Noo Yawk

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So it begins. Leaving home. My routine. My life. For seven months.

After a last night at home relaxing with friends, I became ever so slightly panicked at my plan - and just what the hell I thought I was doing! I knew I should have had that beer...

Anyway, all is going smoothly after a cup of tea with my nan, and my Dad dropping me off at the airport - until a BA flight touches down too early and beaches itself just short of the runway. Bad weather on top of that ensures that we leave England a good three hours late.

An emotional drunkeness overtakes me, and for all that I've come to dislike about home, I was really going to miss it. Eventually. Ultimately, I'm a very proud Englishman.

With the minimum of fuss, we reach NYC and the queue for immigration. After that I'm vaguely unconscious with tiredness, and reach my hostel where I'm past the stage of polite conversation. Alas, the visit preceeding mine was that of a sweaty feet convention, and some 2 days of window opening fails to freshen the room in the least. One, or perhaps, maybe the key reason I didn't spend longer in the Big Apple.

The next day, gasping for air I make it out of my room early and begin pounding the streets. Downtown. Criss-crossing 5th, 6th and 7th Avenues all the way. Breakfast is taken within sight of the Empire State Building, where I seem to impress with my politeness. Probably less so when I leave no tip. Greenwich Village arouses no interest, although I don't look very hard. This is even more true of SoHo and many other of the central areas. My interest overall was generally starting to wane.

One of the main places I had wanted to visit was the site of the WTC. Currently an enormous building site, a small memorial (more to follow in the blueprints) just touches on the little pocket of immense hell that opened up on that day in New York. In some places it is possible to see into the site, the foundations are like a crater, which in the days following were filled with crevasses in between the tangles mess of bodyparts, brickdust, razor sharp twisted metal and entirely flattened cross-sections of the buildings - now just ghosts on the Manhattan skyline.

Like a lot of people must have done, thinking back to that day is something I do afirly often. Though, maybe I didn't realise 'till today looking at the names of those who died, what a mistake Al Qaeda had made in attacking one of the world's greatest cities -one where millions had set their first footsteps in America - having left absolutely everything behind them in the Old World. There were not many 'American' names on that list. Certainly not the kinds that Al Qaeda would have intended upon anyway. It just goes to show the danger that is posed by idiocy and complete stupidity prevalent in small minds across the world.

That fresh in my mind, I amble down to Battery Park - visiting the Statue of Liberty - and the almost infinitely more interesting Ellis Island. I spend a couple of hours wandering the wrong way round - avoiding the crowds - and trying to get a handle on the place again. It is undeniably fascinating.

For me at least, there really was a very clinical, almost Auschwitz like efficency about the place in it's heydey. The stories told there really stir up so much emotion in me. It's bewildering to think of these people leaving everything they've ever known behind - some illiterate - some who had never even held a pencil - waiting with thousands of others like them - and not - to get the nod, to enter into the New World. Skyscrapers. The City. The Statue of Liberty. I can only marvel with a strange smile at the feelings they must have felt in those days when America first flung open her doors too all-comers. Taking their first steps together.

My favourite, heart warming part of the day follows by way of a quote from a Polish immigrant at the start of the 20th Century.

"They asked us two questions, "How much is two and one? How much is two and two?" But the next young girl also from our city, went and they asked her, "How do you wash stairs, from the top of from the bottom?" She says, "I don't go to America to wash stairs.""

Superb 😊

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