Today I lay in bed while everyone else got ready around me, they were all going to some car show which I had zero interest in.
Once they left, I got up, took a shower and attempted to skype my mum. She wasn’t on skype though, so ended up texting her a bit.
When I was finally ready, I left the hotel and ventured down Fifth Avenue, until I reached Madison Square Park, where I sat for a bit, taking some photos. I then crossed the street and took some photos of the Flatiron building.
Stuart had talked about a mural of a GTA5 poster on the side of a building, I looked at my map and it was only two blocks over from where I was (and south), so I decided to go that way.
It wasn’t nearly as big as I thought it was, but I took a picture anyway and carried on. Walking through the west village. I stopped at another park, where a guy was playing piano. Also while there, I swear I heard a fire engine go “nee-naw nee-naw”.
I continued walking, eventually ending up in Battery Park City. There, I saw a weird, out-of-place mound, with a path leading up it, covered in heather and stuff. Confused, I walked around, looking for an entry. There were quotes on the wall, but nothing to say what it was.
There was an entry point at the back, I went inside and saw a box of leaflets. ‘Irish Famine Memorial’. I walked up the meandering path and saw, for the first time, the Statue of Liberty.
I walked down the esplanade a bit before taking a seat looking out over the Hudson. From there, I heard snippets of conversations, from runners going past.
One guy announced, to his running friend, that he and his girlfriend had got engaged. His mate seemed genuinely pleased.
Another running pair had one guy telling the other that “A famine is where there’s no food and everyone dies.” – while true, I fear for a world where people who look to be in their thirties don’t already know that.
It was, I thought, getting close to the time I was due to meet everyone, so I went to see if I could find a starbucks to get wifi, to see of they had WhatsApp’d me. While on the look out, I passed the Ground Zero memorial site. The queue was huge, we had planned on doing it, but I really didn’t think it’d happen.
I found wifi, then also got a text from Hannah. They were pretty much done, but would still be another 30mins or so.
I went up some steps for what I thought was just an overpass, but it turned out to be an entrance into One World Financial Center. In there, I found a starbucks, got myself a drink and a egg sandwich and sat down. There, I ended up in a skype phonecall with Debbie.
After a while, I headed back out onto the esplanade, where I walked south. I sat down and got Mother text from Hannah. They were on their way, where was I?
Things got a bit confusing, but I found them all in the end and we walked up to the WTC memorial again. The queue was a lot smaller the it had been, but it was still huge. We decided to just hit up the museum.
At the museum though, they asked if we wanted passes for the memorial – it’s free, but they have passes for crowd control. We said yes and did the museum (hello nosebleed) and then went back across the road for the actual memorial.
It’s a really nice area, I just hope that once everything is built, they open it up properly. Even reading the names of the dead, it was still really hard to link the park with two fountains to everything that happened on 9/11.
From there, we went to Wall Street, then got a subway back to the hotel for a bit, before going to Hooter for food, we had lost Acloud to a sore head„ so it was just the seven of us.
After Hooter, we walked down a few blocks and saw Jurassic Park in IMAX 3D. Worth every one of the twenty dollars.
Tired, but happy, we walked back to the hotel for the night..