This morning **cough-afternoon-cough**, Rachel and I treated ourselves to starbucks and pedicures. While walking through Manhattan, we found a couple interesting statues. We also walked inside a hushed Episcopalian Church built in the late 1700s.
Then we made our way to Ground Zero. The last time I had seen that area was September 11, 2001 while watching it happen on the news. Other than hearing that it's still under construction is about the last time I had heard about it, too. I just finished reading a Karen Kingsbury book where parts take place at Ground Zero, but it still didn't create an impression in my mind. Years after the tragic event happened, I was finally able to get a sense of what it would feel like to be one of the people standing at the intersection of Trinity Place and Liberty Street. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be standing on the hard pavement surrounded by the normal commotion of business workers, vendors, and honking taxis and actually witness the horrific episode. Although, I had never seen the massive twin towers before they fell, I could see the blank space where they didn't fill up the sky as they once had.
Walking closer, we observed the memorial wall where people had laid things like flowers, bracelets, and letters in memory of the firefighters. Another wall had the names of people who had been in the buildings. A man, selling a booklet of pictures, pointed to a skinny black building and told us that the World Trade Center had been three times the height. I couldn't imagine the trapped people making the decision to jump to their deaths from any height, but especially not that high.
Rachel and I enjoyed dinner at a tasty Italian restaurant, Puttanesca. The New York Sauna a.k.a. the subway and walking everywhere seemed to be overly tiring today. We stocked up on candy, came back to the apartment, and planned an evening in front of the fan and "Friends".
