Our Top of the Rocks experience

I think you can't leave a city without admiring its lights above a higher place. Especially when we're talking about New York! Before we actually went up to the tower, there was a brief introduction about the building of Rockefeller Center with some comment clips. I immediately got a flashback of a history lesson in middle school. I remembered this black and white photo where a group of lads were casually sitting on a steel pipe high above New York City having lunch.  Apparently, the workers also used to take naps there between working hours. Good to know not all the history lessons were useless!

But back to our experience. We intended to go up to the tower during daytime, but despite our fairly early reservation, we got tickets for 6 pm - and by that time it would be dark. There are a few upsides and downsides for visiting Top of the Rocks when it's dark.

+ The lights look awesome. 

- It's almost impossible to get a great photo of you with the lights of New York

Okay, I guess if you're a professional photographer taking photos up there would be a piece of cake. But for us, it was a struggle trying to adjust perfect amount of light and contrast while focusing on our faces. In the end, it wasn't worth the effort. I saw others were experiencing the same problem, desperately trying to add light to their faces with the help of their phone. I don't know if they succeeded better than us.

Then, my little brother came to me and told me they found a cool room on the lower deck. He called it "the gaming room" because it kept making beeping noises just like a Nintendo. On top of that, it had white walls with flashing lights in blue, red, green and yellow. Seemingly, a Finnish guy overheard us while marveling the room and asked if we wanted a picture over there. I don't know why but none of us responded to him. After I realized he had asked again and was waiting for an answer, I quickly said "Yeah, that would be nice" and handed my camera to him. It was just super weird to hear Finnish in that state of mind, especially when it was a stranger talking to you. So, here's a happy family portrait taken in the weird room by a random Finnish guy, who made us speechless simply by talking to us in our native language.