Category: reisen

It’s already September

Some people are complaining about the absence of information on my blog. So, a few lines:

As I wrote in my last post, I went to NYC to improve my English a little bit. Writing is still hard for me, but understanding and speaking is better as before. The first picture is a little restaurant at the 8th Avenue / West 38th Street in NYC where I was quite often at lunch time. They have a nice salad bar and the food was always fresh and delicious.

I visited a lot of places, especially museums but I  loved to walk through the Prospect Park and to see the skaters in the Central  Park too. I visited the Guggenheim Museum. It saw Rineke Dijkstras Retrospective there and Ghost in the Machine in the New Museum.

I found the High Line by accident. I saw a documentary about this place in Switzerland, but I forgot it entirely. But one day I walked the 14th Street from east to west, looked up and thought “Oliver, you know this old rail bridge.”

Another nice trip was to go to the Coney Island Beach and Boardwalk. I did it together with Masu – a Rapper from Japan (Hey, do you still have a sentence of the day?).

Oh, New York City. It was such a great experience!  Greetings to all there, which I met. Special thanks to Heather and Nick. It was fun to stay at your home! On 10 August, I flew back.

One week later our family and friends of us went to the dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel (Germany). After three weeks without my family it was nice  to be reunited.

And the last two weeks? Now I’m a tenant in the gleis70 – Mixwerk here in Zurich. I have a table, a chair, power, internet and my computer.

I program, I watch the episodes of CleanCoders and I read a lot.  I still try to help vert.x a little bit. But it is more difficult as expected. My first github pull request was rejected, because of to much structural changes.

First week in NYC

Okay, I,m already staying for one week in New York City. And I want to write a few sentences about my impressions. First of all, it is saver as I know it from the movies.  I run every morning and everybody says “Hi” or “How are you?”. I like that. I go every working day to school to improve my English. The teacher there is just amazing. We have so much fun with this guy. He was traveling a lot and he lived in Prag for 7 years. Btw the name of the school is New York Language Center and I can recommend it.

My favorite place is the subway. The reason is: It is cold and I can read a lot. It is not so warm here in New York but the humility is quite high compared to Zurich.

Last Tuesday I joint  Brooklyn Code. There was a great table with a lot of laptops on top of it and the coders sitting in front of it. It was a nice experience to see and here how there are working in Brooklyn – very kind
A evening later I listened to a presentation of Jason van Zyl in one of this big hotels here in New York. He introduced the new product of sonatype called “Insight”. A lot of people know Jason because he is the inventor of Apache Maven and btw he is a good speaker too.people and good talks.  I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to come to the meeting.

On Wednesday evening I was at the Rooftop BBQ Summer Tech Mixer at one of the New York City’s best roof top bars, as they describe this place beside the Williamsburg Bridge. A lot of entrepreneurs, software engineers, foreigners ( I was not alone ) and  students eating, drinking and talking together. The funny

thing about this bar is: It’s on the second floor.

I visited the Time Square of course and walked along the 5, 6 and 7 Avenue. On last Saturday I was in the Central Park. There are so many things to look to. I was sitting on a bench for more then two hours only watching Beach-Volleyball. These guys are very good in this.

The Friday before I was in the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). A very friendly woman invited me to come with her into the museum, so I saved the 25 Dollars.  Yesterday I visited the Met (Metropolian Museum of Art). They have very nice pictures from the 20. Century. I was very impressed. And I found one of my favorite pictures “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” from Caspar David Friedrich too. I didn’t know about the existence of three versions of this picture.

I was in the American Museum of Natural History too. (Uhhh… I did a lot in the last week.) I like the exhibition about the dinosaurs. There are nice exhibits in full size.

So, I have to finish now. It is more a list of what I did as a description of my impressions. But I’m writing this story  in English and I’m still slow with typing.

Bye for the moment!