TV and Radio Museum, UN, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island

It's been an interesting couple of days. I've been hanging round with various people at the hostel, went out to a couple of bars with them last night, and doing touristy stuff during the day.

Yesterday I was in shock in the morning, when I posted yesterday I thought only two or three people had been killed, and I had no idea how serious it actually was. Once it sunk in, I really felt the shock and, although it had been, I suppose, inevitable, it really had an effect on me. After panicking about my dad (he works near Liverpool Street) I finally calmed down, but by then it was too late to visit the Statue of Liberty so I visited the TV and Radio Museum, which is the best thing ever: a huge archive of loads of American TV and radio shows, with screenings in small theatres, and a library section where you can select four programmes (the selection room is full of these ancient apple macs which are as old as I am) from a reasonably large list (it had about a quarter of the Simpsons episodes, but barely any for some shows), then you go off to the watching rooms and sit in a booth with a small screen and some headphones (again pretty ancient stuff, its all on tapes and the equipment was pretty temperamental) and watch the shows. If I lived in New York I'd definitely get a membership ($35 for students) and hang round there loads.If only the BBC would do something similar, preferably digital. It would be a mammoth job, but definitely worth it.

I then went to visit the UN building, which was pretty cool, the tour actually takes you into the Security Council voting chamber, and the big Secretariat hall with all the names of the countries on the desks. The tour guide was a stunning Ukranian brunette with a stereotype Russian accent, particularly amusing when she was talking about Peacekeeping, so that kept it interesting when viewing some of the more boring stuff, such as gifts presented by various governments to the UN.

After that I walked around some, intending to walk to Ground Zero. I took a wrong turning though, and ended up on the opposite side of the island, so I walked all the way round the bottom of Manhattan to Battery Park, then along to Ground Zero. This was pretty powerful, what with the London bombing in the morning, it got me thinking a lot about how the USA has been defined in recent years by 9/11, and wondering whether the London bombing will be similar for us. I may write a short piece on this later, if I can a) organise my thoughts sufficiently and b) be bothered. Don't wait up kids.

Yesterday evening as I mentioned earlier I went to a couple of bars with some people from the hostel, got talking to a guy from Reading who had been driving across the States in a van with some friends, so they found out yesterday afternoon about the Olympics and the bombings within an hour of each other, he told me about how some American woman had been extremely rude to him- the conversation went something like
"You're from London huh? It got blew up today"
-cue looks of amazement
"Four bombs bang bang bang bang. Get with the picture", she says, before getting into her car. He was pretty pissed off about this, and it showed when he was telling the story, and we agreed what an effect it had being out of the country when it happened.

Today I went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, but it's been a miserable day, absolutely chucking it down, so I've not really done much but get soaked. The Ellis Island Museum has some interesting stuff, but I was just tired and wet and fed up, and so I didn't bother with some of it. I did however look at all the stuff about controlling immigration, a lot of political cartoons on keeping immigrants out, and stuff such as the law they had banning Chinese people from entering the country which was only repealed in the 1950s. Again, I might be putting my thoughts on these into the aforementioned short essay which I probably will never do.

I have Saturday and Sunday left now, I still intend to go up the Empire State Building, visit the Museum of Modern Art, and check out a few record shops. I'm holding up pretty well, I like this place, but I think I might get fed up with it after a while. Perhaps living here would be different, there are some pretty nice places to live. And as I said before, if I did live here I could spend lots of time in the TV and Radio museum.

Thats it for now, I'm going to do some catching up on BBC News.