The first time I saw New York was just after 9/11. After years of thumbing through The New Yorker, I was dying to see the city, but kept putting it off. That strange autumn seemed like a good time to stop procrastinating and get on with life.
I visited a friend who was living in Battery Park City, a few blocks from the pile, and explored the city in a surreal daze. Lower Manhattan was eerily silent, save for the songs spilling out of St. Paul's Chapel, which echoed like a lost whisper down Broadway (now named The Canyon of Heroes). There were other tourists as well; Americans from across the county who came to lend some quiet form of solidarity to the moment, to look at the images of missing family members and to try to grasp the meaning and scope of such a tragedy. It was an noble moment in a noble city, with a spirit that was all too fleeting.
Since then, I've breezed in and out of New York many times. Standing in front of Wall Street with my brother, spending a few hot August days with Shelly on my way to Botswana, circling the Statue of Liberty, huddling against the wind on the top deck of the Empire State Building, rifling through the souvenirs at the United Nations gift shop. The last time I was here was for my Oxford admissions interview (got the MBA, lost the girl), but that seems a lifetime ago.
Now I'm here again and miss the charm and fascination the city once held for me. Now, it just seems like a city; a bit too crowded for my tastes, but well within the navigable geography of experience. Through the alchemy of time, the charm of the big city is now a weighty nostalgia and I miss my home in LA.
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This is the blog of Richard Conn, Oxford MBA. I'm originally from Vancouver, Washington, but have lived in LA for the past ten years. So far, I've traveled to 26 countries and have a passion for digital marketing.
