Today’s photo: Hungarian Parliament. Modelled on Westminster it’s the world’s third largest parliament building. I woke up at 7 to queue for tickets for a free guided tour, and it was well worth it.
Budapest 2
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Tag Archives: tourism
RIP Predator Cam
My trusty Sony V1 camera is about 6 years old now, and the batteries have had it. So I bought a new camera, and have been running around Budapest trying it out. As you do. It’s a Sony a-500 DSLR which seems to be fun, if complicated.
I’ve shunned the traditional tourist highlights for the time being, although there are still a few days to go the the relevant museums etc. I’ve found that museums have fairly awkward photography rules, mostly that they advertise a photography price at the entrance but refuse to let you take pictures anyway… Zoos and botanical gardens have none of that nonsense, so I could play with the camera to my heart’s content.
Many photos will follow I’m sure, but here is a taster 🙂
Unfortunately we’ve been stung by the exchange rate – I took out my travel money last Thursday and since then Hungary has had debt problems and the exchange rate has got 15% better. Luckily most things are still pretty cheap here – £1 a pint in most bars and £2 for bottle of wine from a supermarket 🙂
With apologies to Pierre de Fermat
I have some beautiful photographs of the Eiffel Tower, but the internet here is too slow to share them with you.
Christmas lights here in Paris are somewhat more tasteful than their UK counterparts. Each major road has personalised displays hanging across the road, whilst the pedestrian areas are ablaze with lights strung here and there. The highlight is the Tower though, which is a lighting engineer’s dream. Each strut has been wired individually with at least seven colours, each can be switched on and off independently to create pulsing rainbow effects, with colours running up and down the height of the tower. There are also searchlights on top and spotlights which can be set to flicker and sparkle. Each hour the lights change from a simple white illumination to a full-on spectacular for 10-15 minutes, visible from all over Paris.
I guess the question would be, who has to climb up and down the inside of the struts when they need to replace a bulb?
Rob 2 Merde 1
Three days down, two days in the lab, and still just the one merde incident. I feel like keeping a track of the number of times I successfully dance across the pavement, avoiding another well-laid trap. However, keeping score like this is fruitless; if I score a point each time I avoid some, I effectively lose a million points each time I fail.
On a lighter note, the food today has been great. For lunch we had the plat-du-jour at a local Spanish restaurant, a fantastic paella stuffed with chicken, prawns and saffron. Back in the lab the lasers are switching between playing ball and playing up, but data is appearing quickly at least and I will have plenty to keep me busy over the winter. This evening I wandered around the Christmas-lit city centre with Lauren (who is being paid to do a masters here!) but unfortunately it was raining and I’d left my camera at the hotel, so pictures will have to wait until another night.
J’arrive a Paris
Having been back in the UK for three weeks it’s time to rack up some more expenses. This time I am in Paris visiting Olivier Beyssac, who has a shiny lab here with lots of expensive machinery for me to use. Eurostar was great, the check-in and passport-control system managed to get everyone in the right place at the right time, even though the train was really busy. It made me think of early aviation, where you could walk onto your plane with ease rather than the current system of frisking, security announcements, airports miles outside the city requiring a transfer as expensive as the ticket, water-bottle nazis and several miles hiking to get to your gate.
Right then, time to try some french cuisine wine 🙂
Gallery – Turkey 2
Here are the photos from Antalya, our beach holiday
Home safely
You can all breathe a sigh of relief / disappointment, I’ve completed my 24 hour return trip and am back safely, sans food poisoning, swine flu, broken limbs or cholera.
Leaving Kaohsiung at 8.30pm and flying through the night, I arrived into Heathrow at 6.20am after ~21 hours of darkness. Thinking this wouldn’t be the prettiest of flights, my camera was packed at the bottom of my hand-luggage; unfortunately I was wrong. Over China there was a thin veil of low cloud, just enough to blur things out but not enough to stop the light seeping through – giving the appearance of 10-mile-wide embers shimmering away. A short nap, some very dark Central Asia and several terrible films later we were drifting over London, the roads picked out in orange whilst the train tracks were shown up by slivers of light shuttling back and forth. It was immensely pretty, but you’ll have to take my word for it.
Diffusion
It is the 29th birthday of the University today, so there were activities all morning including some obscure frisbee target-practice game. In teams of five, each member had three throws at a target made of magnetic numbers. Whoever knocked out the most points won something. I say something, because apparently we won and I might get a delivery on Monday. There seemed to be a lot of missing for what was quite a short throwing distance and so I was quite puzzled by how I seemed to be the only person able to hit the target more than once with my three throws. My 16 points took our team up to 29 points overall, at which point there were a few high-fives and we all sloped off for some lunch, which mostly consisted of “seafood my grandmothers would have avoided”
In the afternoon I went sightseeing Sparkie-style, which is mostly a diffusion process. It involved wandering around the local area for a while, then deciding to head into the city. The shiny new metro system has a touch-screen map to choose your destination, so I chose at random and got off when it reached my stop. Using the map and my GPS I discovered I was a short walk from the Central Park, so I went there. Here is the result:
