Little Italy, Chinatown and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum

Food has been the epicenter of the past couple of days for me in New York.

Yesterday, we went to Pepe Rosso in Little Italy for pasta (how stereotypical). I had my go-to penne bolognese, and it was pretty good (but not as good as my mum’s).  Then we went to Eileen’s Special Cheesecake for, you guessed it, cheesecake. I had the Salted Caramel Cheesecake and it tasted like a Crème brûlée. In hindsight, I would have ordered the Oreo Cheesecake (I had a bite of my friend’s), because it was truer to a traditional cheesecake in flavor. Today, we went to Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown for dumplings (also stereotypical); it wasn’t as good as Din Tai Fung, but the soup-filled Shanghai-style dumplings were authentic (很地道).  After that, we got bubble tea at Gongcha, followed by rolled ice-cream at Penguin Ice Cream. Later in the day, we got dinner at Joe’s Pizza. Kevin Spacey’s (and Anne Hathaway’s, Rosario Dawson’s, Bradley Cooper’s etc.) photo was on the wall, so I felt some serious Frank Underwood at Freddy’s BBQ Joint vibes. We then had some amazing crepes (I had a salted caramel, french milk chocolate and strawberry crepe) at a creperie near campus. Anyway, we ate so much food. I feel like Italy-Elizabeth in Eat, Pray, Love.

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Aside from the food (so much food), today we went to the 9/11 Museum, which offers free admission for a particular time period on Fridays. We heard oral testimony of some of the survivors; and we saw the worn badges and uniforms of officers who did not survive and photographs of people jumping to their deaths from the burning towers (I was not aware this had occurred). The events of that day were mapped out on a timeline, and it was particularly tragic to see that a message had been sent out to those in the North Tower, after the first plane had hit the South Tower, that evacuation of the North Tower need not occur. The museum was heartbreaking, evoking a powerful response in all of us.

On a final, less depressing note, I should mention that we had some fantastic speakers: Gary Bass, author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, and Larry Johnson, former Assistant Secretary-General for Legal Affairs at the United Nations. Bass talked about World War II and the international adjudication that followed; Johnson talked about the Haitian Cholera case, the 2003 Iraq War and the sexual harassment claim against Ruud Lubbers (the former Dutch PM and UNHCR).