But Farber's lab was listless and empty, a bare warren of chemicals and glass jars connected to the main hospital through a series of icy corridors.
At the Delano, Ian Schrager's oceanfront hotel, the icy chic of the corridors is undisturbed by human visitation: the long white marble sushi bar is empty.
For three hours, we are force-marched through icy, virtually pitch-black corridors, barked at (by canine and human alike), humiliated, interrogated, forced to sign false confessions to imagined crimes, shown propaganda, and taught to prepare for a nuclear attack by the imperialist pigs.
Moreover, large cities tend to create their own micro-climates and this can be disconcerting at first, until you learn to cope with additional heat from so much concrete, extra humidity, icy sidewalks or windy corridors caused by tall buildings and grid streets.
The arrival of Pisa tests sent an icy draught through these insulated corridors.
But last Tuesday, as I was wandering through those icy high-tech halls and corridors looking for the last flight out of Thailand to Tokyo, I couldn't help being amazed that there wasn't a cop or a soldier in sight.
The rules that apply to the rest of Afghanistan are often irrelevant in the Wakhan Corridor, a frigid, finger-shaped stretch of land squeezed between Tajikistan, Pakistan and China that is cut off from the Afghan heartland by the icy ramparts of the Hindu Kush.
Taken together, these data paint a detailed picture of the ecology of the corridor as it transitioned from icy wasteland to fertile forest.
The rising temperatures come after a freezing weekend that has seen a "corridor of snow" stretch down the UK, leaving icy roads and huge waves.
This wide-eyed, come-to-the-toilet-with-me friend took your wrist with her icy grip and conspiratorially led you away from your male friends into the toilet corridor.
