Gleetch.com is a really small application that lets you tweet your newly learned skills and your unlocked achievements from Glitch.com

Now you might be wondering what Glitch.com is, but that’s a totally different blogpost. But for now you can just read their information. If even that is too much; Glitch.com is a web-based Flash game that lets you wander in a fantasy world called Ur.

Gleetch.com intro page

On Gleetch.com you can sign in with your Glitch account, they have an offical Glitch API. If it’s your first time you are asked to allow our Twitter app to get access to your Twitter account, if all is well, you will get to see your settings page. Here you can set your messages and enable or disable pictures.

All skills and achievements come with pictures, so we will send them along as well, using Twitters ‘own’ photoservice.

Gleetch.com settings page

The application will then keep checking your stats and post it to Twitter, if you unlocked something good! This is how your Tweet will look like..

The default text contains the hashtag #Glitch. So to see Gleetch in action, look at the Tweets with the #Glitch hashtag.

Gleetch.com is operational, but I wouldn’t want to call it finished. As you can see designing layouts still isn’t my best skill and we might expand the service with tweets related to your in-game wealth or location.
But the people like it and more people use this than my other service Longer Tweets: Get some! So that’s a nice incentive for me!

P.s. Glitch.com is momentarily in beta, I still got 3 keys, so if you’re interested, let me know!

Friday, september 16th, my girlfriend and I want to Leeuwarden, to the Leeuwarden Air Base (IATA: LHW, ICAO: EHLW).
Every year the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF) organises a static- and airshow.

Let me tell you this, it’s really hard to film and photograph fast flying airplanes!

Tillybot is a utility bot on Twitter. You can give her commands and she’ll reply to them.

At the moment she can fetch the weather, compare Last.fm users, geocode your address to latitude and longitude coordinates and fight against other people on Twitter! #fight

Robots have always fascinated me and my first robot-like thing must have been Lego and later ‘Technical’ Lego, with little engines and train rails. Skip ahead a few years and then there’s IRC, I was using mIRC to get onto servers and communicating with the ‘bots’ such as NickServ.

So it didn’t take long before I started to make my own IRC bots. I wasn’t good with all that shell stuff, so I just opened 2 clients, one where I would run my bot and one where I would test it.

Now skip ahead again and I’m having a lot of fun with API’s, one of which is obviously Twitter. Now I had the idea for a while, but a couple weeks ago I ‘discovered’ the “entities” in the results that Twitter gives you. They parse hashtags for you, time to get started!

So I created a ‘utility bot’, I wanted to call her uTilly, but it was already taken, so then the name Tillybot was created. Luckily the .com was available as well ;)

If you’re wondering what a utility bot is, it’s basically like a utility knife; one entity with a lot of functions.

At the moment Tilly only replies to commands/hashtags, but I intend to make her a bit more ‘human’, so you could have ‘real’ conversations. For now the commands work fine.

At the time of writing she knows the following commands:

• #bmi – Will calculate your Body Mass Index
• #fight – Will ‘fight’ another person on Twitter
• #followme – Will make her follow your Twitter account
• #geo – Turns addresses/locations into geo coordinates
• #lastfm – Compares two Last.fm users
• #weather – Gives you the weather for the provided location

Most of these commands require ‘parameters’ so for a complete list and explanation just check our her website: http://www.tillybot.com

Tillybot.com

This is only just the beginning and there’s still a lot of things to make/do. So if you know any cool commands or know a neat API that Tilly should use as well, let me know in the comments!

P.s. If you want to fight me tell her this: @Tillybot #fight #gerbenjacobs

This post is the fifth part of a series named “New York”, in which I talk about my trip to New York city in the first week of May 2011. These posts will be loaded with pictures, I took 1050 that week!

This post will be slightly different, as I’ll just show pictures and write hardly anything.

View all posts about New York 2011 or read all about day 4!

Tuesday, May 3rd

Alright, so like I said, this post will be different from the others as it will have more pictures than text. For 2 reasons: a) I don’t feel like writing much and b) we only did 3 ‘things’ so not much explanation needed. I’ll try to annotate the photos to give a little exta information if possibile.

Today was another normal weekday and once again New York was less touristy, we liked it!

We had planned to go to the USS Intrepid, which now is a museum, but we first, by accident really, came past the “Engine 54, ladder 4, battalion 9″ firehouse.

Engine 54, Ladder 4 - memorial

Engine 54, Ladder 4 - memorial plaque

We then entered the museum, with another metal detector!

USS Intrepid road sign

Plane below deck

The 'tower' on the USS Intrepid

AH-1 Cobra

"Huey"

Radar plane

AH-1 Cobra and Huey from another angle

"Blue Angels" stuntplane

AH-1J Sea Cobra

Fighter jet, not sure what type

AH-1J Sea Cobra cockpit

Sea Cobra in semi-profile

Old MIG?

Radio from 1941

More old radiostuff, however this looks somewhat less older

After this ‘museum’, which my little sisters didn’t enjoy as much as I did, we went for a boattour around NYC, we opted for the 3-hour one which circles the entire island. One of the best ideas this entire week and if you find yourself in NYC, make sure you do this. You get to see a lot! *TIP*

Some of the following photos have a lot of ‘heads’ in them, my apologies.

The NY skyline in my sisters maillot ;)

The Dutch flag waving proudly at the pier

Golf court thing?

Big tugboat

Blachhawk overhead

And if the Blackhawk wasn’t enough, somewhat later we saw this!

Old houses

Biggest clock in the world..

Old fort or stronghold kind of building

The Staten Island ferry, which is quite big but also free of charge

Atop the Brooklyn Bridge

Manhattan bridge

Helicopter landing, people already waiting to board

Brooklyn Bridge pier

Roosevelt Island cablecar

Queensboro bridge, one of the prettiest NYC bridges

By now, we’re entering the little ‘river’ that embraces the north east side of the Manhattan borough, which really, is a great place. A lot of ‘old’ things, but it’s these things that really have character and it allowed for some nice photographs.

The History Channel building and logo

Closest we got to the Yankee Stadium

Beautiful swing bridge; Macombs Dam Bridge

Old aquaduct

Loose lips, sink ships

Some may call it a bad photograph, others call it abstract.

The George Washington Bridge and Jeffrey Hook's Light

Or.. "The Little Red Lighthouse"

And finally back at home, at Times Square, my sisters were having fun with the giant Forever 21 tv-screen/interactive billboard.

My sisters found themselves in the spotlight

I kinda like webservices that allow you to create longer tweets, because really, sometimes you just need them a tad bit longer.

There are (only) a few options out there, but the main ones I know are tweetlonger.com and deck.ly, the latter only open to Tweetdeck users. The deck.ly tweet page looks like a web 2.0 ERP business-aligned software page and tweetlonger.com’s tweet page, accompanied by the tl.gd  domain, is just.. well judge for yourself.

Both show the Twitter username and a photo (which you quite have to search for on tl.gd) and that’s it. “Come on!” I thought “I haven’t spend ages on my Twitter design for nothing”.

Well, I didn’t really think that, but it was something along thoses lines and basically:  ”Why is there no longer tweet service that incorporated my Twitter page design?”

So I created “Longer Tweets, Get Some!” or commonly known as http://lt.gs.

It’s really simple, you sign in with Twitter (give the app access if it’s the first time you use it) and then you’re ready to go! Breaking the 140-character limit since 2011! Sure, be a rebel, why not!

When your tweet is posted and people follow the short url back, they’ll find something similar to this.

A screenshot of how a tweet on lt.gs would look like.

Some people have already commented on the layout, which they consider ugly, so I’m having artsy people look at it. I’m not really a designer ..

This post is the fourth part of a series named “New York”, in which I talk about my trip to New York city in the first week of May 2011. These posts will be loaded with pictures, I took 1050 that week!

View all posts about New York 2011

or read all about day 3!

Monday, May 2nd

This was the first normal weekday that we spent in New York and it was noticable, all the weekend-people had left. Of course it’s never not busy in New York, but it was relatively ‘quiet’. Or “Deir aar not muts piepel” as @HencosMening would say.

Looking west onto the Hudson river

We were all quite tired, because we kind of pushed our limits on saturday and sunday. Doing a lot of stuff in one day. This day, and the ones ahead, were slightly less hectic, but still packed and with all the things we done, we still didn’t see everything.. not even everything that we wanted to see.

So when we woke up, the TV’s went on (of course), and Osama was all over the news; he was dead. So we went outside to get breakfast and all the newspapers were headlining it.

Got him!

Wall Street Journal playing safe: "Reported dead"

They “nailed the bastard” according to the New York Post, and people had been gathering at Times Square and Ground Zero, in fact, they were at Firehouse Ten, where we were just the day before.

We went to the Subway (the sandwich shop, not the transportation one) and I had to teach my parents the entire concept, eventhough we have quite a lot of Subway’s ourself in the Netherlands. My dad just gave up and pointed to some egg muffin. The picture showed two different kinds and he thought he’d get both. Which he didn’t, so he ordered another one. The rest of us did get a real sub though.

Just drop the letters through a giant 'chute'

After all of that, we went to the first ‘attraction’ of that day: the Empire State Building.

Of course more metaldetectors and waiting in line for one of the elevators to get down. Which they’d stuff with people. Maxing it out! Also, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘fast’ unless you been in these elevators.

When we got up there I instantly recognized the guarding rail, because you see it in so many photos, I just never knew they belonged to the ESB.

The view is absolutely amazing! And it beats the view from Top Of The Rock by a magnitude of.. let’s say.. 3.73!

Also the fact that there’s no glass, just a fence with holes big enough for camera’s to go through, makes it the perfect candidate for aerial photographs. There’s not much else to say about this, so here are just some photo’s:

If you happen to fly by and wanna kno where you at..

Tiny people eating tiny sandwiches and drinking from tiny cups.

Some trees. Just chillin'

How much does this remind you of GTA?

When we took the turbo jet-engine elevator back down we went to a McDonalds, so that meant free wi-fi. Checked in to some of the places I went, twitpic’d and instant messaged with my girlfriend back in the Netherlands. I ordered the “Frozen strawberry lemonade”, which is just really a slushie/Slush Puppie.

Art deco?

We then started walking to the MoMa. Or (better?) known as The Museum of Modern Art. We were all rather optimistic about this visit, especially my mother, but it was false hope.

Airplane on ESBs eye-height

The “Contemporary Art” section was, as weird as this may sound, enraging me. It made no sense, there was nothing to ‘see’ and it felt like it was really meaningless. But maybe that’s just me. I really liked the other galleries, the one with photos, the digital age gallery and the typography gallery, where I intensively searched for ‘Comic Sans’, but to no avail.

By the time the chairs were growing out of the walls, the rest of the family was starting to get bored. Thinking back, it was really a bad choice to go to this museum, we should have gone for a history museum or the National Museum of the American Indian.

Harley parked on the street

For reasons I can not remember anymore, we went to our hotel to get some rest? Drink? Choco krispies?

So when we left the hotel again, we walked underneath the Ed Sullivan theater and to find ourselves in the middle of .. Hollywood?

What we saw was a giant crossbow, a man in a black jumpsuit and camera’s. So I took out my camera too, and made some shots.

Turns out this black suited man’s name is Brian Miser or as he likes to call himself: The Human Fuse. The fact that the entire parade was parked in 53th street was no coincidence either, it was of course next to the Ed Sullivan theatre where they film The Late Show with David Letterman.

So that was quite a wake up call.. sort of.

Clean shoes at Grand Central

We then went for dinner and we chose the Planet Hollywood venue right on the Square. Well, let me tell you, this was one of the best, if not *the* best, restaurant we been to. If you strongly disagree, then I guess we made the wrong choices before.

The ambiance in this place is great, movies, props, special lightning, interior, music. They had it all.

The food was great, really big plates and the only time I had the slight feeling that “Everything is bigger in America”. Also, first time we encountered re-fills, which is totally uncommon to us; but great nonetheless :D

Why go to MOMA when you got streetart?

We actually somewhat planned to eat near Times Square, because for the evening our plan was to take the tour bus and do the night tour. The bus was quite late and we were there waiting for quite some time. First in line, so that’s nice. My little sister and I went to sit up front.. Our tour guide: someone they fished from the Apollo theatre. If Bill Cosby and Robert DeNiro would have a baby, it would look like our tour guide, except 55 years younger.

Not sure what this is.. funny with the branches though

Most of the photos turned out really crappy, because taking photos in pitch dark and while sitting atop a moving bus.. well.. do your math.

Futuristic buildings look even more futuristic at night.

It was a great tour and nice to see New York at night without having to drive or walk through the traffic yourself.

Being on a poster, like a boss.

Here are some more night pictures, but these are quite ‘horrible’. However, they *will* give you a slight impression of what it was like.

NYC at night

What my moms Canon manages to do..

Edited version of NYC at night

South Street Seaport at night

Update july 25th, 2011: ifttt.com implented the Last.fm channel and triggers.

I’ve already suggested to the guys over at ifttt.com to add the Last.fm API to their channel for us to interect with (and they’re working on it!). However, untill they actually make this, here’s a quick tip (or lifehack) on how to achieve somewhat of a Last.fm channel.

One of the default If This Then That channels is RSS. On your last.fm page you can see your recent tracks but also loved tracks and similar options, these come with a RSS feed; thus you could interact with it.

Your “Favorite Tracks” URL would be something like this: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/theonewithout/lovedtracks.rss
Where you would want to switch my username (theonewithout) with yours.

Now you can add an action for it. I’m obsessed with twitter, so my action is set to “Post a tweet”.

The ‘command’ looks like this:

I just added "{{EntryTitle}}" to my Last.fm favourites! {{EntryUrl}}

So in the end, our task looks like this:

From (Last.fm) RSS to Twitter

And our tweet like this:

The end result: A tweet

Hope this blogpost can you help you figure out cool stuff!

P.s. All available Last.fm feeds can be found here: http://www.last.fm/api/feeds

This post is the third part of a series named “New York”, in which I talk about my trip to New York city in the first week of May 2011. These posts will be loaded with pictures, I took 1050 that week!

View all posts about New York 2011

or read all about day 2!

Sunday, May 1st

Back home, it would be labor day and I thought it would be so too here in New York, but it wasn’t. What it was though, was supposedly ‘a carless sunday’. All of which to support the “Five boro bike tour”, organised by Bike New York. Unlike the flashmob-like crowd (and feeling) that we encountered yesterday, we knew about this day when we left. Our granddad told us about it, being the avid cyclist he is.

However, when we went around the corner to enter Broadway, there were still enough cars. All of the downtown biking took place on 6th Avenue and everything else seemed to carry on as usual. Slightly less traffic, though.

For breakfast we went to Bagel & Bean on the corner of Broadway and 54th street. Nobody actually got a bagel, but oh well..

Yesterday we went, as you may have read, to Battery park and watched Miss Liberty from a distance. We then already agreed on going there the next day; which happens to be today! We hopped on the tourist bus again and went downtown. Slightly different route, different guide. The guide was meh.. the tour, or more like, the detour was great. Because you get to see different stuff of course. We already saw Ground Zero on saturday, somewhat, but now the bus took us all around the block and we were sitting on the upperdeck which allowed us to watch over the fence and see the square holes for the fountains, which were empty. (Now that I’m writing this, they have one operational!)

We first had to get our Liberty Island tickets in the Castle Clinton monument bookstore, which had a “No gun”-sticker on the window (yes, for us Europeans this is worth mentioning). When we entered through the maingates, the loudspeakers already said that entrance into the statue was full or closed, or whatever. I have no idea what the thing was and somebody had already told us that you have to get there early. We got there 10 o’clock, which isn’t that early, apparently.

Hell yeah, Amsterdam!

Then there was the line, which went from the docking entrance all the way around the westside of the park untill halfway the path that goes right through the park; yes, it was long. But luckily it went fast, so my little sister and I went to get some drinks from one of the many stands and I also bought a ‘churro‘. I knew about these things from Youtube, but had no idea what they were. They’re ‘sticks’ made from dough and somewhat remind me of pancakes. A bit dry though.

Apparently, a really old building

Anyhow, like I said in my post about day 2, we’d encounter more airport-style security, one of which was this ferry. But then again, you’re going to the most famous landmark in the States, if not the entire world; Statue of Liberty.

So after the long line and some annoying Italians infront of us, we went through security and got on the boat. Which was rocking heavily, which must have been due to it’s location, the ‘north’ shore. My little sister, dad and I went up top, on the upper deck, where I quickly seized an open spot near the railing, ’cause it was crowded!

After we started pulling away from the shoreline and the oh so famous skyline became apparent, all the waiting, annoying people, losing 10 bucks *coughcough*, the security, it all faded away; “This is New York!”

We then arrived at Liberty Island, the Island on which the Statue of Liberty resides. About 200 people were waiting to get onto our boat, oh yes; “This is New York, too”.  Tourist-y.

While the number of people on shore scared me, the number of people that left our boat wasn’t that great and it only felt like 50 people were on the island. Trying to get a photograph from your relatives and the statue was hard though. Not only did you have to kneel, but everybody had the same idea. So in some photos you could see 3 other people/couples/families take somewhat the same picture. But hey.. there you are.. at the foot of this massive statue that the entire world knows about, a statue that is practically in every movie that starred New York.

Pier A, clocktower

Then there was the NY skyline again. Wow. Watching all the helicopters fly over, the boats, the cars on the other side of the river, very nice. But we shouldn’t forget the island it self, it was a gorgeous day and we walked around the island, to the back of the statue where there’s a little park and a place to eat. So  I got a bacon cheeseburger and not the kind you get at McDonalds. It was a real bun, real burger and slightly less chemical cheese. Accompanied with some chips and lettuce.

We then went to sit at the ‘riverside’ and that’s where I took the photo above, which should been a 360 degree photo for you to really ‘feel’ it. Also, if you look closely, you can see the building on Ellis Island on the left side of the photograph. It was really relaxing, away from all of the city buzz.

We then left the island and went to the ferry’s next stop; Ellis Island. We didn’t get off, because we weren’t that interested, so we just stayed seated. Then a seagull pooped on my dad, bingo!

Give it up for the Empire State Building!

When we went pass Ground Zero on the busride that morning, my sisters saw “Century 21“. It’s an outlet store with designer brands. So our plan was, to walk past Ground Zero and visit the memorial museum first and then go to this outlet store. Well.. my plan changed once I walked into the store.. you know.. on secondhand, I’d rather wait outside. So my dad and I went outside and went to sit on some steps across the street. Watching people and cars come by. Also quite some jews with the curly sideburn hair, just like you see in Antwerp, Belgium.

Saving people, not sure what this statue actually is for..

To find the museum, I had to use a tiny map in the guidebook, because we were on some outer edge corner of the ground zero block. So after some streetcrossing we found the street the museum was in and on the corner was “FDNY Ten House”. This was the firehouse of engine 10 and ladder 10. On the westside of the building was a giant bronze relief plaque as a memorial and monument for September 11th.

9/11 Memorial plaque

This firehouse lost 6 members that day and was partially destroyed as it laid literally at the foot of the Twin Towers.

So here we were, a day too early really, because the next day they’d announce the death of Osama Bin Laden and people and newsagencies would gather near this memorial and Ground Zero in general.

We then went into the Tribute WTC museum. It was quite emotional, especially the personal stories and just the entire ‘people’ aspect. Because numbers and names start to get real people behind them. It’s not seatnumber 12D anymore.. it’s ‘ John Doe’, father of 2 and passionate about building motorcycles. It’s really weird when you start to think like that, after 42 years of walking the earth, you die in a terrorist attack because some dickhead misinterprets some ‘religious’ book and thinks he can become ‘an hero’ when he dies a martyr.

There’s a wall with “Missing person” flyers.. I just skipped that entirely, couldn’t handle it. On the other side they showcased stuff they found in the rubble; burned creditcards, deformed cellphones (really old ones!) but also firefighter badges and stuff from people that were on the plane.

Random corner and intersection in NY

When we left the museum, I felt somewhat awkward. You leave an emotional and quiet place.. and then all of the sudden you’re out in the street again, people, cars and noises. There’s always noise in New York. Which makes places like Liberty Island so liberating (yes, pun intended), like I said before.

Anyway, the ‘thing’ my older sister had waited all day for; Century 21. I don’t believe they bought anything. I can’t remember either. “Shopping” is the worst invention ever.

NYSE - New York Stock Exchange

Next landmark: Wall Street.

It was kinda dissapointing. I knew there’d be only just this one building. But it got overtowered by quite some buildings, was lying in the shadow of everything and was not very ‘reachable’.

But it was also more of a lucky coincidence, because we wanted to go to the Brooklyn bridge, so we just dropped by Wall Street. Then we walked north through some ‘normal’  blocks. Which was fun to see as well, because not much tourists come there.

Wall Street

We then started ‘climbing’ the Brooklyn Bridge. The walking bit was divided into two sections, one for cyclists and one for pedestrians. Just not all pedestrians were able to understand this system, so a lot of annoyed cyclists and squeaky brakes. The Brooklyn Bridge is actually looking the prettiest from the water and when you’re on top of it, it’s hard to see it’s beauty. It’s quite pretty though, just before the first tower, to look to the west, over South Street Seaport where you can see the water and the road curling around the island.

Something else that I found pretty, were the padlocks on the tower. I’m not really sure what they mean, but I bet it’s supposed to symbolize ‘eternal love’. It was a funny sight. (I googled, read more about it here and see it here!)

We didn’t really cross the bridge, and why would you? We did go to Brooklyn, don’t worry, just not on ‘this’ day!

We then walked back to the nearest busstop which was behind the City Hall, which by the way is a great building, but I don’t think we even got a photo of it, or at least not in full view.

A weird angle on NY's City Hall

Then onto the bus.. If you’re staying in New York for longer than a day, then I really suggest you get passes for this bus, because it’s amazing. We once again got another guide; a great one. I’d say he was the best. He was a sobered up drugs and alcohol ‘addict’, he had some rockstar thing going on and was funny in a cynical kind of way. Straight to the point and direct, just like us Dutch people.

"Tiles for America" - paintings made by children in honor of 9/11

We first went round Battery Park (again) but this time we got new information. We passed a giant golden globe which was dented in, we thought this was supposed to be art, but it turns out this was the globe that stood on WTC plaza in 2001 and got smashed by the debris. Now it’s a timeless reminder in a beautiful park.

We then went through South Street Seaport, pass the United Nations building, the police museum and old boats called “Peking”. Okay, just this one boat.

We then entered China Town, where we had been before, but different guide means different story. So he managed to tell about how you can get from New York to Boston for just 15 dollar with this Chinese company. Another thing he liked to point out was that you can find anything here. The Chinese McDonald’s is funny too..

We were really lucky this guy was funny, because it was 6pm and it started to get cold and besides all of that, we merely got on the bus to get back home to Times Square. Next time we should just take the sub, but my dad didn’t feel comfortable.

I’m not sure where we ate that day, or what we ate. But we did go to the Wallgreen’s (supermarket/grocery store) on the middle of Times Square to get some water. We then also started to realize we were somewhat sunburnt from half the day on the open water, with the gorgeous weather. So no complaining here!

Ads on Times Square, from my sisters mobile phone

So we walked down Times Square as if it was daylight, but it wasn’t, it was 8pm and dark. The lights (and advertisements) are enormous and everywhere, everywhere!

We sure slept well that night.

At work today, my colleague needed to add, or rather ‘insert’, a value into an existing array AND on a specific index. This because we fed it into a JS table sorter thing, once we pulled it through json_encode().

We couldn’t find any existing Array function at php.net, so I decided to make my own version.

At first I wanted it to work with associative arrays too, but it got complicated fast and at the time we didn’t even need it; feature creep. So for now it only works with numeric array keys.

What it does..
First it checks whether the index you supplied ($index) is available in the array ($array), if so, dissects the array in half, starting from the point you supplied ($index) (there’s no default function for this either, so I used array_slice). You now have a ‘first’ and a ‘last’ array. Then you add your value ($value) to the first array, merge both arrays back together, and you’re done!

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function array_push_insert($array, $index, $value) {
	if (array_key_exists($index, $array)) {
		$firstArray = array_slice($array, 0, ($index + 1));
		$lastArray = array_slice($array, ($index + 1));
		array_push($firstArray, $value);
		$array = array_merge($firstArray, $lastArray);
	}
	return $array;
}

Example
We call the function and supply it with our original array, the index after which we want our new value to be inserted and the value itself. So in the next example, we want to add the letter “D” after the “B”, and this value’s key is 1. So we send in the array ($array), the key (1) and our new value (“D”).

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$array = array(
	"A", // 0
	"B", // 1
	"C" // 2
);
 
$finalArray = array_push_insert($array, 1, "D");

So when we print_r() the $finalArray, it looks like this:

Array ( 
[0] => A 
[1] => B 
[2] => D 
[3] => C 
)

New York as seen from the GE building

This post is the second part of a series named “New York”, in which I talk about my trip to New York city in the first week of May 2011. These posts will be loaded with pictures, I took 1050 that week!

View all posts about New York 2011

Saturday, April 30th

The first real and ‘full’ day for a simple small town family from the Netherlands to wander around in the Big Apple.

Looking for a place to eat, because we didn’t have breakfast included in our hotel and why should you? So the place we ended up had the great name of.. Europa Cafe. I already knew what I wanted, American pancakes. They were quite nice, but not overly special..

We had ordered a 3-day ticket for the City Sights NY bus, an open top bus that drives around the island and lets you ‘hop on, hop off’ whenever you want. So if you stop by some interesting place, you just get off and when you’re done, you get on the next bus. Now that I’m writing this.. isn’t that just the meaning of a bus? Oh well, all for the tourists I guess.

American flags waving outside

So besides a cop on every corner, on that same corner, you’ll find a guy in a yellow raincoat jacket asking if you need a bus pass.. every time. Because nothing screamed “tourists” like we did. I hate that.. I always try to act as if I’m a local, haha.

TV News van on the streets of New York

Anyhow, like I said, we ordered them and had to pick them up in the Planet Hollywood souvenir store, right in the middle of Times Square, which was PACKED! They were holding a race, or a walk, or something along those lines. It was called either Revlon Run or “Walk For Women”. They had built an entire stage on top of the stairs on Times Square (which we didn’t find out until the next day, when we could see the stairs! “Oh yes, those are there too..”)

Then I saw a mom with a little girl who was wearing an orange shirt and an orange tiara; Queensday! Back in Holland it would have been Koninginnedag (queensday) which is always on april 30th. Of course the girl was Dutch and not just an American princess whose favourite color was orange. In fact, we could ‘hear’ a lot of Dutch people in New York and you can ‘see’ it. We used to do bets and go like “There, 2 o’clock.. Dutch family”. It’s funny, because you expect you can just talk Dutch and have no one understand what you’re saying, so a lot of times I pretended to be English..

So, anyway, we got there and it took quite a while, but I blame that on my mom’s English. It was often, during this trip, that my sister or I had to step in and take over the conversation and it created a great catchphrase throughout the entire week when my dad kept saying, during the first days: “whare dew yew tink we kem vrom?”. My dad is probably the worst at English, yet the most eager to strike a conversation. I’ve got a great story coming up, evolving around this, but it’s not until wednesday the 3rd of May.

The "Flat Iron" building

So after asking where the nearest bus stop was, we started crossing the ‘square’. Times Square isn’t really a square, it’s a triangle made by Broadway and 7th Avenue. Just in time for the start of the walk, we reached the sidewalk. We probably got on the bus at Madame Tussuad’s, or which ever stop was closest by and got on the ride.

Every time we took the bus, we had a different guide. The first one was a New Yorker from Queens with an Italian accent, really funny and one of the best. We finally got to see New York, but unfortunately I was in the front of the bus and the windows on the sides were scratched, so all those photos didn’t work out well. The frontwindow was almost invisible, so I got some good pictures!

Old buildings and old streets

We had to get off at Battery Park, if we wanted or not, and if we wanted to get back home, to Times Square, we could get on the next bus. But we were thirsty, undeceicisve and 20% of our party was cold! It wasn’t that nice weather yet in New York and my mom thought, due to the forecast, that she didn’t need to bring a coat or jacket. So there she was, in her parachute-like shirt/blouse thing. Later that day, it turned into nice weather, the sun just had trouble coming through at 10 in the morning! We went to a Subway on the corner, bought some drinks and took the next bus ‘home’.

But not before wandering around Battery Park, the Castle Clinton monument, the docks and the ferries to Liberty Island and Ellis Island.

Three statues of Liberty, can you see which one is sitting?

Battery Park logo?

Tunnel building near Battery Park

One of the brownest squirrels in Battery Park

After we got warmed up we went out again and decided to go to “Top of the rock”. This observation deck on top of the GE building, located at Rockefeller Plaza, hosts, among other things, the NBC studios and gives you a view from midtown Manhattan at 850 feet (or 260 meters)

New York as seen from the GE building

Street below "30 Rock"

Looking the Empire State Building right into the eyes

With the highest buildings in the Netherlands at 10 stories (okay, I’m a bit generalizing here) it was weird to go up so high in the air and what was even more weird, were the thrillride like elevators. At a certain point the floor indicator said “XX” because else people would get scared of how fast they went up, I bet. You had to ‘pop’ your ears due to the quick change in altitude, or maybe just we tourists needed to do that.

My little sister and I dashed straight outside, sticking our heads over the edge, as far as it allowed us. No fear of heights, what so ever. What a great view! Unbelievable. We walked around the tower, staring into the distances at all four sides. And to think that the best observation deck still had to come! ;) (giveitupfortheESB!)

Oh, what I forgot to mention.. before you can even get impressed by the sheer beauty, you have to go through metal detectors and put all your stuff in boxes. If it weren’t for the body scans, it’d be just like airport security. We encountered more severe security checks later that week, and luckily they didn’t take that long, but still..

Little church between buildings

After that we walked pass St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which later that week would be the scene of many TV channels when the pope was in the news and important religious New Yorkers went to that church. Following that same 5th avenue north, we came by big designer names such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the like. But more importantly, hehe, we went to the famous glass cube building with the giant bitten apple logo; the Apple store! It was massively crowded..

We then ‘hopped’ on the bus again, this time the Uptown line, which brought us up all the way to Harlem, past Central Park, the Hudson river and the famous Apollo theater.. or not that famous? My battery power was gone so my mom was taking pictures and she told me that if I saw something, she’d ‘shoot’ it for me. So I said “Take a picture of the Apollo”.. and she wondered why. I must confess it looks, from the outside, just like a theater with a neon sign. The weirdest thing, the guide (not the Italian guy anymore, but some incomprehensible young woman) didn’t mention it either. Later at home, I looked into the books and guides that we bought and they all mentioned it.

Wide street

Harlem was.. kinda scary. One little kid thought he was P. Diddy and was jumping up and down on his front porch while miming he was slitting his throat. Smiling the entire time through though. Scaring tourists ftw.

The color green looks like this..

We then went home again, it was getting cold as well. We ate at a place called Lindy’s. Apparently they’re praised for their cheesecake, but we didn’t want dessert. The food was horrible. Literally, and that’s not something I often say! It was also way too overpriced.

So if you’re going to New York, do not go to Lindy’s, not even ‘to see for yourself’. I forbid you! I wish I had seen the reviews on the internet or Foursquare sooner.