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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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Saturday Excursion: Prambanan

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One of my main goals of this trip was to visit Prambanan, one of the most magnificent ancient Hindu temples in the world. The Prambanan temples were constructed in the 9th Century, but were abandoned in the 10th Century and most of the complex collapsed in the great earthquakes of the 16th Century. The site, which had largely been covered by volcanic ash and jungle growth, received worldwide attention in 1814 when Sir Thomas Raffles publicized its existence. It took over 100 years to sort out all the stones to figure out how to reconstruct the temples we see today.  During an approximately 20 year span, in the mid-1900s, most of the current temples were reconstructed, though restoration is an ongoing process. Nevertheless, about 200 temples have not yet been restored, though because much of the old stone was plundered for other buildings after the site was abandoned, a much larger reconstruction might be impossible.  Not only is the temple architecture extraordinary, highlight...
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