Waking up in New York
While half of the World Have Your Say team is in New Orleans, the other half landed in New York Sunday evening. After a long way in the immigration queues, we settled in and went to the site of our first broadcast .
For Rabiya and Shona, our studio manager, it's their first time in New York. For me, New York almost seemed to become a home away from home in 2002.
I was based in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Washington bureau for six years until last April when I moved to London. In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, I was in New York several times to cover how the city recovered from the attacks.
It's always great to come back. New York is the kind of city that your first visit seems like a return to someplace familiar because it is such an iconic city. You've seen Central Park, the Empire State building and the concrete canyons of the skyscrapers towering overhead so many times in film and on TV that you recognise places that you've never been to before.
Landing at JFK, we then had to wait for an hour and half in the long immigration queues. Correction, being an American, I was through in 20 minutes. The rest of the team was caught in the long snaking queue.
It was a mixed blessing, I had to get the couple hundred kilos of gear from baggage return.
But we made it into the city and then headed off to resturante where we will have our broadcast on Tuesday.
The resturante just opened three months ago. It is a cooperative restaurant run by former employees of Windoows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center.
The staff from come around the world, and the menu is inspired from the family recipes of the staff like the starter and the goad curry main course.
After a long day traveling, we were thrilled to have such a warm welcome.
We're already busy this Monda morning with preparations for our broadcast on Tuesday. We're going to talk about the lasting impact of the 11 September attacks on the city and about the United States' relations with Israel. If there is something that you would like to talk about, send us an e-mail or leave a comment here.
