Downtime in London

I promised a quick blog entry about my London break, so I should put something down I guess... It's just after midnight on Saturday night here in Lisbon and I'm lounging in the hotel Piano Bar with a beer celebrating the completion of a migration that was really looking bad for a while there.

Yesterday was a bit of a shocker with almost nothing going our way with the IT systems. Because of a number of factors the site we were migrating was almost unworkable. Despite things looking good on the surface, as soon as we started any serious work everything started to go wrong. Finally around 11pm we began to successfully diagnose problems and rectify things, allowing us to progress. By 4am we were in a position we should have been in at 9pm but at least it was something. I must be getting soft as I haven't had to do an 18 hour day in a long time. All the hard work paid off though with things going fairly smoothly today and allowing us to finish around 10pm (only an eleven hour day - easy!). At this stage tomorrow is looking like a lazy day on the beach.... (just got back, it was pretty sweet... no waves but finally I got burnt nicely!)

But back to London. With the Warsaw migration being a bit of a pain, I was pretty wiped out for the first day or so, but with the warm weather in London finally arriving it was good to just relax around the house in the sunny back yard (tanning even) for most the day on Sunday. I had to work a little on Monday and Tuesday but the great thing about IT is that you can do your job anywhere in most cases, so I didn't have to go into the office or anything. Aside from these little holiday-disturbances I got a chance to show Ghizlane around town a little (I still love hanging out around Trafalgar Square, and Westminster Abbey is cool the third time) and do some things like shopping (can't remember the last time I went shopping in London!!). I also got to hang with my sister as we hadn't seen a lot of each other recently which was great just going to dinner/drinks with her and her mates etc.

On a whim a few months earlier I'd bought tickets to a Prince concert (just because I got the chance to get them pre-general sale) and although I wasn't that thrilled at the idea leading up to it, the concert that Wednesday night was bloody awesome. I haven't really followed his music for a few years, but he hasn't put out that much to follow so I still knew a lot of the songs he played. Rather than doing what many critics were suggesting he didn't just play his 'greatest hits', lots of stuff was from the newer albums. Our seats weren't amazing, but for 35 quid, you can't argue! The man is a real performer and even if you didn't know ANY of the music, he's still worth going and seeing just for the stage show itself. Bloody awesome..

The next day I actually had to go to work for while (bah!) but it wasn't a long day. In an effort to get some culture Lany, Stoney and Matti and I decided to go and see The Mousetrap. It's a famous old play based on a famous old murder mystery written by Agatha Christie. As a casual, easy kind of thing to do (doesn't cost a lot) I really enjoyed it. I did manage to guess the killer, but only about 5 bloomin' seconds before it was quite clearly revealed to everyone - d'oh!!! (the killer does a couple of things right at the end which give them away). Still, knowing there's a murderer on stage makes you pay attention to the smallest stuff on stage like where the newspaper is, who picked it up, was that light on etc etc... For me, it's the kind of thing I love.

As a big finale to the week on the Friday night I took Lany to a modern opera adaptation of the story Carmen - and it was brilliant!! I'd seen another adaptation in Madrid last year but it was more a little bit of opera with lots of flamenco dance. This one was based near Chicago during the war, with Carmen being a worker in a parachute factory which is being protected by soldiers (the men she bewitches!!!). I thought the whole things was brilliantly done as it wasn't over-the-top-traditional opera style. Instead the stage had a kind of 'slummy' look, the musicians pit is right in the middle of everything (so you can watch them), there are comedic characters and moments both in the main story but also in characters silently acting around the stage at different times (little kids playing etc), fully theatrical elements of spoken dialogue, amazing elements of opera singing (but again not over-the-top opera, some fancy singing but quite clearly understandable lyrics), just musical bits for the orchestra, a little dance and one awesome slow-motion boxing match!. "I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?" (can't remember what comedy show that was from). Have I said enough? It rocked!

Carmen was playing at the Southbank theatre which is a fantastic venue as the bar area overlooks a beautiful stretch of the Thames. During intermission we went out there and caught this amazing sunset.....

That's about it for the big stuff. On Saturday night we checked out Stoney and Matti's new place in Bermondsy (they act like they're married already) and sampled the local Italian restaurant. Sunday morning was a bit of a frenzy as we had agreed to head out to the Spittlefields and Flower Markets somewher up near Liverpool Street station. The flower market is pretty impressive (I've never seen some of the crazy stuff there before) but we got there quite late and I think we missed a bit of it (so go early guys if you want to see it all). Still, we had lunch with Kath and her friend Batya before quickly checking out some of the market areas around Brick Lane (they've got some awesomely funky clothes shops) on the way back to the tube station.

Despite having hours before our plane left for Paris, Ghizlane and I weren't exactly early for it. Although we got back to the house in decent time, getting to Luton took bloody forever! (The train from Blackfriars to the airport took an hour, then you need to wait for a free bus that takes another 15 mins, then you have massive security lines - it's crazy!). By the time we landed in Paris we were pretty dead.

I did work a little in Paris on the Tuesday but on both the Monday and Tuesday night we just caught up with friend etc before I headed out to Lisbon on Wednesday. Voila!

Anka

Athens and Warsaw

Hey guys,

I've just enjoyed almost a full week off work, which is something I haven't done since snowboarding in Austria in February... yay!! I just flew into Lisbon for this weekends work but have got a bit of time to hopefully get a blog post up. Since my last post about Budapest and Bastille Day I've been to Athens for work, then on to Warsaw for a shortened weekend of work before heading back to London for my week break. Ghizlane has taken time off work so she was coming up to get some good London alcoholism... I mean.. culture for the first time.

To get the Athens stuff out of the way first, I can report that things went pretty well as far a migrations typically go. The weather was really a treat for me as northern Europe has had mid-20's temperatures (and lower) and tons of rain for the whole summer, but in Greece it was 40+ and dry as a bone - perfect Aussie weather. The really weird thing was that despite this intense heat, I didn't really get burnt much at all while lying near the hotel pool or walking around town, but I'll get into that more later. Oh, yeah, the hotel was nice with a good gym , a great pool and a nice bar/restaurant on the roof overlooking the Acropolis. No complaints there....

In terms of the migration, we worked fairly long hours Thursday, Friday and Saturday but managed to get everything sorted by late Saturday evening. This gave us our usual Sunday off so naturally on Saturday night we headed out to a non-tourist type area for some drinks. The place was basically a long street of bars/clubs somewhere down the near the harbour, but it wasn't that amazing. On top of that we almost got in a fight with some Greek boys because (omigod the horror of it all) one of the boys actually spoke to a Greek girl *faint*. Nah seriously they're pretty protective of the girls and we didn't really feel welcome like in other countries... oh well, perhaps it was just that area. We still managed to stay out until around 4:30am so hell, it couldn't have been that bad!

The next day nobody really got out and about until very late in the afternoon. I'd surfaced in the early afternoon and done some gym stuff etc, but the heat was pretty intense so I wasn't quite up to looking around town until later on when it was a little cooler. The hotel was quite central so there wasn't too far to go to look for things. Firstly I walked up to see the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which is just a ruin now. From there I wound my way through the old town area (called the 'Plaka' district) and checked out some of the little cafes and shopping areas.

While doing this my friend had also finally roused himself and was on his way to the Acropolis. I climbed up through some amazingly cute and tiny old streets of the Plaka to get up the entrance and lost about 2 litres of water on the way :). Still, the Acropolis is very impressive. At it's peak, it must have been the most amazing thing to see (especially since you can see it from basically anywhere in the city). I was a little annoyed though at the lack of guide materials there. I kind of tagged on to a tour of a group of Aussies but even that wasn't too good. Luckily I had a little guide book I'd picked up in London which was ok. The view from the Acropolis is pretty cool too, you really can't appreciate how big the city is until you are up there (it's big people).

After checking out the area we eventually got booted out just after 7pm (so a note for people visiting it, although the official closing time is 7:30pm, you'll start getting herded out around 7). From there we strolled back down into the Plaka and found a little cafe with a rooftop terrace where we could eat and watch the sun set. Greek food is a lot of souvlaki type grilled meats, but also there's the Mezze (almost like tapas) side of things where you can just order lots of different little things. Our dinner on the terrace was awesome both for the food and the view/sunset over the city. A cute little band was also playing Greek music in the lower garden terrace. As it turned out, we had been amazingly lucky because we were told about the 'best restaurant' by a taxi driver a day later - it was the same place :)

Monday was a pretty standard user support day without too many problems, but still it was quite long. We went out and had another look around Plaka and stuff, but that was about it. As I was compressing my workweek and flying straight to Warsaw on Wednesday, I chose to stay in Athens rather than flying back to Paris/London. This meant that on Tuesday I had a full day to look around.

Tuesday morning I got up pretty early to try and beat the heat, and just started walking. I'd signed up for a tour that night but cancelled early in the morning once I really looked it over while eating breakfast (it went to half the places I'd already seen). Almost everything is fairly close in the middle of town, so it's fine to walk. The first stop was the original Olympic stadium which has been restored. It looks pretty damn impressive actually so in the old days it must have been super amazing. After that I walked through town, particularly around the main park area to briefly look at the President/Prime Minister (whatever) compound and big law courts. How funny are the bobbley things on the guards feet, it's hard to take them seriously, even with the big guns they hold.... oh well. Still, I had to kind of sneak a shot of a close up one as I'm sure the guard would kick my arse if he knew I was taking the piss out of him... :)

On the way out of the Plaka I found the old ruins of the Roman Senate with the Tower of the Winds and the original site of a marketplace. This is pretty much right next to the major ruined/preserved area of Athens, the Agora. The big attractions there are the Stoa of Atalos and the Temple of Hephaestus both of which are pretty impressive. The Stoa has been restored and converted into a museum while the temple just stands there, doing what temples do and looking cool.... The other ruins around the site are fairly interesting to look at, but they're pretty badly degraded to the point where they isn't that much to distinguish.

From the Agora I walked around some of the main squares in the middle of town and checked out the older buildings and a church or two, before heading up to the non-tourist areas to see the market squares. The staple things sold are fruit/veg and meat (the meat sits out with very little cooling - ugh!) but there's plenty of cheap flea type stalls selling everything from books to plastics to household cleaning stuff etc etc. Finally I headed up to the main Archaeological museum to take in some of the history of the country.

The museum was really interesting and aside from the various sculptures and paintings that were quite good, the best thing I learnt was the actual expanse of the Greek empire before it got totally smacked down by a few invasions (most notably the Romans). It seems like they were basically the ones running the Mediterranean pre-Roman times but internal wars (for example with Sparta), a dissolution of the governing power (leading to internal laws) and the invading forces from the Orient all seemed to have taken their toll. If anyone out there knows history good and I've stuffed something up, please let me know.

So that was about the end of my morning run around as we ended up having to head into the office to install a new piece of communications equipment which we hoped would improve the speed the office connected to London with. Unfortunately there was a fair bit of tweaking required to get everything sorted so the majority of the remainder of the day and early evening was burnt up there. All that left on Wednesday morning before our plane left was time fro a quick gym workout, an hour in the sun, a bit of lunch and then a dash for the airport as checkout took so long because they stuffed up my bill!! Unfortunately I never made it to the local beach (only saw it at night), but honestly, it didn't look like much (aussie bias).

My overall impression of Athens? Polluted!!!!! Overall the city is really pretty ugly, quite dirty, massively polluted and feels a little more 'poor' than a lot of other cities in Europe. On bad days the pollution was so bad you can't see the hills surrounding the city, and the guys and I were able to spend hours in the sun yet barely get a tan (Budapest for example is in a similar geographic area, and I got fried nicely there!). The average street in the city is just a mass of apartment blocks with not much greenery or even nice architecture. Rather than preserving as much of the older stuff as possible (ruins etc) it seems like they've just flattened everything for housing. We also had trouble finding a nice decent place to go and hang out for a drink or a dance etc. Perhaps it's just summer holidays, but taxi drivers and locals all told us that no one stays in Athens for summer, you go to the islands (for like 30 euro return) for a weekend of fun.

But it's not all bad. With the Acropolis, some nice old ruins, some cool new stuff (probably courtesy of the Olympics) it all kind of evens out. The good areas really do carry the rest of the place though, so you can see all of those and hang in the Plaka shopping and relaxing for a few days, but that's about it. I have heard from lots of people that all of the action and the beauty is basically out on the islands (even the IT manager from the office said Athens is ugly and he hates it - he has an island house though). So if you guys are planning a Greek journey, I'd say spend 2 days or 3 days max in Athens, then island hop around (which is exactly what I intend to do sometime soon).

From Athens we took a short flight to Vienna, and from there a Turboprop plane (they still use planes with propellers?!?!!) to Warsaw. It was a decent size one though, so the trip was pretty good.

After getting into Warsaw quite late, there wasn't much to do except check out town quickly then hit the hay. The rest of the weekend was basically spent in the office as the migration actually turned out to be quite difficult. We worked around 36 hours in three days before I jumped on a plane late in the afternoon on Saturday and headed back to London to start my holiday! yay! A few hours later I was drinking a beer in a pub with Stoney, Matti and Ghizlane... ahhhh

The week off was awesome but I'll write another entry about that (maybe tomorrow). For now, I'll try to get this one up fast :)

Anka