For my birthday this year Angela bought me tickets to see The Postal Service in New York City! We decided to make a long weekend of it, so we took the Friday and Monday off work and arranged for Aiti to spend the weekend with Aila.

While we were in NYC, we took some tours (Angela has been there a few times before, but this was my first visit), saw a broadway show (The Book of Mormon), and visited the 9/11 Memorial.

The memorial is huge. The museum isn't open yet, unfortunately, but there are two huge fountains where the twin towers used to stand, and they are surrounded by the names of everyone who died in the attacks. It is sometimes hard to get a sense of scale or a feeling from a still photo, so I also captured a short video of the south tower memorial.

The Postal Service concert was incredible, by the way. I think that it was historic... I'm not sure that anything like it has happened before in the music industry. For those who aren't familiar with the story, here it is in a nutshell:

• In 2003, Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello met and decided to try to do some music together. They were each in their own bands at the time, so they collaborated by mail and put together 10 songs, with Jimmy writing the music and Ben writing the lyrics and doing the vocals (along with Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley).
• They put the 10 songs together on an album called Give Up and went on tour, playing in small venues of less than 100 people with mixed success.
• They then went their separate ways again with their original bands.
• Over time, the popularity of the album grew, first selling tens of thousands of copies, then hundreds of thousands, then going gold, then going platinum, over the course of several years.
• Ten years later, in 2013, they announced that they were doing another tour. For any normal band, you would think that they would do another album before going on tour again, but not them. They just decided to go on tour and perform the same 10 songs (plus some B-sides) that they had performed way back in 2003.
• However, this time instead of playing in tiny bars, they played to sold out stadiums along the entire tour, including two back to back sold out performances in NYC.

Technical details: This panorama was taken with my 5D Mark II + EF 17-40L at 17mm, ISO 800, f/16 for 1/400th of a second. It consists of three photos stitched together using Hugin (PanoTools).