Al’s Blog

Back in February a mate who was buying a flat in Athens asked if I fancied driving a car loaded up with furniture once the sale had completed. I’ve just got back, wiser for two pieces of knowledge - 1) Athens is a long way by car which you don’t appreciate in the 3.5hr flight, [...]

The final day of the NAB show was spent rushing around meeting all the vendors we’d not had time for on the previous days. We left the show at 6pm and after negotiating the long queues at the monorail station (the old, head-one-station-in-the-wrong-direction-then-come-back trick) headed up past the Wynn to grab dinner from the California [...]

Last night’s excursion was the first proper taste of Vegas this year.
At an event celebrating the launch of Silverlight held at Caesars Palace there were ‘waitresses’ handing out Silverlight cocktails (Martinis with light-up ice cubes in them!), USB SD card readers and branded M&Ms. It was very much Beauty and the Geek. The club also [...]

Fairly uneventful day yesterday - arrived about midnight London time, 4pm local time; checked in to the hotel; settled into my room out of the 2,621 they have (a small hotel by Vegas standards!); dinner and well needed rest.
Woke up this morning to find it raining. Headed to the conference despite the best efforts of [...]

So i’m off to Vegas again for NAB. I’ve just arrived at Gatwick Airport and discovered that my colleague and I are booked into the same seat (seems the online booking system and the manual check-in system at the airport are not integrated too well). I didn’t realise that Virgin airline included a complimentary lapdance, [...]

Holiday over, the city highlights…
Athens - Having dinner on a roof terrace in the light of the Acropolis.
Sofia - Gatecrashing a British Embassy pub party and drinking free beer. Mmm, free beer. And getting free shots from the cute barmaid…
Belgrade - The taxi being push started by the drivers’ mates into a stream of traffic. [...]

Checked into the hostel and went straight out for food and beer. Had some Dutch hotchpotch - stew and potato with carrots - which filled us up perfectly.
Then headed off to a Jazz bar. Nice. Although the band seemed to be more into mellow rock (Sting, Peter Gabriel) than jazz. E went home after the [...]

Yay! Oktoberfest. We went out on the first night to an Oktoberfest-style beer house in the centre of town. Needless to say that we got way too drunk trying to teach E and the Americans sat next to us how to flip bar mats, and then play “shove ‘apenny”.
The British were clearly leagues ahead of [...]

Boring. Go somewhere else.
However, their cake shops are good. They have some old buildings too, and a really big “castle” with grounds we explored.
Don’t bother with walking up the spire of the cathedral, having ascended the 350ish steps, we found that it was covered in scaffolding and we couldn’t see out. (Of course, some might [...]

Zagreb is a great place - a neat, tidy, friendly city with loads of outdoor bars and pubs. Lots of trees, little pollution and the sun made this a great break from the smoggy Belgrade, and cold Sofia.
Arriving at the station there were no ‘Information? I give you information - very cheap. Where you go?’ [...]