How was the visit to the 9/11 museum in New York

Today is the commemoration of the 9/11 attacks in New York, and you're sure to hear about it on the news.

I may have said this before, but I caught those moments live on TV. It was a coincidence. I had just finished high school, I was on summer vacation and accidentally fixed that day and at that time I turned on the TV on Euronews, a channel I usually didn't watch. Euronews was just breaking news about a plane crashing in New York and pictures of one of the buildings. I saw live how the second plane hit the second WTC tower, their collapse, images from the street as they appeared and so on. They stuck in my mind.

A year and a half ago, I visited the 9/11 Museum in New York, built underground in the place where the World Trade Center towers once stood. The museum is great, if you come to New York you can see it. It's the kind of place you come out of… otherwise, excited and shocked and quieter and at the same time glad that you live in other parts of the world, just like those who visited Auschwitz or Sighetu Marmației say they felt after visiting in such places.

Those who designed the 9/11 Memorial were artists in creating emotion. The place is perfectly made not to present the events of that time, because everyone knows them, but the individual dramas of the people present in that place. It turned out great for them. There are napkin boxes in the museum. I've never seen so many people cry together and I think it's impossible not to shed tears at certain times, especially when you hear phone calls or other recordings of people caught there.

The museum begins to surface. Where the twin towers used to be, it is now a beautifully paved square, with trees and benches, and exactly on the footprint of the two towers were made two fountains (or pools, as they call them). The wells are well thought out, the water comes out of somewhere from above and cascades down their walls to the bottom, and in the center of the wells it falls back to the underground, but you don't see where and at what height. The water flows like an abyss.The WTC towers rose to the sky. The memorial pools are pointed down, and all around them is a railing with the names of the victims cut into it, and their relatives leave flowers there. The new, taller, larger One World Trade Center building has already been erected near the square. It is a very good image to commemorate what happened in 2001 in parallel with the way New York went through this tragedy.

Once you pay for admission to the museum (included in the NY Pass, too), start going underground. There are two main areas.

The first is a very large one for an underground, where you feel like in a salt mine. There are large descending ramps, and from time to time you see various objects left over from then. Of interest is "the sluice wall", ie an underground dike built with the twin towers. The buildings were close to the water of the Hudson River, and this wall that descended deep into the ground served as a dam to stop water from seeping into their basement. It's all that's left of the two towers.There are others to see in that area. You can see metal beams in the structure of the building, contorted after fire and collapse. There are pieces of them embedded in the old foundation of the buildings, now of the museum, broken to collapse. A cross made for FDNY (fire department, their firefighters) since those days by passers-by and volunteers. An elevator motor and even a concrete staircase inside the building, which survived the collapse (staircase B in the north tower, where 14 survivors protected by the resistance structure were found).The second, in the evening, when in the World Trade Center area, the two powerful installations that illuminate the sky annually on September 11 were lit again. They are called Tribute in Light and are two batteries of 44 xenon reflectors, each of 7,000 watts, which light up in the evening and last until late at night.

They can be seen from all over New York and beautifully illuminate the sky. For a few hours, two twin light towers continue to rise in Manhattan. This is what our hotel room looked like: