Love the New York skyline!

So far, New Yorkers have been unfailingly nice.  We’ve gotten directions and information from people on the street, construction workers, transportation workers - everyone.

Today we took a short ferry ride across the Hudson, then another ferry ride out to Ellis Island.  Ellis Island is so amazing!  Lots of information about the people who came here: what they left behind, what they hoped to find, how they traveled, what kinds of procedures they went through at Ellis, and how they lived after they were accepted.  They came with everything they could carry, although at least one couple came with an empty suitcase;  they didn’t want the officials to know that they didn’t own anything.  That sounds sad, but who knows what happened to them after they got here?  That was the draw of the US - anything could happen here.  We take this for granted now but at that time and in many countries, it simply wasn’t possible.  Only here.  How amazing.

From Ellis Island the ferry took us to LIberty Island.  It is amazing to see this huge statue standing out there.  America has nothing else like it.  Ancient cultures created larger-than-life statues to be worshiped, but America, originally founded mostly by Puritans, Christians, Quakers and the like, did not go in for that sort of thing.  So this statue is unique.  It is breathtaking to see her standing in the harbor.  You would never paint a statue that shade of green, but it works because it’s natural, full of little variations that soften the lines.  The entire time I was there, every single time I would look at something else then look back at her, I’d say the same thing - “She is so beautiful”.  

Since we came directly from Ellis Island to Liberty Island, I was struck by the number of languages and cultures represented by the tourists today.  It’s interesting to think that every day there is a cast of characters here similar to a day at Ellis Island over a century ago.  It feels like the presence of all these cultures today is a way of acknowledging to the people in the past that it was all worth it.