Looking for a chance to wait forty minutes to get your neglected bike onto the McBain elevators, then ride many miles in the freezing cold? Read on, my friend.

Staten Island is probably foreign ground to the vast majority of Columbia students, and with good reason -- even on a good day, it's an unbelievable trek. However, it's often worth it to travel out there. If you're looking for weird and little-known places, well, Manhattan is no longer the place to find them. But Staten Island is a vast expanse of empty, unpopular, and abandoned wonders.

Case in point: the boat graveyard. Tucked away on a forgotten corner of the island's west shore is a swampy little plot of land where wooden and steel boats have been haphazardly rammed into the shore and left to decay. A continuous string of craft lets you walk hundreds of feet out into the water.

Photos and more narrative after the jump.

In which Bwogger Armin Rosen shows first-years how to break out of Morningside without breaking the bank.

New York's expensive, but the cheap bastards among you are in luck. Yes, New York's notorious cigarette taxes mean that smokers will have to do a little pinching—or, better still, quit smoking altogether. And although $6.50 might seem a little steep for a sandwich, the tenth punch of a Ham Del Gold Card and its attendant free hero drops the price to a slightly more reasonable $5.90 something. Even then, it's possible to subsist off of club pizza, the Wednesday night vegetarian potluck, various Hillel events, and post-conference wine and cheese receptions (IAB 15 is a goldmine, by the way...).

But what if subsistence just isn't enough for you? As freshmen will soon discover, a night away from campus does wonders for your mental health. And luckily, New York is one city where parsimony needn't keep you in. What follows are a few suggestions for how to have a good time even if you're not dropping Franklins.

First-years, Bwog summons you from your groggy Sunday morning hangover. The air is warm and crisp, the sky is blue -- perfect for an afternoon outing to Staten Island.

Well, the destination is not so romantic (Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island is home to New York's refuse), but the journey. Oh the journey. The half-hour long (free!) ride on the Staten Island Ferry is calming and gentle, you can watch the city skyline and Brooklyn's bridges shrink against the horizon, as the Statue of Liberty and sleek Verrazano Bridge come into view.

The boat is always laden with camera-clicking international tourists and Staten Island commuters -- prime territory for people watching -- and travels from the ferry terminal downtown (get off at Whitehall St. on the R train-- the 1 doesn't run to South Ferry today) to the newly renovated terminal on "the Island", as natives call it. The area immediately around the terminal at St. George may warrant exploration, but Bwog reccommends staying only until the next ferry to Manhattan arrives. Buses to other parts of Staten Island are few and infrequent, and it is not exactly a walkable borough.

Ferries run every half-hour on the weekends; check the schedule before you set out.