Columbia University

That was my first visit to Columbia, and I came away about $200 poorer because of book buying, completely unexpectedly.

Excellent small point: they have a branch of Maoz on Broadway and W. 111th Street, so I had one of those great felaffel sandwiches and a lemonade.

I’ve found over the years that no matter how many photos or how much film you’ve seen in a place, it never ends up being anything like what you expect. For me at least, that’s because travel is a mostly kinetic experience rather than a strictly visual one. You need to find the major and subordinate walking and transit routes in a place, feel the gradations of level on the streets, see where the breezy corridors are and where the dead-air ones are, and feel how comfortable and/or uncomfortable the distances between your major co-oedinates are.

In the case of Columbia, I was rather shocked, having only seen photos and also seen its location on maps dozens or hundreds of times. What the photos and map don’t tell you (and even if someone told you personally it wouldn’t sink in) is that Columbia really is on top of what amounts to gigantic hill.

This left a big impression on me because I naively got off the A-Train at 125th Street, thinking that it looked like a pretty easy walk. It’s a pretty easy walk if you’re a mountain climber– you’re pretty much scaling a very steep park hillside if you come at Columbia from that direction.

Aside from that, I’d say the campus looks a bit smaller than I’d expected. The overall feeling of the place seemed more comfortable than expected, however.