Day 173: World Trade Center and Times Square

After taking care of some necessary business in the morning, I took the metro all the way down to Lower Manhattan to where the World Trade Centers were located.

The World Trade Center is actually a building complex of five buildings, a memorial, and a museum -- the modern day buildings in the process of replacing the original seven buildings that collapsed during the September 11 attack. The main building we see today is technically called One World Trade Center, the others being sequentially named Two WTC, Three WTC, etc. Although Five WTC and Six WTC are not being rebuilt, one, two, three, four, and seven are.

I visited the memorial for the fallen towers and those who died in the attack. It's quite sad just being there. Water falls from all sides into the pool below, and slowly makes its way to a smaller hole in the center, where it falls down one last time. It's designed in such a way that you are unable to see the bottom of the second hole, no matter which angle you look from. On one of the sides of the smaller hole there is a somewhat obvious door for easy maintenance access, which I didn't like because I felt like it took away from the purity of the minimalist monument.

I spent some time exploring the nearby waterfront and Westfield mall before grabbing a calzone at a pizza shop and hopping on the metro elsewhere.

The white spikes belong to the modern architecture of this Westfield mall.

My destination was Columbia University. 

I wanted to see the campus and library of one of the most prestigious universities in the US, but when I got there I was in for a surprise.

Thunder and lightning!

The main campus looked beautiful, if small, but a flash downpour sent me scampering back towards the metro station.

I was intending to go directly back to the hostel, but after I emerged from the metro station during a transfer the sun had already come out again and I heard someone mention going to Times Square. I was only a few blocks away so I figured why not (more like "why not in spite of my socks being wet").

The sidewalks are, of course, inundated with tourists, but I found a space with some breathing room at the south end of the square to snap photos of the buildings from while the sun set.

After some confusion on the metro ride home with route changes during the weekend and scheduled changes for the June 30th to July 3rd period, I made it back to the hostel around 10pm. I had had a few interesting experiences on the metro that day. The first being when a flutist/beat boxer performed for us while on my way to the WTC. The second being when a clearly mentally unstable man kept raising and lowering his arms above his head on my way to Columbia, at one point telling the people sitting across from him "Ayyyy fuck you!" before remaining silent for the rest of the trip. The final experience involved another man playing a bluesy version of When the Saints Go Marching In on his harmonica on my way to Times Square.

It had been a very productive and busy day.