Wow, what a marathon day. I'm exhausted and my feet are on fire. But that's nothing more than a sign that I saw a whole heckuva lot of New York today. Obviously I haven't even scratched the surface, but here's a quick run-down:

Got up and took a morning walk for coffee at Joe: the Art of Coffee. It's a place that the good folks over at Victrola in Seattle visited recently and recommended via their blog. And a very strong recommendation it was. Excellent latte.

Walked all around midtown Manhattan - saw the vastness of NYU, Washington Square Park, and the Strand Books store (home of "18 miles of books"). Went in a couple second hand music shops and a couple shoe stores.

Checked out of my hotel, and walked to the subway station to go to the place I'm staying the next few nights. It's a really cool guest house in a Brownstone, about half a block away from Central Park and one block over from the Museum of Natural History. I ate a street vendor hot dog for lunch.

Then my travel compadres made it to the guest house, and we ventured out together. Took the subway down to the World Trade Center area. We walked the perimeter of Ground Zero. It's all cleaned up now, of course, and being prepared for the Freedom Tower to be built. But it's still just this massive hole in the sky - this in a city where the sky is full of buildings. Creepy. We continued walking down through Battery Park and jumped on the Staten Island Ferry. Basically, we went to Staten Island and back, just because it's a free trip, and it goes right in front of the Statue of Liberty. After this, we took the subway back up to Times Square, where we ate dinner. Interestingly enough, despite being referred to as this iconic New York City kind of place, felt the least authentic of anything I've seen so far. Probably just too many tourists like me. Eventually we made it back to the Brownstone, and given that it's just in front of midnight, I'm gonna call it quits.

Tomorrow we've got a series of meetins with some folks doing ministry here in the city. I'm looking forward to getting down to business with why we came here.