Diary of a Fat Chick: New York City Adventure... Part 2

Part 1 of Day 2

The next morning, I woke up excited but a little scared to brave this city that I had so longed to go for so many years. I was scared that it was going to get the best of me, and I would run back home crying after spending my four days locked in my tiny hotel room. We walked down to the restaurant inside of the hotel to get breakfast and I remembered that we had a concierge. When we checked into the hotel, they did mention that if we needed any help getting around the city or finding things to do, that they would be the ones to ask.

I went to the young hipster at the concierge desk and first asked him if he had a subway map. He handed me what I am ashamed to admit was the exact same map we were given at check-in that I never even opened, and which was sitting on top of my suitcase back up in our room. I looked at it for a second and asked him how to ride the subway to get to the 9/11 memorial.

He gave me a sweet smile and proceeded to map out every detail in pen on the subway map. He told us to walk down to Lexington, cross over to the other side of the street and go down that subway opening as it was the downtown train. Head down to the 6 train and ride it to the very end, or the Brooklyn Bridge stop. He was very detailed, which I appreciated.

So we head out and armed with the subway map, we went down and hopped on the train and made it to our stop with ease. So easy in fact that I felt even more like the idiot who had a panic attack on the subway. I’m not sure why we picked the 9/11 memorial and museum to be basically the first thing we did in NYC, but as it turned out, it was what we were looking forward to the most.

The Subway looks the same in person as it does on TV

We walked to the memorial first, and it was beautiful. Looking across the hole that was once the base for the North Tower, which was the first one to be hit by the plane, I had mixed feelings. I was sad about what happened and in awe of how beautiful they made the memorial, and surprised at how small it was.

North Tower 9/11 Memorial. This woman was in so in awe, she put her camera down.

Being from Texas I was used to large buildings, but as we have plenty of land to spare our building were fatter than they were tall. It was an odd feeling to realize that the world trade center buildings weren’t necessarily that fat, they were just really really tall. As I looked up at the New World trade center, I realized I had never seen tall in my life. Here was the tallest most impressive building I had ever seen in my life.

View of the World Trade Center while in line for the Museum.

After having a good look, and a few pictures of the memorial, we walked over to the museum, where we had to wait in line for 45 minutes to buy tickets, then wait in line for another 45 minutes just to get inside. Once inside, there wasn’t as much as I had thought there would be, but it was surreal seeing parts of people lives that died in the tragedy. Being able to touch the first response fire engine (oops, I don’t think I was supposed to touch), seeing a part of the plane, or a shoe, or a handwritten letter someone wrote just moments before their death. It was emotional, to say the least.

It took about two hours in total to get through the museum, most of which had a strict no pictures policy. I looked around me at people who were crying and listening to them speak and realizing that they weren’t even from the states. It hit me at that moment that this was a global tragedy, not just one that affected the US.

Once we got out of the museum, we walked over to the new trade center, which had just opened days before to finally start allowing visitors up to the observation deck. We had a quick discussion about which “tourist” tall building we wanted to experience on our first trip. Did we want to go up on the Empire State Building, Top of the Rock, or the World Trade Center? We quickly picked the World Trade Center.