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20 Years Ago Today: My New York University 9-11 Experience

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Originally Published:  9-11-2021 9-11-2001 seemed like any other beautiful late summer day at the New York University campus at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy.  I was responsible for the student life of our campus.  Each semester we housed 100 study abroad students in two of the five villas on our 200 acre estate of gardens and groves of olive trees and cypruses.  And we were also responsible for 300 students scattered throughout the city in apartments NYU leased for them.  As you can tell from the pictures, La Pietra was a romantic Tuscan setting that seemed to come straight from a movie.  Mid-afternoon on the 11th got a call from the Head of Student Life for all the NYU abroad campuses who was situated about 20 blocks from the towers.  He told me that there had been an aviation accident and one of the Twin Towers had been hit.  At that point it sounded like a freak airplane crash.  It was when we learned of the second tower being hit th...
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Nirvana

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I decided to escape the giant glass tower, where I have spent 98% of my time this year. So last weekend I enjoyed a 24-hour vacation at the Grand Kempinski Hotel in Downtown Jakarta, wearing my N95 mask and face shield.  Ate lunch at Oku, the Japanese restaurant inside the hotel that flies its fresh fish directly from Tokyo's finest seafood market. I can say that my sushi was as good as one can obtain outside Japan. When the tuna is as smooth as butter and tastes as fresh as the treats from Neptune's table, you know your sushi is special. Add some tempura and gyoza and I attained something about as close to Nirvana one can reach on this plane of existence, with apologies for trivializing the divine with my excessively happy rhetoric, but when one is perfectly contented...
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Every time I arrive in a new country I am overtaken by the feeling that my life is unreal, or perhaps the better term is surreal.   After living in Japan in an apartment not much bigger than a shoebox, in an apartment in Mantova, Italy adjacent to both the train station and the busy "Street of Trucks" (also above a pizza joint where I would be awakened at least one night per week by the smashing of plates, hurled at each other by the highly vocal and emotional husband and wife team who owned the place), in a haunted medieval Dutch castle with peacocks and geese shrieking and honking half the night, in a renaissance era complex of villas overlooking the Florentine skyline, in a campus that resembled a giant yellow spaceship that was nestled in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, and now in a high-rise apartment building in the metropolis of Jakarta, home to 30 million residents, I feel as though I haven't been living a life as much as I have been inhabiting a peculiar dream.   An...
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