From there I headed downtown to the 9/11 Memorial. September 11, 2001, though I have no actual attachment to NYC, was a very emotional day for me. It was a period in time where I was seriously considering moving because I was really unhappy with events transpiring in Norman. I remember when the attacks happened one of my friends freaking out because I had so seriously been talking about moving. Though I didn’t know anyone it felt extremely personal to me. In anticipation of seeing the memorial I seriously was choking back tears the whole way down and while I was picking up my visitor pass (which you have to reserve ahead of time).
On the way to pick up my pass I found Occupy Wall Street:
They were still pretty riled up, however they had been evicted at 1:00 am, so the park was clear, though there were TONS of NYPD floating around.
On my walk to the memorial I ended up behind some Kansas fans in town for a basketball game (because we know they don’t care about football!)
Then came the nice, long, Six Flags line to get in. There is a ton of construction going on around the WTC, including the building of One WTC, which will take the place of the Twin Towers.
I found this pretty funny:
It says what is not allowed and one is “demonstrations of any kind.” With all the hoopla around the corner I found that pretty funny, even though my picture got cut off.
When you entered the memorial there are two pools, the north and south.
The names are adjacent to one another based on relationship, whether family or where they were. You can look up the names on a kiosk and print off maps. Since I didn’t actually know anyone I used the little girl from Flight 77:
When I went to the north pool there was a family doing a rubbing of a name.
I was really surprised at the peace that I felt while in the memorial. I really expected to be in tears the entire time, but that was not how I felt at all. Peace is the best way to describe it. If that’s what they were aiming for then they certainly did a great job.
Eventually there will be a museum on site.
For the time being there is a small museum around the corner. Seeing all the artifacts from the attacks nearly brought me to tears, but probably none more that this:
It is always interesting to put names and faces together. To see the people that were lost during this attack. To see the wall of their smiling faces; graduation pictures, wedding photos, snapshots of them with their kids. It was quite overwhelming.
I spent quite awhile at both of these, but knew that I had theatre tickets for that evening and wanted to make it back to the apartment in time to chat with Whitney, so the memorial and museum was all I did on Tuesday.
I did however manage to get lost downtown. I always get lost in downtown. The worst part was that my trusty phone, with Google maps, was on its last legs. I did a quick search of which trains to take and tried to take a picture of it with my camera. That was worthless, so I jotted the directions down.
While trying to find the subway station (I swear they hide sometimes) I managed to end up IN Occupy Wall Street. Yeah that wasn’t so much fun. I was afraid I would get in the middle of something I didn’t really want to be in the middle of (however I apparently have a “thing” for NYPD because there were several I would have taken home with me, I think it’s the hat).
Finally I found where I needed to be and made the trek back to the Upper East Side.
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