Picture Time! Time Square, Rockefeller Center, 5th Avenue and Brooklyn Bridge

There is not much to be said about today that cannot be said in images. The weather was stable-ish today, so we decided to check out New York's sights in Manhattan.

Time Square
This meant first arrival at Time Square which is admittedly so busy and shouty with billboards and video boards, it is hard to figure out where to look first. This is the part of the city that never sleeps.





Nintendo Store
I had to admit to myself the level of sadness that my life has reached, when I realized how excited I was to see a Nintendo Store in Time Square. Even better, on the way there we found a bust of Bart Simpson.
The stuff that the store had can only be described as sad, yet wonderful and I would wear it. Check it out for yourself. In addition, the book that was shaped like an old NES cartridge was awesome!







Rockefeller Centre
I always thought that the Rockefeller Centre is actually a shopping mall. To my surprise, it is a block of buildings in the centre of the city dedicated to... not sure what... capitalism, I guess.



New York City Library
On our way to the Empire State Building, we had a quick look into the New York City Library, just to have a look how they tried to manage the split between a quiet environment for study and thousands of tourists each going in there to have a look at the architecture of this very old building... The answer is lots of security checks and prohibition signs...





















Empire State Building
On entering the Empire State Building (ESB), I got reminded of the PC game Bioshock that I am currently playing. Quite obviously the designers of the game used the interior of the ESB as inspiration... so it felt strangely familiar. The only real difference was that no genetically modified crazy people want to slice me open and eat my brain while laughing maniacally... so, only a minor detail is different there.
Today's mission of the people running the ESB is to convince people to make their buildings more energy efficient. They did this buy calculating the energy and money savings from some investments.

Afterwards, we went all the way up to the 86th floor, followed by a careful navigation through 1 million different souvenir shops.

The Financial district as seen from the ESB

The Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island really is quite small

Brooklyn Bridge
After the ESB, we went for some dinner, before our last tick in the box, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge at night. This is a bit of a rite of passage. The pictures did not come out as well as I hoped, but it was very cool to see Manhattan by night. Check it out below.

Again, Lady Liberty from far away