First Day Off.

Today was our first day off since class started. Sadly on weekends the dining hall is closed so Ms. L gave us some spending money for meals. We were planning on meeting Ms. L at NYU, so we bought a quick breakfast across the street from Columbia. After Margaret and I worked together to navigate the complicated New York subway system we headed to the park in the middle of the NYU campus. It was a lovely park with families and food carts, there was a big fountain in the middle and lots of people tanning. It seemed like a nice place to study or just relax if you did go to NYU.

Washington Square is a lively and lovely place to be!

The first thing that made a big impression on me about NYU was that it did not really have a defined campus. Sure, some of the buildings had small NYU flags hanging from them, but the campus as a whole was blended together with the city of New York. This is very different from all the other campuses we have visited, which all had large entrance gates and clearly defined campuses. To me this is honestly a little bit of a negative, I like having a defined space to call my home, and New York City is most certainly not a "defined space". After an hour long information session that went over all the same things every other information session goes over we went on a tour.

The tour was actually very fun. The tour guide told all sorts of funny jokes and even made references to both Arrested Development and Friends (my two favorite TV shows). What I really liked about NYU were the dorms. There are about 8 dining halls all over the campus, and one of them has the only Chick Fil A in New York. Dorms are all in high-rise buildings, and each room has its very own bathroom. This is a major plus for me. What also interested me was the Law and Society minor, a subject which deeply interests me. NYU is certainly a very different feeling campus and school from the other four places we have visited, and I think I will need to take a long time to decide if it would be a good fit for me.

After visiting NYU we took yet another subway to the 9/11 memorial. The first thing that can be seen when stepping out of the subway station are the tall new glass towers being built as the new World Trade Center. The sky reflected beautifully off the buildings and I took some incredible photographs. After a series of checkpoints we made it into the actual memorial. What struck me first was the sheer number of people that were there, all crowded around the memorial fountains. As I made my way around the memorials, I routinely saw people smiling and posing for portraits, talking loudly on their phones, and all trying to swarm the one name with a flower on it. Honestly (and sadly) the place did not feel like a real memorial, it felt more like a tourist attraction. After visiting the memorial we walked past the firehouse where almost every firefighter was killed trying to save people from the two buildings. A bronze mural on the wall memorializes them, but it is on the sidewalk so people are rushing past it, ignoring it,  and are selling water near it. Maybe because in working with the police (who take 9/11 very seriously and always wear a black bar on their badges during the month of September) I found peoples behavior in this area to be quite offensive. The sheer rudeness and disrespect that people had towards the thousands of people who died on 9/11 was certainly unexpected. While I was there I was comparing it to the feeling at the Vietnam and Korea memorials in Washington DC. At these two memorials there is very little talking, and people are taking photos respectfully. 

Despite people's rudeness, the memorial was still emotional.

People swarming the memorial.

At 5 PM we returned home to Columbia via subway and collapsed in our dorms. Today was a busy day with lots of walking and standing. I am excited to get some rest and go out for dinner tonight!