indigenous peoples, Portuguese settlers and African slaves. As a result, there are many brown people such as mulattos. “My family is whiter, but my mom is kind of tan,” said Gustavo Rodrigues Jacovazzo, a Brazilian student of Stony Brook University, New York.

Checked Luggage: The High Price of Taking to the $kies

When my boyfriend and I first decided to go away for spring break a few weeks ago, I was super excited. It’s my senior year here at Stony Brook, and I’ve never gone away for spring break before, usually opting to make a little extra money by picking up more hours at work for the week. But this year, since it’s technically my last chance to have a real college spring break vacation, we decided to book a week in Florida, where it should be in the low 80′s by the end of March (yay!).