Over the holiday bwog freelancer Kate Linthicum headed north with four friends and a loose agenda: rollick through Buffalo, Toronto and Montreal, make some art, and do it all for cheap.

On Monday we packed ourselves into a borrowed van and fled the city.

Goodbye thesis, goodbye job, goodbye anxieties about post-graduation life.

In Poughkeepsie we stopped at a friend's house and jumped on his trampoline just to prove to ourselves that we were being spontaneous. Then we rambled west under the bright white sun.

Eight hours later, we arrived at our destination. We were greeted with a feast of corned beef, cabbage and shamrock-shaped sugar cookies.

Mine eyes, I am now happy to report, have seen the glory of St. Patrick's Day in Buffalo.

For those of you who opted to stay put this spring break and work on your thesis, go to your internship, or just to avoid seeing your parents, we've compiled (a continually updating) list of activities to keep you busy. * designates free.

Tonight:

Mountain Goats and the Moaners @ Webster Hall 3/18 $18. (Note: this show is not sold out, it is the Williamsburg show that is sold out.)

* Manhattan School of Music Percussion Ensemble: Marimba Concert; 7:30 PM @ the John C. Borden Auditorium

Attention all dairy and hops lovers: tonight is the Cheesening at Pacific Standard. This Park Slope bar plays host to a tasting of a half-dozen different cheeses, from Wisconsin, Oregon, Vermont and Texas. You can wash them down with Sixpoint?s Hop Obama, a presidential candidate "tribute beer." Whatever your political persuasion, you'll probably be persuaded to raise a glass. (At Pacific Standard 82 4th Avenue between Bergen and St Marks Streets. Take the downtown 2 or 3 to Atlantic Avenue)

Wednesday:

Lots of new arrivals at MoMA today, including Projects 87: Sigalit Landau and Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s. For a complete list of all MoMAs film screenings, go here.

* Also at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg: Quizz-Off 7:30 PM. Test your mental mettle in areas of general knowledge, music, top tens, and visual identification. With prizes!

* Lecture: Fashion 101: How to Start Your Own Fashion Line in Today's Market (with Mercedes Gonzalez of Global Purchasing Group). The New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library; 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

* Panel: Voces: Contemporary Actions by Latino Artists (moderated Jose Munoz; featuring the work of contemporary Latino performance artists Nao Bustamante and Nicolás Dumit Estévez.) For advance registration e-mail public_programs@elmuseo.org. El Museo del Barrio; 1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street) #2 or #3 train to 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, walk one block east to Fifth Avenue, then south to 104th Street.

Earlier this week, Bwog daily editor Jessica Cohen spoke with Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Tulane and official historian for CBS News. The New York Times recently named his book recounting the short-term aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, The Great Deluge, one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. Over spring break, Cohen and 38 other Columbia students worked for the Common Ground Collective, gutting homes and weeding abandoned land plots in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Bwog: How effective do you think the volunteers for Common Ground have been in their efforts thus far?

Brinkley: I can't praise Common Ground enough. When the government abandoned the Lower Ninth Ward, Common Ground stood up and became a great organizing enterprise, a real galvanizing vortex of the rebuilding effort. It's the best of what faith-based groups and college students and caring citizens can do in the sense of physically picking up debris, gutting houses, trying to help residents reestablish a life in their neighborhood. So out of all the organizations I've seen operating in New Orleans I think that Common Ground deserves the most pats on the back.

B: I think that many of us felt that a lot of the physical work we were doing wouldn't be fruitful in the long run. We felt that the government may still bulldoze houses that we gutted or repossess lands that we cleared.

DB: It could be a lost cause, individuals and groups like Common Ground can only do so much. The Lower Ninth is below sea level, it has faulty levees built around it and there's been no commitment to properly rebuild the neighborhood with electricity, water -- basic amenities for survival in America. You may have very well been on a fool's errand if the neighborhood can't get back, but by you coming there and saying "we care," the message to people is that we're going to reclaim this neighborhood, house by house, block by block. And that's all you can do, we're not miracle-makers. The main thing to do is keep some attention focused on it — to remind people there's something worth saving.

Not everyone spent Spring Break in Jamaica. Below, Bwog editor Chris Szabla reports on his visit to cold - and contradictory - Istanbul.

The train from the airport emerges into open air, weaves through tired concrete apartment blocks painted in worn pastels, occasionally grants glimpses between them of an endless, rolling cityscape of similarly dilapidated structures, all suffused in a dull green-blue haze. It halts at a transfer point shrouded in fog and you exit, your face sprinkled with forty-degree rain. That's when you remember: despite the minarets puncturing the distant horizon, the hijabs, the buzz-buzz-buzz of calls to prayer mediated by electric megaphone, Istanbul is far closer to Bulgaria than Bahrain.

Sure, "East and West": both are present in this city, which legendarily spans continents and cultures, shores and civilizations. That the two meet here is the cliché that has saddled Istanbul at least since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s, when one Orientalist trope after another was swept away by Atatürk's steady - some would say overzealous - Westernizing hand. Some dissenters, naturally, have chosen to paint the city one way or another, instead. "This Istanbul is European thing is bullshit," one grad student told me before my departure. "Most of it is just like Damascus." In Orhan Pamuk's Snow, on the other hand, distant Istanbul comes off no less foreign, no less "Western" to ur-Turkish Anatolia as Paris or London.

In his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City, the Nobel-winning author strikes closer to the truth about this beguiling metropolis. East and West - if, for convenience's sake, we can collect a variety of stereotypes under these contested categories - do both exist, indeed coexist, in Istanbul. Whether they, in fact, meet - this is another question entirely.

Bwog coffeeshop reviewer Downing Bray took a break from caffeine this week in the Caribbean, and made it home to tell the tale. Her hazy memories follow.

Jamaica, it seems, was the place to be this spring break. On this sunny island of white beaches and clear blue water, of abundant Red Stripe and weed, many a Columbian could be spotted sunning, perhaps with a beer or joint in hand, showing off their bathing attire and nascent tans . . . or more likely their lack thereof (got neither? No problem mon!). In Negril, on the very western tip of the island, pale New Yorkers mingled with hordes of other college spring breakers (and high schoolers—they only tell you their age after the hook-up). Days disappeared while we sprawled on the beach, sloshing in the ocean while sloshed, or tripping over the sand munching on a special cake. Nights were basically the same, minus the sun and plus much more sloshing and tripping. Adorned with multiple fluorescent wristbands, Columbians jumped from bar to open bar while and experiencing the joys of easily accessible weed (check out the back pocket of the guy in the yellow shirt). Along with pot, throngs of locals sold fruit and souvenirs, lobsters and patties, parasail adventures and booze cruises—other than tourism, all the Jamaican economy has going for it is something called bauxite, so we're walking meal tickets.

Hot spots included Rick's Bar, the site of cliff-jumping and endless drunken pick-up lines; Margaritaville, the pivotal gathering point of trashy spring breakers, equipped with a water trampoline, cheesy decoration and a live stage featuring horrible music; and The Jungle, the nightclub where Grammy-nominee Beenie-Man reggaed the night away. Suffice it to say, midterm stress faded away, whether through enjoying the jerk chicken or taking advantage of . . . other things. Coming from the land where every little thing is gonna be alright to the snow-covered sidewalks of Columbia has been rough—blurry Negril memories, plus sand still stuck in my suitcase, will have to see me through till summer.

It's like news from a sinking ship: text messages, calls from borrowed cell phones, and internet cafe e-mails have been pouring in recently from those stranded in exotic spring break locales (including the ridiculous number congregating here). The nastiness outside in New York grounded over a thousand planes, foiling the homework plans and sinking the budgets of partiers scattered across the Carribean.

Perhaps most troublingly, it seems that key members of the student government are missing. The CCSC VP Funding is stuck in the Bahamas, the VP Communications is stuck in Fort Lauderdale, and the senior class president is somewhere between here and Jamaica. Thankfully, the VP Policy is safe at Columbia, and we can only presume that the President and VP Campus life are in secure, undisclosed locations.

The VP Communications sends these observations from Fort Lauderdale:

Man on Phone: "It's so fucked up. It's so fucked up, Steph."
Woman, probably wife, on other end: "..."
Man: "What the fuck do you want me to do? Grow wings and fly? I don't feel good."
Woman: "..."
Man: "Why don't I try to rebook it? What the fuck do you think I've been doing for the last 30 minutes? Can't you just call them from home and pretend that you're me?"
Wife: "..."
Man: "OK! You're a woman! Not a good plan. I need to go. I need to eat. I'm getting dizzy."

More after the jump...

Aside from the lethal shooting of an NYU student, the burial of the kids and adults who didn't make it out of that Bronx house fire, and about two days of above 65 degree weather, you didn't miss much in NYC. But at Columbia, on the other hand...just look at all of the exciting things that happened while you were gone:

The novelty of the Christmas decorations wore off halfway through the Yule Log bash, but the lights twinkled on for several snow-less months anyway. Yesterday, the holiday cheer was spotted bagged up and waiting for storage in Columbia's musty attic until next year's festivities.

Further down College Walk, a horde of baby journalists here for a Columbia Scholastic Press Association conference, wearing name tags and eager smiles, colonized Alma Mater. They've been crawling around campus all week. Go away!

And speaking of nuisances, Low Library is undergoing a "bird control project." Luckily, the ugly scaffolding you may be able to see if you squint and look at the back of the photo at left, should be gone by tomorrow.

-SEV

Aside from the lethal shooting of an NYU student, the burial of the kids and adults who didn't make it out of that Bronx house fire, and about two days of above 65 degree weather, you didn't miss much in NYC.

But at Columbia, on the other hand... Just look at all of the exciting things that happened while you were gone:

The novelty of the Christmas decorations wore off halfway through the Yule Log bash, but the lights twinkled on for several snow-less months anyway. Yesterday, the holiday cheer was spotted bagged up and waiting for storage in Columbia's musty attic until next year's festivities.

Further down College Walk, a horde of high school student-journalists wearing name tags
and eager smiles colonized Alma Mater. They've been crawling around campus
all week!

Go away!

And speaking of nuisances, Low Library is undergoing a "bird control project." Luckily, the ugly scaffolding you may be able to see if you squint and look at the back of the photo at left, should be gone by tomorrow.

-SEV

Bwog dredged the cynicism and negativity from its collective soul a few weeks ago, and pissed a few of you off in the process. Well, that was winter. With spring comes renewal, and lists of things that are shiny and new and exciting! Meanwhile, Bwog is pooped, so you may not be hearing from us as frequently. Have fun on your exotic getaways (or mundane weeks on the living room couch). The fun starts again soon.

Gayatri Spivak
FreshDirect
BorrowDirect
kumquats
UK spelling
petty theft
flyers condemning petty theft
hopscotch
Dixieland jazz
pancakes
Robert Maschio
body stubble
shaved heads
multivitamins
three ring binders
hole punchers
nepotism
bagel lady who has replaced bagel man at Ferris
raccoon hats (these are not coonskin caps)
going to bed at 11:00 PM, waking up at 7:00 PM
breakfast
apparently, masturbating in front of the butler circulation desk at 3:30 AM during midterm week
Ovid
E-40
Riverside Drive
ping pong
cheerleading
Leif Erickson
old timey fisticuffs
whiskey