Nat Arem's Blog

I’ve been in my new apartment for about 10 days now and I’m really enjoying it. This is the first time in my life that I’m living in a real city environment where almost everything is walkable. It’s just awesome to be able to get outside and walk around. Everything is close. It’s basically the polar opposite of Vegas in terms of walkability. My feelings on walking might change in February when it’s 20 degrees (-7 celsius) outside but for right now I’m loving the walkability.

My building is great as well. I have a great view of south Philly and the Delaware river. Here’s a picture looking towards the Delaware:

It’s a great view. And my apartment building overall seems really really friendly. All of the doormen and employees are nice and it’s been a super smooth transition to living here. No loud neighbors. I really don’t have a single complaint about the building or my apartment.

So far I’ve explored a few cool places. I’ve been up to the Reading Terminal Market a few times. I’ve been down to the Italian Market (more on that in a minute). I was in Old City the other day for food with my friend. I’ve been over to the Rittenhouse Square once so far and I plan on spending a decent amount of time over there whenever I can. And so on. I really want to take advantage of being in the city as much as possible.

Getting back to the Italian Market, it was a total trip to be down there the other day. Back when I was quite young (under 10) my dad used to take myself and my sister (this was before my brother was able to walk around for the most part) down there all the time on Saturdays. He’d take us down there and we’d do food shopping for the week and we’d usually get lunch somewhere in the area. Outside of getting cheesesteaks at Pat’s and Geno’s (on the southern outskirts of the Italian Market) with my friends while in high school and college, I hadn’t been back to this area of Philly in about 20 years. Actually through most of my life I didn’t even really know where it was. But it had always stuck in my mind as a pretty cool place and I was really excited to go back. While I had a lot of memories of it even before going back, it was amazing how many things came back to me when I was walking around there. Even things like smells made my head turn in recollection of the same smell from years ago. This is probably the first time in my life that the “trip down memory lane” experience really applied to what I went through. And it was awesome. I have to drop my car off tomorrow for my state inspection and my walk back takes me through the Italian Market so I’ll swing by some places again tomorrow.

Another great thing about being home is being near family and friends. My parents still live in the suburbs and I have a few friends who live in the Philly area. My friend Eric Strauss (filmed and edited thepokerfilm) lives in the area as well. This is the first time in roughly 11 years that Eric and I have lived in the same city — dating back to when we graduated high school in June 2000 and went off to college a few months later. Prior to that we lived directly next door to each other from age 4 to 18 and we went to the same school from age 2 to 18. Despite not being in the same area, we’ve remained great friends over the years and we still get along really well. I am probably going to be working on a few things with Eric so that’ll be fun.

Sept 11th 10th Anniversary

Lastly, I should probably say something about the 10th anniversary of Sept 11th. I’d actually been to the top of the twin towers once. I don’t know if my family has any pictures but I remember going up there with family during a trip to NYC. I’m going to see if I can locate pictures at my parents’ house. I don’t think I’ve really written about my Sept 11th experience on my blog before. But I was a sophomore in college at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. I’m not sure if all schools schedule classes this way, but at F&M, all of the Tues/Thurs classes were 80 minutes long. So I had a 9-10:20am class called, of all things, National Security Policy. It was taught by professor Robert Gray who is still at F&M and turned out to be one of my favorite professors (since this was early in my second year, I’d only just started to get familiar with various professors).

My usual routine in the mornings was to wake up at around 8:40, brush my teeth, get dressed and leave for class around 8:50. I was usually rushed so I didn’t really check my desktop computer in my dorm room. I had a cell phone but it didn’t have any sort of data connection at the time. I’m not even sure if it had texting. I’m pretty sure pretty much no one in my class had phones with data at the time. If they existed, they were very primitive compared to what we have 10 years later. So given the timing of when the planes hit, no one in the class had any idea of what was going on. All of the news reports were starting to filter out when we were all headed to class or just starting class. So we had a pretty normal class and, if I recall correctly, we actually talked about terrorism of all things. I can’t remember the details but I’m pretty sure we did. I’d love to jog my memory by talking to Professor Gray one of these days though.

EDIT

I just noticed that Professor Gray gave a talk as part of a 10th anniversary ceremony at F&M. He starts talking at around 18:40.

I’m not sure if he talks about his experience. So far I’ve watched a few minutes and he’s mainly just talking about the effects of 9/11 on the world.

END EDIT

After class let out at 10:20, I headed to the College Center for some breakfast and I noticed something wasn’t right when I saw a huge crowd around a TV out in the Atrium. I asked a friend of mine from my freshman hall (named Bas Solleveld) what was going on and he said that planes had flown into the twin towers in New York. Like most, I didn’t get the gravity of the situation at first. I was standing in line for food, not watching TV, so I hadn’t actually seen any images yet. He mentioned that a few planes had hit so I definitely assumed terrorism from the start. But I also thought it was like… Cessnas. I asssumed casualties would be like 100 people at most which, granted, is quite bad. But then I saw that both towers had collapsed. I might have seen the second tower collapse live — I’m not sure if I saw it live because of the confusion both on TV and in the College Center Atrium at the time. I went back to my dorm room and pretty much watched CNN for the next week straight.

Like most, I was shocked, angered, saddened and more. I wasn’t directly affected by the whole thing at all. I barely even knew anyone who was affected. There were a few students at the college who lost parents but I wasn’t close with any of them and I only even tangentially knew one of them. That being said, just imagining their pain from the whole thing was really horrifying. I know that my parents (and myself for that matter) won’t be around forever and that anything can happen at any time — but for something like that to happen to someone is really just awful. I know that 3000 people really isn’t that many when you line it up against other non-natural death stats (car crashes, war deaths, various earthquakes, various tsunamis, etc) but at the end of the day, 3000 is a HUGE number. That’s an unimaginable amount of pain for family and friends. My condolences to anyone who was affected.