My first glimpse of New York City came on an August day from a train carrying my college roommate and me from Baltimore to that amazing city. We had spent the previous week visiting my aunt and cousins just outside of Washington, D.C., touring museums, monuments, Mt. Vernon and Arlington National Cemetery. We enjoyed our visit there, but the ultimate goal of this trip, our graduation gift to ourselves, was the Big Apple. Diane, a dance major, and I, a theatre major, couldn’t wait to experience that mecca for lovers of the arts and culture. At last, rising up beyond the foreground of Jersey factories and marshland, I spied them: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. We had arrived! That week in New York was everything we had hoped it would be. Every day we explored the city, and every night we saw another Broadway show. We strolled Central Park, window-shopped along Madison Avenue, climbed the Statue of Liberty, toured the Met. We wandered from one neighborhood to the next, dodging clothing racks being wheeled across the streets in the Garment District, experiencing exotic scents in Chinatown, trying not to stare at the Hasidic gentlemen in the Diamond District in their long black coats and swaying earlocks – so foreign to these two girls from Oregon. What an exhilarating, intimidating, wonderful city we found New York to be! We experienced the sticker shock of an 8 percent sales tax on top of what seemed to us to be ridiculously high prices for everything from a glass of lemonade at a deli counter to souvenir postcards. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, many seemed brusque and impatient, but we also met those who gave us tips as to where to go, what to see, how to navigate the city. We boarded our flight home at the end of the week inspired to return some day, feeling more confident than when we arrived, knowing we had, if not tamed the big city, at least met it on its own terms and not been eaten alive.  I returned to those memories over and over again as I watched the television on that morning in September in 2001. I couldn’t reconcile the images of those burning and then crumbling towers with the beautiful, proud, sleek spires which had beckoned to me as a young woman over twenty years before. Please visit the Global Traveler website tomorrow for a special memorial tribute on the tenth anniversary of the attacks on our country on 9/11. Also subscribe to our eFlyer USA newsletter for a special edition commemorating that day. — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor