Got into JFK a half hour behind our scheduled 7 a.m. arrival. Make it throught immigration and customs pretty quickly. Bid goodbye to Alex who is about to embark on a eleven hour layover before returning to San Francisco. I am glad not to have to cool my heels in the airport for that long. I head over to the subway and am on my way into NYC. I get to Peter Shapiro's about 9 a.m. He was up until 5 a.m. and is not very alert when I arrive. I head out to get some victuals from the health food store at Integral Yoga around the corner.


Peter in his natural habitat.

I eat and show Peter my photos. He is mightily impressed. Spend the next couple of hours arranging my flight back to LA and getting my itinerary for New York sorted out. Josh has informed me that Freezepop is supposed to play this evening pretty close by here in Chelsea. Later I find out the show is cancelled. I had been looking forward to meeting with the band, as I had made some video clips for Josh to use with them at some of their shows in Boston.

I start to flag around 2 p.m. and have a nap for a couple of hours. Peter is awake at this point and we head over to Chinatown to visit Zakka. Pick up a couple of Japanese produced magazines and DVDs.


Can't make a trip to NYC without a stop at Zakka to see what is going on in the international design field.

We then make our way up to the Apple store to get my power adapter replaced. The adapter had died, fortuitously on the last day in Dar es Salaam. The Apple store is a fancy affair occupying an old Post Office. Next stop is Kim's Video over on St. Marks.

At Kim's we run into John Morton, a friend of Peter's from the Pseudo days. He joins us at Caravan of Dreams for some delicious vegan and raw dining. For the first time out of my many pilgramiges to the restaurant, the service stinks. John is brought the wrong drink and his Shitake Stir-Fry comes out minus the Shitakes. Otherwise the food is delicious all the way from the Seitan Stroganoff throught to live Carrot Cake.

John is the manager of a club called Remote Lounge. We head over with him to check it out. Peter had run into another friend earlier who is playing there tonight, so we were planning to go anyway. Tonight's entertainment is stricktly 8-bit. The downstairs is crawling with C64 and Amiga enthusiasts. The upstairs is for tourists and bridge and tunnel yokels.

One of the attractions at the club are 50 cameras and remote control consoles. You can sit down at a console and with a joystick, control any of the cameras in the club. You have a monitor and a phone in addition to some other buttons to do things like take a snapshot that is put up on the web, send a message to a remote user, and talk with a remote user. It is pretty fun.

We watch the show for a while. It has been arranged by Repellent, a local zine and Micromusic, a user group based in Germany. The video content is being generated by two Amiga computers and run through a Edirol V4 mixer. We get John to give us a behind the scenes tour. The video cameras are all run into separate receiving units that are akin to channels at a Cable TV provider. They have 96 "channels," which can be accessed with a VCR or similar device. A server is running the software to control the consoles, so it is fairly easy to update the whole system. They also have some custom systems to control various sets of monitors throughout the club.


Remote Lounge exterior.


The bar with cameras over head.


One of 50 cameras that you can control remotely.


The control units for the 96 channels at Remote Lounge.


The VJ hard at work slaving over two Amigas. Also available are four PCs, four VCRs and four DVD players.


Well, duh!

Peter and I make our back to his place on foot. We stop for a bit at Union Square to watch some breakdancing and BMX bike stunts. I put in some work on Peter's G4 when we get back. Finally tuck in at 3:30 a.m.

Up at 6:30 a.m. Can't shake the early morning routine. Get all of our stuff packed up and head over to the DTP office. We putter around for a bit making DVD-R backups of photos. I head off on foot to a bookstore that Mwanga had recommended in search of a book on learning Kiswahili. Downtown Dar es Salaam is compact, so it only takes me about 15 munites to traverse more than half of it. I recognize a great many of the places that we have gone to with Hanif over the past couple of weeks.

The Tanzania Publishing House bookstore is great. It is full of locally published books, about half in Kiswahili and half in English. It takes me a moment to find the book that Mwanga recommended. I also find some interesting books on the history of Zanzibar and a Tanzanian Cookbook. I am on a tight timetable and have to head back to the office. My fifteen minute walk leaves me drenched in sweat. Our visit has been during the Winter for the southern hemisphere. I can't begin to imagine what is must be like here during the summer.

Alex, Maina, Rita and I pile into the Nissan Patrol and head off to the airport. The truck is running on fumes, so we head off in search of fuel. The first station we stop at is out of diesel. I think Alex and I were a little nervous at this point. Missing our flights would be a huge problem. The second station has what we need. The conjestion around the office lightens after about 15 minutes of stop and go.


Alex gets talked into having his luggage stretch-wrapped.

Our flight to Johannesburg is rather uneventful aside from the release of a sanitizing aerosol into the cabin. Appearently all flights originating in other African nations receive this treatment. I did not get sprayed down on the way in from the US. At Johannesburg Intl Airport, we wait in five different lines to have our documents examined and receive numerous stamps before finally getting to the departure lounge for our connecting flight. When our tickets were changed I didn't think I would need to request vegan meals again. I couldn't have been more wrong. I head off to find something to tide me over on the seventeen hour flight. After some hunting I wind up with a plate of steamed yams, broccoli and fresh salad. We both take advantage of the wireless Internet access for some last minute communication. It seems blazingly fast compared to what we had in Tanzania.

The cattle call goes out and we all herd over to the plane. My seat is toward the back, next to a window. It is going to be a very long flight. We are delayed an hour due to a no-show who had checked in some baggage. They have to hold us until the bags are removed from the plane. I nod off to sleep and have a fitfull rest until we arrive at Sol Island ten hours later for a security check. Our friends at the FAA require that all flights into the US be checked to make sure that all baggage in the passenger compartment is claimed. We have to remove all of our bags from the overhead compartments and from under our seats. Half an hour later we are on our way.

I spend the rest of the flight reading and watching a couple of films. I check out Bullterproof Monk, Basic and the opening of X-Men 2 again.