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I was in Stamford, CT the next day which is where my mom and dad live. Checking email and glad to have a meesage fom my friend Danny Kalanduyan. Danny lives in San Francisco and is a master of the kulintang, an instrument and musical style of pre-Spanish Mindanao (Philippines). Coincidentally, Danny was in New York to lead performances of his Palubinyan Ensemble in New York and New Jersey. For the New Jersey concert, Palubiniyan was sharing the bill with yet another West African group, the Ensemble Koteba d'Abidjan (Cote d'Ivoire). Why travel when you can simply visit The City and have the world come to you? The following day, I was back in the city again. Evelyn and I had some time to wander around the area known as Hell's Kitchen. We had by now adopted the traveller's mindset. We were curious about everything and purely observing.

What a great neighborhood. Residents from all over the world as represented by restaurants and markets specializing in fare from Cuba to Israel to Bangladesh. Middle Eastern spices, Senegalese dried fish, Hindi videos, betel nut concoctions, African newspapers. Greek and Turkish restaurants appropriately side by side. "Tel Aviv" shabbat candles from the American Candle Corporation (Made in China). I bought an issue of the African Sun Times. The headline read "Niger Coup: Bloody Murder; Where Next?". On April 9th, Ibrahim Bare Mainasarra, the president of Niger was assassinated by his own bodyguards. The newspaper editorialized that "given the antecedents of what had earlier happened in Niger, it is quite difficult to find a common ground on which to condemn or not condemn the assassination of President Mainassarra." I thought about what a crazy place the world is. Why travel when the world is so crazy and it's safer to stay home. We returned to Stamford and turned on the TV in anticpation of viewing our video footage from that morning's wanderings in Hell's Kitchen. We were greeted by live camera feeds from Littleton, CO. Gun and bomb toting students at a suburban high school were holed up inside while SWAT teams moved into position. Eighteen students had already been shot. The final tally would be 15 dead. Why not travel.