new york, new york

i spent last night in manhattan, visiting (with karl and david, on david's last weekend in the states) jan and new york. jan and her bf jon and the three of us wandered around the city all day, through central park (a lovely day for it), by the macy's christmas windows (the theme this year is the macy's thanksgiving day parade), then down to the financial district.

it felt funny, kind of wrong, to want to go see the ruins of the twin towers. it's not a tourist destination. jan put me a bit at ease by noting that it's a memorial of sorts, now, and by visiting we weren't necessarily gawking, but paying our respects. also, that part of the city especially needs business. so anything one buys down there, even if it's only a soda, helps out the neighborhood. we could only get about 3 blocks away from the wreckage before it wasn't worth it to try to plow through the crowds. i don't know how close the closest people were. but from 3 blocks off, you can see quite a bit. it was dark when we were there, and the ruins were lit with floodlights. it looked fake; the floodlights and the grey coating of dust over all of it made it look unreal. there's still about 9 stories or so of part of the outside wall of one of the towers standing. there's a blank in the sky where the buildings should have been. and it smells. it smells like concrete dust and burnt steel. it's chokingly acrid. it's heartwrenching.

around the ruins, the city has been cleaned up. there's no more dust covering everything. mostly, business has returned to normal. [but there's not more tourist tours of the trading floor of the stock exchange--no one who doesn't work there is allowed into the building.] there are american flags, and the letters nyfd, everywhere. big flags. billboards with phrases like "we shall rise above" printed over representations of the towers.