"Standing in the bleachers, listening to the Pripyat municipal overture of resounding bird song, the only thing we could do was stare out at the trees and wonder "how long until New York looks like this?"" "Looking at the newspapers and books scattered about apartment No. 23, the packed suitcases sitting where they were left, the clothes pins still sitting on the same clothes lines where they must have been 33 years ago, you can feel the abruptness of the city's end. This wasn't a ghost town that slowly petered out over decades until there was nobody left, it was a densely constructed city of 50 thousand where everyone left at the exact same moment, and nobody ever came back."