Istanbul, from the rooftop with a beer

Sitting on the rooftop in Istanbul. Sun shining down drinking a beer (Efes, which isn't half bad I guess). The view is amazing and takes in much of Istanbul with a view over the Bospherus. Across the river the city keeps sprawling and is littered with thousands if buildings, mostly all old and with down. Towering above them, the Galata Tower. Amazing and impressive considering it was constructed in 1348 and is still completely intact today. On this side of the city, the skyline is littered with buildings new and old but all have the one same strange similarity. Satellite dishes. So strange how some buildings were built before anyone dreamed of satellite TV but now they all have the ugly things pointing out from them. Some rusty, some long broken and forgotten. Can't describe this view without talking about the mosques and minarets. They are everywhere, even if you can't see the mosque you can see its minarets. Amazing to think this city was the centre if Christianity for a long while and now all you see ate minarets. Its the crossroads of east and west, literally. One side if the Bospherus is Europe and the other Asia. You can feel it looking at it. I can't explain it. The way the clouds rush by and explode upwards, the way boats are constantly going in and out and even the way the birds all hover and patrol over the river. Very cool view. Now, my beer is almost finished and the sun is behind clouds. Its still an amazing view.

Update: I just ordered another beer.

I'm Back!

My last post was randomly reviewing TV series in 2012...like anyone was actually logging onto my blog to read my thoughts and comments.

Anyways, the blog posts that I did make while travelling in London and Spain turned out to be pretty good because I would not have remembered those days and events as well if I only had pictures of them. Therefore, instead of keeping a journal I think i'm going to do the same blog post/diary style entries for my trip to Europe this year.

I guess I'll give the URL out to a few people who may or may not actually read this but it will be more for me to look back on in an attempt to save the memory of all the little details I'll no doubt forget in the future.

It's Thursday now and I leave in 2 days! I feel pretty calm about the whole trip, not really stressing about anything. I guess if you've travelled a bit you get more and more comfortable with going away and don't worry about the little things like what to pack and if you've sorted all the details of your trip out before hand etc.

So my trip is sort of broken into 3 parts in my mind. First is the trip with my dad that includes Istanbul, Greece and finally Milan. Then I have my 'solo trip' to Sicily for 2 and half weeks followed by a mini trip to mainland Italy doing Rome and Florence with friends.
I'll break it down to my thoughts:

• I can't wait to be chilling in Greece on the beach, having the odd frape and devouring the food
• It will be interesting to see family in Greece I haven't seen either ever or since 1998 when I really wasn't paying attention!
• Istanbul will be interesting...but I bet it's awesome.
• I will probably have this feeling that i'm so close to the Greek islands and be frustrated that i'm not going there! (Murphy's Bar anyone?)
• Seeing Milan and doing Lake Como and Swiss Alps from there will be cool and something I haven't done before. I think Milan will be better than I've been told it is, then again it might be exactly as I've been told!
• Sicily...well know knows. I've wanted to go for a few years now. Why? I don't know, complicated I guess. More on this when I'm there or about to depart I think.
• Hostels in Sicily should be good. Palermo could be very good and I imagine Taormina/Giardini Naxos could be either awesome or a bit flat. All depends on the people staying there. There are good time to be had, probably great times. All depends.
• Driving in Sicily should be fine. I'd guess at the start I might be a bit stressed but I'm confident I'll be driving like a Siciliano by the end.
• Getting to Rome and catching up with Nick and Charles will be epic after travelling alone for 2 and a half weeks! Food, drinks, nights out... Unimaginable potential!
• Looking forward to doing Rome and Florence without the pressure or doing touristy things the whole time. Live life as close to the locals as possible.
• Coming home. BOO. I think i'll be violent at the prospect. Leaving Florence at 6am will also be a test. 

So there, thought dump before I leave. I guess I'll post again when I'm in the land of the Turks (who thought I'd be going there!?).

The Best of TV in 2012

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A few weeks ago I started making notes about what I thought the best shows of the year were. Since then I've kept coming back and elaborating more and more and this is the end result. 

Television is clearly experience a sort of golden age right now in terms of the quality of the shows and storylines in them. Further to this the calibre of actors being atracted to these shows is also the highest it has ever been. All together this makes picking the best of the year difficult if not imposible. I can't watch every single series currently airing, therfore this list ranks the best shows I've watched during 2012.

Revolution Review

So, currently I'm about 30 mins into the 3rd episode of the new tv show Revolution and I thought I would spill some thoughts.

*I've actually paused the show because I couldn't be bothered watching the rest. 

Yesterday I saw that the show had been picked up for a full first season. I don't get it.

I'll admit when I saw the teaser for the show I was very intrigued. All of the sudden everything that requires power in the world stops working, phones, lights, heating, cars etc. Awesome idea and a crazy possibility to think about. I had a look at the actors in the show and was excited to see names like Elizabeth Mitchell, Tim Guinee and especially Gustavo Fring Giancarlo Esposito.

Gus Fring, still a badass even without power.

The first episode had issues that got me worried, then the next two had more.
Here is my current list:

1) Tim Guinee's character dies...okay, but he was a good actor compared to the other no-names?
2) The trek from their 'village' to Chicago goes pretty quickly (not sure how far away it was but it felt like it should've taken longer)
3) Oh no, some random douche bag pretty boy has been cast who clearly can't act for shit.
4) So guns are rare? I guess...wait doesn't America have a shitload of guns? Like every person has one, or more?? There are gun shops. I'm tempted to say there are more guns in America than any other country? So why are all modern guns rare and people have to use old school guns? Makes. No. Sense.
5) Because of the above issue, militia (the shows version of army or cops) use..swords. Swords? They are good with swords also. Right.
6) Why should I care about the brother? This annoying chick is walking around the place finding her uncle and some other woman to get her brother back. Seems like there is more pressing issues the audience want to address. Like the POWER PROBLEM.
7) Mr Esposito is so underused. Criminal.
8) The leader of the country (one of many in the former USA) is that guy? But he is young. How do people take him seriously? How is he the leader? Couldn't the showrunners cast someone a bit older that I would actually be afraid of. Like say. Giancarlo Esposito? He was on Sea Patrol.
9) There is a fat IT dude who used to run Google or something walking around with some random chick who is dead boring and must die imminently. I actually care about this breakaway story the most because it seems to be directly dealing with the POWER ISSUE!! (note: that chick serves no purpose at all. At all. Die now)
10) my biggest problem and the one that shows how random this show is. The mum is alive....Alive? WTF. And she is chilling with Monroe in some library doing some bookkeeping. Right. No words.

Too many problems for this show to last in my opinion. It has some potential but overall meh.
I'll see what the end of this episode brings but honestly all I'm interested in is
WHY DID THE POWER GO OFF AND HOW CAN THEY FIX IT. 

Mystery USB drive / necklace that makes power work

Don't care about finding the brother, why the mum is alive and what she's doing and certainly don't care about that other woman following the Google nerd around.
Will I still watch...probably.
But it's getting harder every episode.

6 Months Later

So it been around 6 months since my last post. Feels like a lot hasn't happened in that time but I guess it has. I never finished off the Spain posts, pretty standard.

 

Testing out a new blog app for iPad because for some unknown reason blogger doesn't have one but they do for iPhone???

Blogsy for iPad

Posted with Blogsy

Indiana Jones and The Holy Grail

The one thing we knew about Valencia before we came was that it had a massive aquarium area with crazy buildings and museums. So we set off for the area catching a metro train and walking a fair distance until we discovered it.

Very impressive, huge buildings with crazy designs all surrounded by water and other features. The Oceanografic was cool but mostly disappointing. The buildings and area itself look so amazing that the okay features of the aquarium itself felt like a letdown.

Moving on we decided to check out the science museum and the Indy expo they had on. Disappointed that you couldn't take photos inside because they had everything! Heaps of artifacts from the film like the stones in Temple, the golden head from Ark, the actual Ark, the cross that young Indy gets, the staff of Ra etc etc etc even had the Holy Grail. it was awesome. Plus they had real archeology items and information as well. Very cool expo.

Next day we spent shopping and walking around. We stopped in a plaza at one point to take some photos of a church that looked cool. It had a tower and we could see people up there so we decided to see if we could go up. We claimed if it was under 5 euro we'd do it. So we walked into some entrance saw a sign for 4.50 euro and paid at the counter. We were in a huge church and it looked cool, I was thinking it would be cool to have a look before we climbed. Then the lady tells us that we can do a self guided tour with audio of the whole cathedral and each important section has a number that we enter on our audio thing to hear commentary. She then says the numbers go from 1 to 18 with 18 being The Holy Grail which we can see in a room to our right. Pause.
The Holy Grail!?
We entered this church trying to climb the tower and we ended up finding the Holy Grail? Nice.
The cathedral was awesome, had lots of original paintings and crazy designs everywhere. Even had a saints hand, yep, hundreds of years old and you could see it. Weird.

Did we climb the tower? Yes. We realized that when we walked in the right door was the church and the left door was the tower. Fate led us to the right door and discovery of the Holy Grail, which we had now seen 2 of in 2 days.

Ps: the tower was massive, like massive. And it had steps. The whole way. I nearly DIED walking up.

La Crida by chance

So we turned up to Valencia and got out if the train at about 2. The hotel wasn't far so we walked it and about halfway there explosions start going off. The area we were in was dead, the streets dirty and graffiti everywhere. I thought we walked into Iraq! Huge fireworks were going off in the city just in front of us. Later thousands of people spilled out of the city center on their way home. We had no idea what was going on

Late that day after going for lunch and struggling to find anything open we got home and had a mini siesta. Outside our window we could hear noise and people singing with drums banging. Using trusty Twitter I searched for what was going on and found out at 8pm everyone was meeting at these towers at the top if the old city for some event.
So we got changed and finally got out then it was easy. Follow the crowd. Massive number of people were all walking to the same place do we followed. Along the way we were walking with a matching band, drumming and chanting the whole way. People were dressed up in costume or in colors of their local communities or churches. We got to the Torres de Serranos and I'm pretty sure there was already thousands of people there.
Music played over speakers as dancers hung from a crane dancing over the crowd. The Queen of the festival got on stage and did a speech then declared the Fallas Festival open. Crowd goes wild. Light go off, like all electricity in the area was cut off. It's dark. Then fireworks start going off. It was nuts. Some of the craziest fireworks I've seen.

So that was our random discovery of Valencia on day one. Pretty damn cool and totally unplanned.