Image courtesy GreatModernPictures.com

Most of the Spectator staff departed last night for Aruba having published no issue for today. So, in keeping with that spirit of travel, today's QuickSpec prepares you for departure with news from the airport.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for flying with us today, particularly those of you with corporate expense accounts.

A safety card is located in the seatpocket in front of you. On it you will find evacuation instructions and a few inspirational poems from Chesley Sullenberger.

In the event of an emergency, one of our engines will drop down off the fuselage onto homes below.

Please turn off all electronics devices at this time, unless you are paying to access our private, in-flight WiFi network.

And for our travelers making connecting flights today to Atlanta, please also stow your firearms in the overhead compartment.

If you're heading home via bus this Thanksgiving weekend, make an informed choice! Here, Bwog correspondents persuade you to ride DC2NY, Bolt, VamooseBus and, in an impassioned, extended defense, Fung Wah.

VamooseBus

My experience with VamooseBus is a prime example of brand loyalty. When I first went to visit Columbia without my parents, my Columbia friend recommend VamooseBus. At the time, it was only $20, $35 for a round trip, and left from right outside my high school. It was still a fledgling service -- another high school friend and I each had a set of two seats to ourselves, and, although the Subway system proved complicated at the time, (we called the 1 Train the "red line"), Vamoose and the friendly, overweight orthodox Jews who sold the tickets, were quite easy to deal with.

As Columbians begin to trickle slowly away from Morningside Heights for the much-anticipated and well-deserved Thanksgiving Holiday, the queues at JFK, La Guardia, Penn Station, and yes even the Port Authority Bus Terminal are beginning to fill out. In typical fashion, Bwog has asked its most experienced travelers for tips on how best to brave the pre-Thanksgiving exodus that is sure to take place tomorrow afternoon. Bwog wishes everyone a safe, cheap, and relatively painless journey home. Bon voyage!

Planning on driving?

• If you're going to Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Ithaca, or anywhere that makes you pass through those places, don't be conned by your GPS into taking I80/I380/I81 out of New York: it's a guaranteed way to be stuck in traffic/construction hell. Take I87 North, then take NYS Route 17- it splits, one way going to Albany, the other going to Binghamton, where it meets up with 81 again. It'll shave a cool 45 minutes off your trip, and Route 17 is really scenic. - Really specific, but it changed my life.
• If you are crazy enough to go down I-95, at least try to leave in the early afternoon (1-2 P.M.) or else you will be caught in the Great New York Exodus.
  
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As is customary before any break, we've re-posted our peregrination pointers list in hopes that you will have the quickest, safest, cheapest, most comfortable ride home. And if you have a travel secret that doesn't appear on the list, email bwog@columbia.edu. Sharing is caring.

How to decide upon the lesser of the three evils: train, bus or car?

* "I'm going to Western Massachusetts, and booked a train two weeks ago to get there (already most days were filled up) and am booking a Greyhound bus today to get back. I figure the roads will be worse on Thursday�making Amtrak convenient�but not so bad in the middle of the day on Sunday, making the bus more flexible and economical."

* "If you live in Philly or its environs, any Chinatown bus during holiday season will be packed with everyone you went to high school with. NJ Transit, though a foul, foul beast, is a less awkward experience. I plan to take a very early (7:14) train on Thurs. morning, which will get me into 30th Street at 9:30 am. I hear Thurs. morning NJ Transit trains are pretty empty."

The joy of attending school in New York is that half of the student body has endured a subway ride with a stranger passed out and drooling on their shoulder. In the hope of avoiding unpleasant public transportation experiences, Bwog reposts its pre-break peregrination pointers ("travel tips" seems so overdone). And if you think this is a load of blithering idiocy, kindly email your travel advice to bwgossip@columbia.edu.

How to decide upon the lesser of the three evils: train, bus or car?

* "I'm going to Western Massachusetts, and booked a train two weeks ago to get there (already most days were filled up) and am booking a Greyhound bus today to get back. I figure the roads will be worse on Thursday�making Amtrak convenient�but not so bad in the middle of the day on Sunday, making the bus more flexible and economical."

The free New Jersey transit fares (with a student ID and this coupon) continue until Sunday. Take advantage and see the Jerz -- here are some suggestions, and directions, from the Bwog Staff.

Medieval Times
Lyndhurst, NJ

Catch the 192 Bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and take it to Polito Ave. Then look for the giant castle.

This olde tymeie fortress is perhaps the best-known member of the knights-and-ale theme restaurant chain that started on the Spanish island of Majorca thirty-five years ago. Watch this badical intro movie. A regular ticket is a steep $55, but groups larger than fifteen get a sizable discount, and admission includes a two-hour show, a hearty, utensil free meal, and flagons of mead straight from the serving wench's pitcher.

As campus is slowly emptying out for Thanksgiving, Penn Station and JFK are filling up. Bwog has asked some experienced travelers for advice on having a safe, cheap and relatively painless journey home. Bon voyage!

How to decide upon the lesser of the three evils: train, bus or car?

• "I'm going to Western Massachusetts, and booked a train two weeks ago to get there (already most days were filled up) and am booking a Greyhound bus today to get back. I figure the roads will be worse on Thursday—making Amtrak convenient—but not so bad in the middle of the day on Sunday, making the bus more flexible and economical."
• "If you live in Philly or its environs, any Chinatown bus during holiday season will be packed with everyone you went to high school with. NJ Transit, though a foul, foul beast, is a less awkward experience. I plan to take a very early (7:14) train on Thurs. morning, which will get me into 30th Street at 9:30 am. I hear Thurs. morning NJ Transit trains are pretty empty."
• "If your parents are visiting tell them to avoid the LIE at all costs."
• "Penn Station is a ghost town past 1:30 in the morning."
• "Triboro Bridge to Columbia all the way. And the secret best route to all points north (holidays only) is to take 155th St to the Harlem River Drive to the GW Bridge to the Palisades Parkway. Even to Connecticut. Even to Iceland."

So you've chosen to ride the bus:

• "If you're taking a bus, get a bus that leaves from Penn Station rather than Chinatown, you save a lot of time in transit on the Subway."
  
• "I typically go to my uncle's farmhouse outside of Hagerstown, Pennsylvania; it always takes a ride on Beiber Bus, which leaves from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in a stink, invariably. It would probably be intelligent to bring potourri or patchouli along with, just in case. Or, if you don't have to go to small-town Pennsylvania, to take Fung Wah for better-smelling buses. Additionally, one must make a point of purchasing tickets at the counter, rather than at the electronic machine: Nobody can explain it, but there are no monitors showing bus departure gates at the PABT. Only the ticket ladies know; that is how they maintain their power."
• "The secret of taking Chinatown buses is that the ones that leave from Flushing [and 8th Avenue in Brooklyn] are less crowded (and harder to plan)."
• "The secret of the Port Authority is that while the bathrooms claim that there are 'Plainclothes cops on duty', after 8 PM it's strictly crack addicts. The real secret of the Port Authority is that the pizza place on the mezzanine level has garlic knots and free ice water."
  
• "Fung Wah = death."
  
  
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Bwog went far and wide this fall break. From Paris to New Jersey to Bear Mountain to Brooklyn... well it was only four days, but Bwog made the most of it.

Five weeks ago, you were taking your first midterm examinations; I was shopping for classes. This Monday and Tuesday, you were taking a break; my peers and I, in London, were enjoying the first half of 'Reading Week,' a much needed break situated smack in the middle of a ten-week term.

One thing to do during Reading Week is to take the Eurostar to Paris. The Eurostar is like the Acela, only fast; when the Eurostar hits a big bump in the track, it wallows like a drunken hippopotamus for at least half a minute, which is soothing and terrifying at the same time. France is all about terror, and classiness, two things that Americans are awed by. For your benefit, I went to Paris and observed a few of the ways French people are classy:

One, nuclear power makes it cheap to heat the wintry outdoors with glow lamps. Parisians like their sidewalk cafes, and these are available despite the season.

Two, the Paris Metro (or subway) closes early, but nights out begin after one in the morning; fortunately it is possible to 'rent' bicycles with something like a Metrocard. Shortly before dawn you can see drunken Frenchmen weaving their separate ways home on borrowed bikes. No word on whether cyclists, like motorists, get 'controlled' by the police.

Three, the issues in Paris currently revolve around Sarkozy being a jerk, and the unfortunate upcoming ban on indoor smoking. These issues are handled by drinking copious amounts of wine until (at least) ten in the evening and smoking lots of cigarettes to imbue every wall and jacket with the glorious memory and smell of smoke.

When enough classiness had been observed, I returned to London to see Vampire Weekend open for the Shins. I am proud to report that, due to incompetence on the part of the Shins' sound engineers, and to the superiority of Columbia University education, Vampire Weekend played a better set than the Shins. You should have been there.

-John Klopfer

Bwog wishes everyone a very merry fall break!

Two Bwoggers report on a disturbing journey to the center of the mind...

Our reasons for doing Salvia had as much to do with irony as they did with recreation. Free of associations with the 1960s counterculture, the perfectly legal psychoactive escaped the social retrenchment our nation experienced during the 70s and 80s. So while Salvia gets you high on one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man, it also gets you high on contradiction: going by our current standards (you know, the ones that don't let you drink 'til you're 21), there is no conceivable justification for keeping this stuff legal. None. It's like hypocrisy you can smoke.

I, however, was a bit confused when my co-experimentalist first floated the idea. A visit to Wikipedia turned up the following information (here I paraphrase):

Salvia divinorum is a naturally occurring herb related to mint and capable of producing strong psychoactive effects for a short amount of time when smoked and inhaled. Its twenty-minute trip has characteristics of both weed and stronger drugs, like shrooms. Salvia's Latin name means "sage of the seers"; the word salvia is related to salve, used by the ancient Romans to mean "hello," "be well," and possibly ""care for a smoke?."

After digesting this new knowledge, I thought for a few seconds, reveled in the narcissism of enlightened drug use, and replied: "Sure, why the hell not?" After all, I was in need of a psychoactively novel experience, and I didn't see myself making it down to the Navajo Nation any time in the near future. So a few weeks later he and I, after pushing through throngs of hipsters and goths on St. Mark's Place and purchasing our wares in a seedy yet comforting headshop (Addiction NYC, for the curious), found ourselves loading surprisingly odorless, fine brown leaves into a knobby and voluminous bubbler.

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.