TBA
New York
9/11 Memorial, WTC Observatory, and a certain friend's toddler's 1st birthday mark an enjoyable-yet-rainy day in New York!
Breakfast and lunch were at The NoMad and Prince St. Pizza respectively. Started off the day with the duck sausage breakfast sandwich at The NoMad. It was pretty delicious, although the english muffin stealing the show was quite unexpected! Some oddity with the reservation scheduling also kind of annoyed me, but it was an otherwise enjoyable experience. Prince St. Pizza for lunch was much more mainstream-- the line moved at a decent clip, but sadly I was in a bit of a rush and didn't have time to wait for their famous (?) pepperoni slices. The margherita was good but quite underwhelming by comparison. Quick dinner at Ben's Deli near Penn Station was an unfortunate conclusion to the fooding, as it was quite mediocre.
A rainy tour around the 9/11 Memorial was quite poignant. Despite the relative casualness of the tour structure, the significance still manages to hit you in very personal, very subtle ways. Not sure if it was rain/darkness/cloudiness related, but the lights came on in the pools about halfway through the tour, and gave a distinctly solemn beauty to the occasion.
The WTC Observatory wasn't as enjoyable with the rain, but it had cleared enough to still give decent views. Definitely better on a clear day, but sometimes you take what you can get. OTOH, the Oculus was a great place to visit in the rain, plus it's dramatically different, inside vs. outside: striking in contrasting white outside but not at all dominating... while inside is a sea of white in an impressively large space (at least by comparison).