Eating Ann Arbor, Part 1

Without a meal plan for the first time in four years, most weeks I fend for myself for twenty out of twenty-one meals. Meal number twenty-one is usually a shared meal after church. About once every other week, though, I’ve eaten out at one of the numerous restaurants in Ann Arbor. Similar to Ithaca, you can get a wide variety of cuisines in Ann Arbor, ranging in quality from late night drunk food to unaffordable on my stipend. The following is my rating¹ for every restaurant I’ve eaten at so far. Keep in mind that I’ll eat almost anything, I’ve probably had a sandwich for lunch for about 170 of my 180 days in Ann Arbor so far, and I don’t mind eating the same thing for dinner for a week straight.­ I also tend to rate everything starting at a 3 and move up or down as necessary.

1. Bewon (Korean) – After (yet another) homework session, a couple friends and I went out for dinner to celebrate Chinese New Year. I had the bibimbap, which was served with warm (purple) rice and mostly cold vegetables, including cucumber, bean sprouts, carrots, and spinach. The overall portion was large, but it was a little short on meat (beef) and it got cold by the time I finished. Still, it was good, and the rating gets increased a bit because they served us a variety of sides and tea that had taste.
Rating: 3.5/5

2. Cardamom (Indian) – For whatever reason, Ithaca has at least three Indian buffet places, two of them next to each other, and I’ve eaten at all three. At Cardamom, there wasn’t a buffet, but I enjoyed my meal there nonetheless. It’s pretty standard Indian food. They do have a naan that’s filled with nuts and other things that was really good.
Rating: 3.5/5

3. Evergreen (Chinese) – I’ve been to this restaurant twice. The first time we went for a quick meal and ordered off the lunch special menu, which was like every other Chinese lunch special menu ever.² The second time I went with a larger group of people and we ordered family style. Surprisingly, the food was not drowning in sauce, salt, or oil, and we left satisfied with the quality, quantity, and cost of the food. They also have the honor of making the first eggplant dish that I’ve liked.
Rating: 3/5 (lunch special menu), 4/5 (traditional menu)

4. Frita Batidos (Cuban) – Be forewarned this is not where you go if you want a light meal. That said, the frita part of the name comes from Cuban-inspired burgers made from chorizo. The batido is a milkshake . . . and you can add rum to it. So we did. We had a passion fruit milkshake with rum, then for dessert we got churros. It’s something different from standard pasta/burgers/sandwiches, and worth trying at least once. (By the way, Google Translate tells me the name together means “fried batter.” Like I said, not light fare.)
Rating: 4/5 (because alcoholic milkshakes and churros)

5. Kang’s (Korean) – Basic Korean restaurant, decent food. I ordered the spicy beef and it could have come with more vegetables, but otherwise the taste was fine. This is probably the only place on this half of the list I wouldn’t go to if I wanted a nicer dinner, and it’s starting to push the top of my price range for lunch, but it’s another option for Asian food.
Rating: 2.5/5

6. Madras Marsala (Indian) – Another Indian restaurant. I had the chicken biryani, which I might have ordered a little spicier than I should have. I know authentic biryani involves over a dozen spices (meanwhile, the entirety of my spice rack (okay, it’s a box) in my apartment is eight spices, and that number includes salt and pepper), but it turned out over-flavored. It would have been okay if I’d been eating it with other dishes, but by itself it was a bit much.
Rating: 3/5

7. Neopapalis (pizza) – Average pizza place with the option to choose your own toppings or order pre-set pizzas. The pizza we ordered was a bit oily but tasty. (Cornell dining makes surprisingly good pizza, precisely because it tends to be on the drier side, though they sometimes solve their “crap, these vegetables need to be used up” problems with the pizzas. And giant bins of shredded carrots in the salad bar. And carrot cake, heavy on the carrots.)
Rating: 3/5

¹My ratings can be described as follows:
0 – Don’t eat here unless someone pays you a significant fraction of your annual income.
1 – If it was free, it would still be a toss up whether I ate it or not.
2 – Food is edible, but I wouldn’t choose to eat here if there were better options.
3 – Solid choice, would voluntarily go back.
4 – Very good food, would definitely recommend to other people.
5 – Best meal of any given month.

²My cooking goal is to be able to make subpar knock-off versions of any dish you’d find on a Chinese lunch special menu. So far I’ve made orange chicken, teriyaki chicken with pineapple, General Tso’s chicken, kung pao chicken, and beef and broccoli. And also tacos, but those aren’t Chinese unless you add soy sauce. I basically make the same sauce base for every single one of these dishes and add one or two different ingredients.

The Wright Brothers’ Flying House

File this one under things you can do when you’re rich: buy famous people’s houses, dismantle them, and cart them off to Dearborn, Michigan, to be reassembled as part of an outdoor museum full of famous people’s houses, which is complemented by an indoor museum full of planes, trains, and automobiles. This is, of course, exactly what Henry Ford did with some of his prodigious wealth, opening what is now known as the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village. I visited with my family during the week I moved to Ann Arbor with my carload of books and dishes, Hezekiah, and my bike.

We started outside with Greenfield Village and saw a sawmill, weaving, a printing shop, a tinsmith, and a pottery shop. At the tin shop, we saw a cookie cutter being made, at the weaving shop there were workers operating the hand looms, and at the printer’s, there was the opportunity to operate the printing press. This part was similar to Sturbridge Village or Plimoth Plantation, both perennial field trip destinations for New England schoolchildren. Next, we moved to the Main Street area, which contains the majority of the transported buildings. Here we saw a millinery, a jewelry store, the Wright brothers’ workshop and house, and the post office, among other anachronistically placed structures. You can send actual postcards from the post office that have their own special postmark.

One of the mills

Later in the day, we ended our evening back in Greenfield Village walking through various homes. Regretfully, we didn’t have enough time to spend time admiring every building, but it was a unique experience. I mean, how else would you ever be able to walk from Thomas Edison’s grandparents’ house to the courthouse where Lincoln once tried cases in fifteen minutes? Overall, I found that the historical presenters were willing and happy to answer any questions, which was a welcome change from art museum docents/security whose main job seems to be yelling at people for using flash photography/taking any pictures at all/getting too near to the art/scaring the paintings by breathing too loudly.

We spent the middle part of the day indoors in the Henry Ford Museum looking at dozens of cars, trains, and any other thing Henry Ford thought would be cool to put in a museum. Highlights include a snowplow train, an(other) entire house, the bus Rosa Parks rode, and a tomato harvester. The house is the Dymaxion house, designed by R. Buckminster Fuller as a cost-effective house of the future. He designed the house to be easily transported and assembled and to be resource-efficient, but the idea never caught on. Fuller has ties to another museum I’ve been to – the Biosphere in Montreal. The building is surrounded by a geodesic dome of which Fuller was the architect. Inside, the museum focuses on the environment, and if they haven’t changed it too much since I went, it’s worth a visit.

A neon Holiday Inn sign.  Because why wouldn't you think
"I should buy this," when you see one?

Two more things you can do at the museum: eat and watch films. We had lunch at the café inside the museum. The prices are pretty reasonable, especially for museum food. It’s not cheap, but the portions are decent and the food’s good. Lastly, they show documentary-type films throughout the day. We saw one on national parks, which we mainly just watched to see scenic shots of nature, and one on transportation, focusing on planes. There were some interesting points in that one, about globalization, and just how quickly things can move now. That movie was the last thing we did at the museum; we returned to Ann Arbor after that for dinner. It was a very long, full, and varied day that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I would highly recommend the Ford Museum.

To conclude, if you’re ever in the southeastern corner of Michigan, pay the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village a visit. You can easily spend a couple days wandering around, because you really can’t go wrong when the theme of the museum is “cool stuff Henry Ford decided he should buy and haul to Dearborn.”

Five More Years at Forty-Two Degrees North

Better title: Hopefully Five More Years at Forty-Two Degrees North, because less than five years means I got kicked out of my program, and more than five years means I still don’t have my degree. That covers the five years part. As for the forty-two degrees north, after growing up shoveling snow off an abnormally long driveway and catching the bus at six dark thirty in the morning, spending four years at Cornell being rained, snowed, sleeted, and hailed on – with exactly zero weather-related class cancellations – I decided I didn’t have enough of the northern United States’s climate and chose to attend the University of Michigan. I also thought long and hard about the hours of pain and suffering inflicted by four years of ChemE problem sets, classes, and research, and opted for five more years of it to get my PhD in Chemical Engineering.

All of which is to say that I’m currently in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan working towards my PhD in Chemical Engineering, a process that takes an average of five years, and the weather is just as wonderful as in Ithaca.

My new clock tower (with carillon, not chimes) and engineering quad

How I came to this point is one of those stories. Like the story of the time I tried to fly out of Ithaca or the story of everything that happened at Lick Brook Falls. This story starts all the way back during my sophomore year at Cornell. After complaining about everything fluids related for four months, I spent one summer working on a fluids demo project, TA’d the class, spent another summer doing fluids-related research, then applied to grad school. My research group at Michigan studies surfactant solutions and does molecular dynamics simulations, among other things, so . . . more fluid mechanics-type topics.

I applied to six schools spread out across the United States and was rejected by four of them, including all three of the schools with significantly warmer temperatures. As a side note, my home, Cornell, and the University of Michigan rank among the coldest, windiest, and snowiest places in the United States. My only other option besides Michigan was Carnegie Mellon (CMU), which is slightly less frigid, but cold and snowy nonetheless.

I visited CMU and Michigan on consecutive weekends, and had a good time at both schools, besides that whole flying out of Ithaca thing on the way to CMU. The grad students were on their best behavior, we were shown the best of Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor, and there was as much alcohol as we wanted. [A word of caution: I heard that at one of my visits, a prospective student drank and behaved badly enough that the grad students recommended the school rescind their offer of admission.] But back to my decision. I liked the ChemE programs at both schools, but as much as CMU tried to convince us their school wasn’t right in the city, it was right in the city. The University of Michigan is also classified as an urban school, but to a much lesser extent than CMU, so when April and decision day rolled around, I officially accepted Michigan’s admission offer and four months later, reported to Ann Arbor.

Michigan is about twice the size of Cornell, both in terms of campus area and students, though the graduate ChemE program is less than half the size of my undergrad program. They have a bus system similar to Ithaca’s that I’ve already taken full advantage of and lots of local restaurants. What they don’t have is Wegmans, hiking trails within walking/biking/bussing distance, and an on-campus rock wall, but they do have a community band, a nice public library, and my desk in the group’s basement office has a window next to it. Hey, sometimes it’s the little things.

My new ChemE building (the complex houses other departments,
including some of the medical school)

I survived my first semester of classes – Cornell ChemE prepared me very well for grad school – and started my second. Now I just have to make it through four and a half more years of exams, research, and publications, and then hopefully they’ll give me my degree.