nerdiness

Here's how nerdy I am:



What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:
Somewhat nerdy. I mean face it, you are nerdier than about half the test takers.

Here's a clip from Gran Canaria, it's all Christina's work. If you'd like to vote for it or leave a comment, here's the link on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc0qebQl2Fk

copenhagen pics

Copenhagen

Last weekend we took a break and we flew to Copenhagen. Why Copenhagen? Well, last year, I had a special offer from Easyjet, some 10-15 pounds off the next booking, or 25?! I can't remember. I needed to book something by a certain date in order to claim the discount. So I looked at the cheapest destinations we can go to and Copenhagen was one of them. As we haven't been to Copenhagen before and it was a cheap flight even before the discount, why not?

We had to fly at early hours in the day, use night bus and leave our place at 3am. Not that nice as you're tired for the whole day. Anyway, no pain, no gain.

In Copenhagen we started walking around the city and on the main commercial street (I forgot the name now). We walked to see the Little Mermaid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid in the first day. It was a long walk. We also managed to see some snow there and have some snow fights :-)
In the second day, we decided to take buses to do things quicker. The only walk was following the guard and seeing the change of guard at the palace. It was raining but that didn't stop us and didn't stop about 100 other people that were there to see the change of guard. From there we visited a round church across the street from the Palace. Quite unusual to see a round church.
Then we hopped on a bus and we went to take the tour of the Carlsberg brewery. You have to cross through the Elephant gate ... a gate with the statues of 4 elephants on the side. The tour is quite nice, you learn about the history of beer making in Denmark and the history of the Carlsberg brewery. They also have a collection of bottles. At the entrance they have a Skoll bottle for some reason. Chris noticed it was Made in Romania and it was in romanian. :-)
We also had vouchers for free drinks included in the price, so we ended up tasting the beer (me) and coke (Chris - she hates beer).

From there we took a bus all the way to Christiania: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania
It's an interesting place, a different world. Not much pavement there, not much street lighting, not so tidy, with people setting barrels alight for warming up (like homeless people would do - they make it for fun though as they live there). We also entered a coffee shop and we had a coffee and a hot chocolate. I ordered a beer but the barman said .. No alcohol. The people that we saw there were mainly hippy style.
At some point 4 police officers, all looking 2m by 2m, entered the pub and they started looking around, without saying anything. Apparently this happens a lot, as the Danish government wants to crack down on the area, seen as a centre for drug trade. The policemen were quite scary. The barman started filming with a digital camera, as soon as they got in. I asked him ... why do you film them? Because sometimes they do stupid things, he told me.
Yeap, reading the story on wikipedia, it seems like they had a long hate relationship with the police.
I must say that being there at night, with not much street lighting, was a bit scary. It was mainly the unknown I guess. But then in the pub, they had the Christiania rules printed on the wall. Some of them are:

No Stealing
No Violence
No hard drugs (light drugs you can buy on the streets)
No bike gangs
No guns
No bullet proof vests

So, after reading that, I felt a bit safer. Although reading the description on wikipedia, you learnt that there have been murders sometimes in the commune, but not as many as in the rest of world I suppose.

So that was the trip to Copenhagen. On the way back Easyjet flight was quite late, so we had to take the night bus again and by 2am we were at home. A bit tiring but worth it.

travelling

Tomorrow we're getting on a flight to Copenhagen, Denmark where we'll spend the weekend. I've printed already the to-do and to-see list. It promises to be an enjoyable trip, although a bit colder than London.
What else is in the pipeline?

Chronologically:

1. March - a week in Portugal, 4 guys, renting a car and travelling between Lisbon and Porto. One of them speaks portuguese, so we won't have a problem. Just in case, I'm taking my romanian-portuguese phraise book. Tudo bom!

2. Easter - we're planning a trip to Italy, the plan so far is to fly to Milan, rent a car and then drive all the way to Venice where we leave the car and fly back. On the way we can hit: Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Padova. It's not booked yet, but likely to be soon. 4 days trip.

3. April 21/22 - a short weekend in Budapest, meeting up with my sister and her future-to-be husband. In the heart of Magyar country.

4. 5-7 May - 3 day trip to Munich, Germany. We'll be with 2 friends, one of them german, so again, no problems. Just preparing our stomachs for lots of sausages and beer :-)

5. We also think about a trip in late May, nothing yet decided.

6. End of june - early July - 2 weeks in Romania at my sister's wedding and travelling a bit around Romania. Brasov very likely, maybe even the Black Sea coast, who knows?!

7. For august we're thinking of a trip to Scotland with Lilian maybe when she's coming here. Details not yet finalised.

So it's all good huh? :-)

Ad generation

Here's an interesting project, it was a thesis project at at Parsons The New School for Design.
Basically it takes corporate slogans and buzz words, mixes them together to generate new slogans. Then it automatically takes images from Flickr and generates fake advertisements.

The goal of the project is to “show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold.”

It's fun to watch.

http://www.theadgenerator.org/

I know I haven't written in a long while ... I have a good excuse: Laziness!
Now, I am due to write about my travel experiences in New York and Gran Canaria. I will. I have some pics too.
In the meantime, let me post some pics of me in the office :-)