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| version française, par ici !! |
wassup ? here everything's fine, we are monday and i have the day off because today is Colombus Day, so we celebrate the day when europeans started killing and raping and enslaving American Indians who hadn't done anything to deserve it.
the girls are at their grand-parents, so i can have a Lost marathon on Netflix while eating Ben&Jerry's, go for a long run, and play a lot of guitar. lately i've been playing "Yesterday", "Everything has changed", "Seasons of love", and "Make you feel my love" a lot. gleeks understand. we've had a tough week.
so i'm taking the opportunity of having free time to post some news.
Yesterday, i went to New York with an aupair who was in the same training session as me, Lauralie, and a friend of hers, a german aupair whose name i don't know how to write.
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| the Empire State Building |
since we wanted to spend the day in lower Manhattan, we took the subway Downtown, but it had to be an express 'cause we found ourselves in Brooklyn. we changed line and took the subway back Uptown, and went down at Wall Street.
Nothing much to see, just the famous front of the building, with its columns. a couple of hippies was there, shouting to the tourists, telling them to sto taking pictures and stop admiring bankers, those vultures.
i was kinda agreeing with them. Wall Street doesn't impress me at all. ok, it's the main stock market in the world, but whatever. it's the symbol of extreme capitalisme. so yeah. whatever...
if you're outside of the US, i don't know if you have followed what happened, but the governement had been on shutdown since the 1st of October. democrats want universal social security aka "Obamacare", and the republicans don't because they are a bunch of haters who can't stand the idea that non-rich people access medecine.
and since they can't find an agreement, they have shut down the governement. which means national parks, lots of monuments, and ministers' offices are closed. which means the government provides minimal services BUT WE STILL PAY FULL TAXES.
because 800.000 federal workers have lost their jobs overnight without salary compensation, but representatives are still payed. this country has a serious problem.
ok, wall street has no link to the shutdown, but still. republicans are holding the country hostage and bankers are stereotypically republicans, so... THEY ALL SUCK
but let's go back to sunday. After Wall Street, we went to the 9/11 memorial. i'm glad we had booked our tickets in advance, because the line for those without a ticket was super duper long. we had to go through metal detectors and everything...almost as paranoiac as airports !
it's understandable, though. the erection of the memorial honors victims, but also sends a message saying that usa can get back up after a catastrophe like "whatever, we'll just build a higher tower !". if it were to get vandalized, or worse, the symbol would suffer.
the memorial is a garden, with lawns and white oaks
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there are also two huge square fountains, were the twin towers stood. water runs along the sides to the bottom and down a square wall carved at the bottom of the cube.
i like the fact that thay are not cheesy fountains, golden with naked angels.
as much as it suits a renaissance royal palace, it would be weird in a memorial. those fountains are very solemn, kind of ...sad ; we see the water spilling, "wasted", just like all those lifes that ended that day, wasted for nothing.
a nice symbol.
it was so weird for me, for i came to Ground Zero 7 years ago during a school trip. i remember standing there with my high school friends, in front of this huge crater in the ground, filled with gravels and trucks. i remember a huge cross made out of pillars form the ruins of the towers. i remember the wire fence all the around the area, and the signs re-enacting the events hour by hour.
all was dirty, broken, destroyed.
now everything is beautiful, clean, calm, almost peaceful.
i hope the families find a form of appeasement there
all around the two fountains, the names of the victims are written. they aren't sorted by alphabetial order, but by social links : people working together are together, family members are next to each other.
a meager consolation, but i think it's still important
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| a white rose is placed on the name of each victim on their birthday |
there is a museum, but it's not open yet. the pillar cross from 7 years ago will be exposed there, among many other things. it will open in spring, so i guess i'll have to come back in a few months.
they are also rebuilding a World Trade Center. the main tower -and the higher tower in the USA-, named One Trade Center or Liberty Tower, is already standing tall, standing out at night with its white lights, when most of the buildings have yellow ones. more towers are being built
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| on the left hand side, the current state of WTC, on the right hand side, a projection of the futur version |
the only tree which isn't a white oak is the Survivor Tree, a tree that was found among the ruins of the towers, and which was nurtured back to health and kept as a symbol of resilience for NYC and the US as a whole.
then we went to the Pier, admiring the view onto the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the New York Harbour
then we kept walking around lower manhanttan, we saw the huge bull, a statue that weighs 7000 "stones", aka more that 44 tons. since there were a lot of people surrounding and climbing the bull, i didn't even try to take a picture. here's a google image picture instead.
after a "late lunch", at Subway, we took the subway to Central Park (almost ended up in the Bronx, but changed trains at the last minute)
we walked in central park a little bit, we walked past the zoo, the same zoo from which the animals escape in the movie Madagascar, then we walked down 5th avenue, before switching for 6th 'cause it was less crowded, towards the train station
the whole time i had "Englishman in NY" stuck in my head, 'cause there's a lyrics that goes [...look at me walking down fifth avenue...]
that's all for the week, it was refreshing visiting with others for a change :)
this week i have to find a halloween costume. the houses are decorated already. i'll make a photo collection and put it in an article called "when american people celebrate a holiday, they don't do things by half"
the title to this article is from the song Manhattan-Kaboul by Renaud and Axel Red, you can watch the video clip here [x]
it means "in my building of glass and steel, i take my job, a line of coke, a coffee", and it is of course linked to my visit to the memorial.
see y'all !
