A big win for mass transit

CNN.com has listed the "winners" and the "losers" in the new stimulus package about to be signed by President Obama and mass transit has definitely come ahead as a winner! America is this much closer to having a modern transportation grid, which is much appreciated by all of us out there who do not own cars.

Question: does any of the money go to projects already being planned for Detroit, such as the Woodward Light-Rail, the Ann Arbor-Detroit commuter line, or the proposed rail connection from Downtown to the Detroit-Metropolitan airport? I would hope so. These things would be invaluable for the city and the region.

So, thank you politicians for finally doing something right. I have no idea what the rest of that stimulus package will actually accomplish, but at least this part of it is a step in the right direction.

A Good Afternoon for Mendelssohn

Went to see a (free) concert here on campus at the Schaver Music Recital Hall (pictured), on this warm and almost Spring-like Sunday afternoon. It was a very interesting (and by interesting I mean diverse) group of performers. The pianist was a Taiwanese woman, one violinist was a mainland PRC Chinese man, the other violinist was Romanian, and the cellist was (here is the shocking one) American.

Great performance! I especially enjoyed watching the pianist. She had the most pleasant smile on her face most of the time when she was playing, and when she wasn't smiling she looked like she was wanting to. It is easy to forget sometimes being a music student that music can be fun. I'll try to smile more this week while practicing piano and see if it helps any. (Doubtful.)

While the highlight of the recital was of course the Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, I think the most memorable part for me will be the three Chinese (or maybe Taiwanese) folk songs that they played at the beginning of the recital. Light, fun, and enjoyable. Too bad though that there wasn't an Erhu!

(Picture from the Wayne State University School of Music website)

Most Walkable

http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/Detroit

I found this website that ranks the "walkability" of different cities, and even neighborhoods within cities. Detroit taken as a whole scored quite poorly (52 out of 100...Ann Arbor received a 91, Toronto a 97), but Midtown itself scored a respectable 86. Downtown received the highest rating of 89, followed by New Center with 88.

The website admits though that they have yet to make crime data have an influence on the score. Hmm....

Best second language for Midtown is...

Forget Spanish. Polish and Arabic are for Hamtramck and Dearborn. If you need to know just one second-language in Detroit's University/Cultural Center/Midtown area, it is Mandarin Chinese. Due to Wayne State being a research university, the area attracts a lot of international PhD students (and often they bring their families with them).

I checked the statistics on City Data for the two zip codes that the Cultural Center is in. In zip code 48201, the percentage of foreign-born residents that are from Mainland China are 14%. In 48202, it is double: 28%.

My neighbors are Chinese and love that I say 你好！to them and can comment on the weather to them in Mandarin. Just this weekend actually I helped a Chinese couple at the bus stop figure out which bus they needed to take. (Detroit bus stops are horribly marked and the only reliable way to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B is to use Google Maps Mass Transit directions, but that is a rant for another day...)

So drop that silly French class. Take Chinese instead!

Happy New Year! 新年快乐！

Did I die and go to Toronto?

Wow. I had a cool experience yesterday that doesn't happen very often.

I was on the Detroit People Mover yesterday and there were people riding it! Usually when my friend and I take it from Grand Circus Park to the Ren Cen (we love to go see movies at the Riverfront 4 theaters) there are usually only a few other people, or quite often we are the only ones on it.

I assume it was because of the North American International Auto Show, but there were TONS of people on the DPM yesterday. It was awesome! There were no seats and we were all standing and being pressed against the walls!

It was glorious.

The best part was seeing all these Suburbians staring out the windows in amazement at the downtown area. They were commenting on restaurants they saw and on the architecture. It was as if most of these people were seeing Detroit for the first time in a long while. Very cool.

A Bad Year for Tomatoes

In my fourth semester at Wayne State, I finally got around to seeing a student theater production. Being a music major, I think of the theater, dance, and art majors as being somewhat like cousins in the big family that is the Fine and Performing Arts college. (On a side note, it is actually called the College of Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts, but we have no idea who those "communication" people are or if they even exist.)

I saw "A Bad Year for Tomatoes" at the Studio theater in the Hilberry. At first when I heard that the studio theater was actually in the basement of the Hilberry, I thought something shifty was going on, but it turned out to be a wonderfully small and intimate performing space that reminded me of The Ark in A2.

The show was hilarious. Who doesn't love someone dressing up as a crazy alter-ego with scissors who wants to chop people's ears off? Brilliant. As great as the lead actress was, the show was completely stolen by "Piney" who was a man of few words, but had a big axe and a lot of nuts he was trying to crack. Hilarity ensued.

It looks like they'll be having another studio theater production in a few months about a nun with Tourettes syndrome. Can't wait...

(Image from Wayne State's The South End News)