Well it wont be a surprise to hear the weather has been aweful here in Dublin, rain then torrential rain then rain again for a change. Sunday we went to the zoo and it was overcast but also some bursts of sunlight! We met up with a couple of my workmates for a photography outing and wandered around catching photos of all the animals. Jan and I packed ourselves a picnic lunch too. Here’s some pics:
After another delicious hot breakfast we hit the road in a bus with Barratt Tours. The guide and driver Richard Barratt talked about some of the history of the area and the high king Brian Boru who led the successful war against the Vikings. We stopped at Leamanegh Castle which was once an O’Brien tower house and took a few photographs.
We next stopped off at the Caherconnell Fort (400AD) where we opted not to pay an extra 5 euros to go in to see inside it (we’d seen a couple of Forts in Kerry last year).
Around the corner we visited Poulnabrone Dolmen. An old tomb that was originally covered in a mound of dirt but it had since washed away. This is said to be over 5000 years old, and the bodies of people were found there from atleast 3200 BC. We also drove past Glenishsheen Wedge tomb by the side of the road and Richard told us of the gold torque that was found there. I would like to see that some time soon in the national museum.
This was when we also got to experience The Burren. The common description ‘Lunar Landscape’ helps a fair bit. There are huge limestone sections across the land. These are ‘climts’ or pavements, which do seem quite unnatural and in places look man made. The beautiful thing is the amount of different wild flowers growing and grasses persisting to shoot up despite the barren terrain. Anyway I thought the area was wonderful even in such wet miserable weather.
We stopped a couple of times, first at Ballyryan which was a (surprise surprise) rocky landscape by the sea. This was made very interesting by a herd of cattle wandering along down from where we stood.
Stopping again at black rock head we got some great coastal cliff views, There was some strong sea spash coming onto us freezing us back to the bus rather quickly.
We stopped in Doolin (population 200) for lunch and we had a hearty meal at O’Connors pub, along with a pint of beer. We wandered up the street for a bit looking in the craft shops. The best site in this town though was the cars filled with screaming teenage girls who had Just won an event. They were leaning out their windows, the parents honking horns like crazy and the head car had a girl holding their trophy. They did a double lap and the shop keepers came out to cheer them as well. Yay small towns.
Finally we visited The Cliffs of Moher. It was a very cold afternoon, The weather was thankfully moody though so the rain would come then change it’s mind and be gone in seconds to clear blue skies. We explored both sides of the cliff edge paths. One side led us up to a tower which was the old tourist centre. The cliffs are over 200 m’s high and are pretty spectacular. We got a pretty good view so we were lucky. At one point the wind was so strong and I was walking against it pushing forward as hard as I could to take a step. Plus there was a spout of sea spray pummeling against my body, they felt sharp, it was pretty discouraging to get through it. I must admit I did like watching other people try and come behind me once I was through the rough.
After being so wind blown we enjoyed a hot chocolate in the new visitors center inside a hill beside the cliffs. I fell straight to sleep back on the bus and woke when we were back in Limerick.
Seems people weren’t so deterred by the sign saying not to go past the end of the trail at the cliffs.
Our last stop for the weekend was as Limericks pub Nancy Blakes where I had a glass of cider in the outback bar and we saw some live music perform, they had a flutist, sax player and trumpeter and the usual drums, guitars, maracas, keyboards. It was quite a group.
We caught the train home which much to Jan’s delight had our names in lights above our seats.
Friday after work Jan and I caught a bus to Limerick. Everyone I told about our trip said a tearful goodbye and said there was little chance we would make it back alive. Limerick has a bad reputation and has been known as ‘Stab City’. To be fair I don’t think it seemed any rougher than we’d see or experience on a night out in Dublin. We were weary though and caught more cabs than we normally would on a small city visit.
First cab was to the Absolute Hotel. A very modern establishment to the north of the center on the Abbey River. We entered to a tense situation of people realising there was no parking left and becoming irate when told they had to park around the corner at the hospital. This shouldn’t have bothered us because we had no car, but it meant for a strained wait to get our room. We were given a smoking room that smelt so bad we decided to wait in the hall after we complained and requested a better room. Getting us a non smoking room apparently wasn’t such a big deal, and we found ourselves upstairs in a lovely room where we settled in for the weekend. We watched ‘The Bachelor’ on the big LCD and chilled out with a bottle of red wine and some chocolates.
View out of the hotel windows:
We had a long sleep in on Saturday morning and then had a fantastic full Irish buffet breakfast with a table overlooking the swans floating on the river outside. The weather was miserable this weekend so we went back to bed for another few hours. I experimented with the coffee machine in our room and gave it a delightful smell that got us out and exploring by a decent 1pm!.
We made it to the Milk market in time to watch last minute shoppers buy fresh fish, flowers, cheese, vegetable and roast pork rolls. It was a cute market place mostly held inside a walled square, We both thought it was pretty cool. I like the feel of Limerick actually because it’s a fairly small city (population around 55000). I heard live music coming out of a few of the bars as we walked around and we were delighted to find this fiddler and his pal on guitar outside a cafe in the market square.
Next up we went to the Hunt museum. This is a funny collection of goodies that I could easily imagine having been the personal collection of the Hunt family. I like the idea of the collection being items the couple liked rather than what was valuable or went together. There was a horse sculpture thought to be by Da Vinci. The painting by Pablo Picasso of El Plat del Dia from Els Quatre Gats reminds me to visit the cafe when I go back to Barcelona. I think we both thought the sperical hand warmer where a hot coal goes in the middle and is kept balanced inside the ball was pretty cool. I was drawn to a tiny head of a man sculpted in amethyst. Finally I liked the twisted Gran Fen Torc - A long, gold, bar-twisted necklace.
King Johns Castle from the 1200’s on the river Shannon from near the tourist office.
After an exotic lunch at McDonalds with the locals we went on a two and a half hour walking tour of Limerick with Michael O’Donnell. This was an excellent tour. Michael recounts the tale presented in Frank McCourt’s book “Angelas Ashes” while walking us around a range of locations from the book. I particularly wanted to do this tour after I heard the author himself had done it for the first time on Thursday just gone. The weather meant we spent brief periods dashing up roads and under shelters or into pubs and cafes. The tour gave us a great introduction to the recent history of Limerick. Michael also told some stories from further in the past including ones about Daniel O’Connell and Limerick itself.
We were soaked to the bone and decided to grab some dinner from Tescos and head back to our room. We had some cheese and bread and some more of the red wine then napped while the rain pelted down outside.
That night we went to Dolan’s Warehouse to see Paul Kelly. First up though was a lovely Australian performer Holly Throsby who sang some original pieces for us on piano and guitar. Jan had a chat with her after the show and bought her two albums. It turns out we already had a song by her from the Crowded House song compilation “She Will Have Her Way”. Dolan’s was a great location for these artists for us at least because it meant the venue wasn’t very crowded and we got there early and sat right up the front and had seats and a table. Paul Kelly was just fantastic and played nearly all of our favourite tunes and a couple I hadn’t heard before. I decided to be good and not even take my camera, which did in turn mean I really got into the music rather than waiting for the perfect shot. I wish now I had a range of pictures though of these great artists, we were sitting up so close.
We finished off the bottle of wine back in our room and watched Batman Returns.
The other morning I was getting ready in the dark and noticed my sleeping Jan was rolled up in a rectangle of quilt with his head to the side, just like a Klimt painting. couldn’t resist the photo.
On Thursday night we went to our first Irish Linux User Group meeting and had a blast. We had some great chats with a bunch of Like minded people at the Long Stone and hope to make it again next month. Luis came along and coincidentally we ran into his flatmate’s’ at the station. They’re all growing mustaches for an 80s night on the town for 08/08/08.
The latest news is Jan pulled apart my laptop and replaced the bulb that lights up the screen. This involved some careful soldering and a whole can of compressed air and stuff. Anyway my laptop is usable on a lap again.. and it probably isn’t leaking mercury now.
We took the ‘Wild Wicklow’ day tour yesterday and unfortunately we were left underwhelmed. Our guide told us a lot of history along the trail which started in the center of Dublin. We stopped quickly at Hanover Quay where U2’s recording studios were. I want to go back and spend a bit of there reading the graffiti. We drove through the southern Dublin suburbs and stopped to pick up some passengers at Dun Loaghaire Harbour. Kevin our guide let us know about the ferries to Holyhead, Wales and as we always have our senses open for adventure Jan and I started chatting about hiring a car and going for a weekend. Anyway first official stop was Dulkey’s Sandy Cove where we could see the Martello tower where James Joyce started his novel Ulysses. There were people out swimming in the water, which seemed crazy on this day with such moody weather.
We stopped up the road at the Avoca Handweavers which had some great crafts and deli items for sale. Jan and I relaxed in the cafe with some delicious scones and a pot of tea.
Next we drove through the mountains, there were fields of pretty purple heather and lakes, pretty valleys below us as well. I guess the most amazing thing about these mountains is the amount of national park. We saw large portions of bog land cut up for turf, which can be used for fuel. The blocks of turf are then left to dry in stacks and the land around them shows ridges of the black turf yet untouched. The waterways running in this area are a dark brown colour from the turf too. We drove through Sally Gap famous for movie productions e.g Braveheart.
We jumped out of the bus high above the waters of Lough Tay, a lake and land area owned by the Guinness Family. This has an imported white sandy beach along one end. We viewed the lake from high up in the hills above, which quite a steep drop below us. The view was spectacular but terrifying for me, I saw sheets of rain coming towards us over the gap as well and we ended up soaked by the time we got back to the bus.
We had lunch at Lynhams of Laragh which was a nice enough pub, but by now Jan and I are were exhausted, it had been a long week. A hundred motorbikes pulled up outside, they were on a rally through the mountains for charity. They gave us something to watch while we relaxed. Before heading off Jan and I explored the river below the car park which made another tranquil setting on this trip. Dark brown water rushed past with great force covering any unnatural noise from above.
The final stop on the tour was Glendalough, which means ‘Valley of the two lakes’ and also has the ruins of a monastic settlement. After an introduction to the site by Kevin we made way along the walking trail to the Lakes. This was a relaxing afternoon in the cool shade of the forest. There were water falls along the way and our favourite part was the moss covered ground with thin trees above that looked exactly like we imagine the fairies forrests would look like. The upper Lake was large and dark, there were families picnicing and it looked like a lovely place to spend some time. There were some ruins around the lake including an old round stone fort.
We continued up a path to a waterfall called Poulanass. The water was again very powerful. Ireland is so green and it rains so much and so I have been surprised to see an increase of water saving advertising and newspaper articles mentioning Dublin running out of water in the future. There are even plans to bring water from the Shanon.
Our remaining time was spent checking out the Glendalough ruins. St Kevins Kitchen, the round 33m tower with a doorway a fair way up it’s walls. The stone arches of the Monestery gatehouse still stand, held up by the keystones. The site was ransacked many times by Vikings and finally destroyed by English forces.
Jan and I shared an icecream and had to wander around to avoid swarms of wasps that seemed to love us. Kevin gave everyone a shot of whiskey before we hopped back on the bus. We slept all the way back to Dublin.
After the tour Jan and I wandered around Grafton street shops, we bought some yummy foods and wine at Marks and Spenser for later in the week. We met our new friend Steffania at Porterhouse for a drink then Jan and I had dinner at Dandelion opposite St Stephens Green where the Prawn cocktail was delicious.
The first morning back from Istanbul, which feels like a lifetime ago already, I started walking to work each day. It is around a thirty minute walk from Pearse train station and I take a short cut through St Stephens Green. That morning I noticed a family of Swans in the park and have watched the Signets grow up since then. There is also an exhibition in the park by Polish photographer Artur Tabor which shows wildlife in Poland. I then cross the bridge to the centre of the park where the traffic noise dies away and I walk silently with many other people through the pretty grounds. There is always something to see in the park, when it is sunny there are sunbathers, large groups of foreign students, lovers, photographers. One hot morning I even spotted a small girl, maybe 18 years old digging into a two Litre tub of ice cream.
Thursday July 17th - We went to Jan’s work party there was pub snacks and beers and I got to meet a few more of Jan’s workmates. This was held in the bar at East Point Business Park local pub.
I was thrilled to find out when I arrived back at work that there were parties scheduled for the month, I hadn’t missed anything while I was in Turkey. The first party was July 18th at the VIP room at Krystal a nightclub on Harcourt Street. The location was very cool and we were even graced with some sunshine after a cold rainy day. The balcony of our private area looked down over a large courtyard where Friday night was getting started and workmates were flooding in for a few beers. I find bars like this amazing in Dublin, from outside it looks like a small location with just a doorway and a couple of windows, but inside it spreads out into the internals of a whole city block.
Jan came to join me at the end of the night and we intended to follow my workmates to another club around the corner. We ended up lost and coincidentally we ran into our Canary Island friends led by Alberto. We had an amusing dinner at Wagga Mamma where even our waiter spoke Spanish. “Luis pequeño!!”.
Saturday July 19th We left the house for a little shopping and saw Wall-E in the city, it was a cool animated adventure, the story of a robot left to clean up earth. The humans had all escaped to a Titanic starship in the sky with all the luxuries a lazy human race could desire. Afterwards we went to an Indian grocery store and bought some great supplies for meals coming up.
Jan ended up with a flu and slept for the next few days, I managed to finish my 2008 scrapbook up to May 1st. I used some kits I bought from the US called Scrap-Room
it’s pretty good value and comes with coffee samplers in delicious flavours e.g. caramel apples and strawberry shortcake. We did some great cooking during the week. One night Jan made Tandoori chicken with naan from the Indian grocer. One night I made Turkish meat balls with the spices from Istanbul and rice with pine nuts and safron also from Istanbul. Meanwhile Jan pulled all the pillows off the couches in the lounge room and we lounged around watching tv up on the big screen. We enjoyed Joss Whedons online sing-a-long super hero musical “Dr Horrible” then followed on by watching “The Guild” about a girl and her adventures with her online gaming guild.
Thursday July 24th - We went to the Carlsberg Comedy Festival “Probably the best comedy in the world”. It was very funny and was set up in the fantastic Iveagh gardens, I can’t wait to explore them again soon. As we walked in the gate a policeman turned around and was painted up as a clown. Inside people on stilts welcomed us by dancing around us. There was a live band playing to our right and across the way jugglers performed awesome tricks. I was giggling already during that first few minutes. We walked around checking out the venue, we spotted our tent the “Magic Mirrors Palace” and headed down the ramp. We were met by a mischievous angel who needed to check our names were on his list, then other performers such as a group pretending to do interviews with a rubber camera and fluff colourful microphone. We found a stand selling funny shaped chocolates and bought some laughing monkeys. We settled into the tent with it’s wooden interior surrounded by mirrors and laughed plenty at our Irish performers Jason Byrne and Bernard O’Shea with MC John Henderson.
Friday night there was another work party, this time held by our social club. We had a BBQ at Kobra on Leeson Street, another courtyard bar and luckily for most of the night the weather was clear and we had a great time. I don’t really know what to write about such events as it’s mostly sitting around making jokes and having a fun time together. The food was great a BBQ with lots of salads and I sat to eat with some of the people from Finance who I don’t get much time to talk with during the day. Around 10pm it poured with rain and the change made me so miserable I went home early, everyone else was out until early morning. I got into an empty carriage on the DART and was pretty worried when a group of fifteen dodgy looking teenagers wearing hoodies. However one of the boys turned on his mobile phone as a radio and they all happily sang along to Robbie Williams with their angelic voices while I giggled in the background. At Home Jan and Miki, via skype, were picking some top shows for us to see in Edinburgh in August at the Fringe Festival.
Saturday we surprisingly jumped up early and headed into town. First stop was the National Gallery of Ireland where we saw the special exhibit entitled “Impressionist Interiors”. This was a group of impressionists paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cassatt, Gauguin, Vuillard and Morisot depicting their homes and domestic life. Paintings of people sleeping, resting, eating, playing music and creating art. After this we walked through parts of the museum itself, there were some amazing works by Irish artists in room 20. We found out recently that most of the galleries and museums are free in the city so we have plenty to come back and see.
We had brunch at Odessa a well known brunch spot here in Dublin. The food was alright, eggs Benedict, I had mine with smoked salmon. The service and atmosphere was ok, but in general I was left feeling it wasn’t as good as any reviews made it out to be. Next it was time for some shopping and I checked out some noise canceling headphones but wasn’t impressed with any in my budget. I really enjoyed the city this weekend, there was gorgeous weather but also nearly every shop and some of the street lights have pretty flowers growing, it really spruces everything up. I did buy a scrapbook and some materials to make an album about Turkey and Jan got himself a stack of Sculpy with the intention of making little model Robots. Next Halley came in and met us and we watched the new Batman movie which was Awesome! I forgot the Joker was Heath Ledger while he was acting, he did a fantastic job.
Saturday night after a rest at home we went for dinner at the pub Halley has been working at in Raheny, The Water Mill. We had a good meal there and a couple of beers before coming home for an early night.
Sunday 27th - We headed over to Howth to get some fresh salmon to make sushi. It was a great time out in the sun and Halley continued on checking out Howth while we went home to relax. Jan made us some delicious sushi half with salmon and the other half with teriyaki chicken he made from scratch. We’ve been having a great week of food here. Jan made his Robots out of sculpy and together with Miki and James we sorted out some bookings for Edinburgh in a few weeks, it’s going to be hectic but awesome.
Tuesday 29th - Jan and I ate a sandwich in Merion Square after work and watched Halley and his street performing friends practice their acts. Next we walked to Weelans together and went to a concert in the back hall. The performers were friends of Jan’s mum Jasmine and the show was called “Andy Irvine & his Australian friends”. We had a few beers sitting up in the balcony section looking down at the stage. The show was fantastic with the group swapping between doing songs together to doing solo acts and in different groups. There were guitars, violins, banjos and many beautiful voices. Afterwards we went down and said hello to the performers and had a chatty taxi ride home before 1am.
Wednesday 30th - Jan and I met up after work to see River Dance at the Gaiety Theatre. First we had dinner at Mao an asian fusion restaurant that made a mediocre mango duck dish for me and a below average chicken stirfry for Jan. All for a surprisingly high price. Next we made our way up many flights of stairs to our cheapest ticket seats at the Gaiety. I felt a little dizzy looking down at the stage it was so far below. We were sitting about four levels, three balconies up from the stage above the giant chandelier. I thought River Dance was fun and well worth going to and I loved the performers from many different cultures. I really liked the group singing performances. The Irish dancing sections tried to depict history and lore together with traditional dance. I guess the theatrics were a bit over the top for us. I did like seeing the combination of dance companies and a few different techniques displayed. The musicians were fabulous the fiddler, the traditional Uilleann pipes and the over enthusiastic drummer was a delight.
I played with my camera trying to learn some of it’s manual functions before the show. I’d like to get out more during August and try and get the best I can out of it.
I attended GUADEC 2008 (Gnome Users and Developers European Conference) while on holidays in Istanbul last week. Here are some
notes that may relate web development or may be interesting to hear about.
1. User Experience (UX)
Keynote speaker Leisa Reichelt who is a UX consultant/guru encouraged us to think about the entire user experience when designing software.
• During user interviews people say they did what they think you want to hear, but they actually do something entirely different.
• Leisa says watching people actually using the product is the most useful, she had an application, called silverback, which monitored the users face and what was going on on the screen.
• Build things for a target market not the entire world, build things for your customer profiles.
• It is very useful to create profiles of fictitious customers e.g. “sarah is 22 and wants to book a trip visiting 4 different cities over two weeks, she is pretty tech savvy and is comfortable buying on line. This helps designers not to use the very flexible word “user” e.g. “our users LOVE flash”. instead say things like “Sarah doesn’t mind flash if it’s not making her wait to get things done.”
Leisa’s website is: http://www.disambiguity.com/
2. Mozilla and Market Effect
Keynote speaker Chris Blizard from the Mozilla corporation made the point that market share is the wrong metric for Mozilla.
• Firefox is popular more than 28 million downloads
• Firefox is at around 20% market share
• They believe in Market Effect which is about influencing all technology, upping the ante. Keeping users happy is key, this means new technologies, and improving the user experience. i.e. Forcing internet explorer to implement new technologies because users demand them.
• Mozilla aims to define the future of the web.
His slides:
http://people.mozilla.org/~blizzard/presentations/2008-guadec/
He also blogged and had some very fancy 3D demos that can be obtained
through the links here: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=405
3. What the future will look like
A keynote by Matt Webb who has a creative design consultant agency and is co-author of Mind Hacks, cognitive psychology for a general audience.
• Like peak oil, this is the year of peak attention span. From now on it will be harder for people to keep all the information shown to them in their heads and they will need tools to be able to cope with all the information presented to them.
• Matt’s suggestion for tools included applications interacting with all the others, todo lists, collaboration tools, seeing if someone is busy or not before you call them.
• The idea is that the computer would be like a personal assistant that it would help manage your attention, if you.re doing something important it won’t interrupt you.
Matt’s website is: http://interconnected.org/
4. The future desktop experience
Federico Mena-Quintero (Novell, Inc.) showed some of his ideas for the new desktop hopefully for Gnome 3.0.
• This includes everything being in a revision control system, you wouldn’t need to save it’s just there. If you want to go back to what you had last Tuesday you can.
• Finding files is now easy because you can search by calendar and see what you did on your computer last Tuesday, or find your homework you started two weeks ago but can’t remember anything else about it.
• These aren’t new ideas but he’s planning to actually implement them.
• Federico also spoke about tagging files ‘work’ ‘fun’ etc. and some fancy graphic ideas like draws pulling from the side of the screen.
5. The Online Desktop
Ideas have been floating around for a few years now about the entire computer being the browser. Applications are being built like the online desktop sidebar which is interfaced to all your online services, twitter, facebook, shares, your friends/contacts, email etc. Pretty much any online service that has an interface can be shown on the online desktop. Getting the web outside of a browser.
X. Other Notes
• There were also talks on principals of design, new 3D graphics technologies(clutter and gtk3), technologies to make desktop apps more web enabled (webkit).
• Novell were there to push Silverlight (microsofts equivalent of flash). They have an implementation Moonlight.
• One main focus of the conference was the future of revision control systems the Gnome community are arguing between Git and Bzr (Git seemed to be the winner and by far the most popular choice) this means that CVS and SVN are considered too old fashioned now that there are far better technologies available.
Our last full day in Istanbul. We left quite a bit until last. We started the day eating chicken durums at the bar we’d had a beer at the first night in town. Perfect hangover food. We walked around from there around the hippodrome. This was perfect timing and we were in the most perfect position to hear ezan, the call to prayer, from the blue mosque be answered somewhere behind us. They sang in a kind of round and it was magical to stand and listen with an obelisk on either side of us in this historic place.
We walked up to the Blue Mosque ‘Sultanamet’ and into the courtyard. There were colourful flags surrounding the archways and it was yet again the most beautiful day, bring and sunny. We stood for a while in the square soaking in the atmosphere and watching people enter the mosque to pray.
Next was Aye Sofya, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. It was built in 532 CE by Emperor Justinian, and was the largest church in the world for 1000 years. It has a massive dome and four minarets (added 1000 years later when it was converted to a mosque). The inside is HUGE. The dome is over 50m high. There is marble everywhere, the marbel is of many different colours and patterns. Tiles and stone work. Stained glass and religious items. Of course painted roofs as well.
Jan rushed off for the last day of the conference and I walked around a little more in the sun. Unfortunately I attracted a man who followed me for many blocks. He was explaining who he was and I was trying to walk fast and seem like I wasn’t listening. I think in the end he wanted me to buy a carpet from him. As I made my way down the hill a huge wind picked up and dust was flying everywhere. This was what I thought istanbul would look like, the heat and flying dust, but this was the only moment it was like this.
I spent my afternoon wandering around the three Archeology museums. There were some cool artifacts and I guess I know more about Turkish history now… maybe, I feel I need to do more reading to fit together all the pieces I saw. Museum one is ‘the Ancient Orient’ There were gorgeous glazed friezes lions, horses, bulls and oher animals set agaist blue backgrounds. They were from Babylon’s Ishar Gate. There was also the first peace ‘the Treaty of Kadesh’, a tablet dating from 1269 BC.
I entered the main building to be greeted by the grotesque statue of Bes, an Egyptian dwarf god believed to guard against evil spirits. He is huge and fabulous.
There was a wonderful collection of Turkish, Greek and Roman items. I guess I’m confused about what belongs there, what was actually turkey during which period and which things were taken during wars with other territories. The amazing thing was seeing these ancient statues still have remnants of the paint on them. There was an area dedicated to Sarcophagus’s and there was The Alexander Sarcophagus, found at the Necropolis of Sidon. I was feeling exhausted and hot just when I came across a cool room with soft chairs. I sat and read my guide book for a while next to an open window. I saw most of the museum and got a kick out of seeing a whole indoor roof area covered with boxes full of clay and items from a digging drying in the sunlight.
After relaxing in the shade out in the gardens with some apricot juice I went to see The tiled kiosk, the third museum. Each room in this building from the 1400’s that used to be part of the topkapi palace gardens was tiled in a different style. There were some great examples of Iznik tiles.
I had about two litres of cold water and a nap then bought us a couple of pieces of baklava and went to meet Jan at Karakoy station. Our next adventure was to visit the Galata Tower. This tower can be seen up in the hills and it’s actually located up quite a steep set of steps and through some little streets. It was worth the climb though, not only to see the towers base but the interesting characters that were lounging around on the benches outside. The 360 degree views seen while walking around the outside of the Galata tower are the best in Istanbul. We were so lucky with our timing and it wasn’t so crowded up there.
Next we went to a bar across the road from the tower, up on a terrace ‘Anemon Galata’ and had some pomegranate juice while seeing some wonderful views across the city but this time including the tower itself. Galata tower was built in 1348. Apparently in 1638, Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi flew as an early aviator using artificial wings from this tower over the Bosphorus to the slopes of Üsküdar on the Anatolian side and the sultan first was thrilled then changed his mind and exiled him to Algeria.
From here we wandered back down to Karakoy to meet a bunch of our friends. We again took the boat to Kadakoy on the Asian side. I’d heard some tales of people spotting dolphins in the water while standing on the shore and so I was very excited when one leaped out of the water and across behind the boat. Jan missed this occurrence however because he was inside with his laptop out integrating his dvd player with Totem. We met some guys and went to Asia, we saw dolphins Jan used his laptop on the boat.
This was just the most perfect time of day, the sun was going down and every second there was a more amazing view back across to Istanbul. This time it was Robs first time to Asia so he got a kick out of stepping onto the shore.
The restaurant we ended up tonight was recommended in someones guidebook and it turned out to be the same place we had cocktails at the week before. We had a really cool dinner there, we shared turkish meze plates, delicious hot treats too. We drank some yummy rose with it.
On the way home we found a set of 3D images at the ferry terminal, all pictures from around Istanbul. A young turkish guy saw us all standing around talking english and came up to practice his language skills. He wanted to know where we were from, well there was England, Australia, Norway, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Pakistan, USA, and probably more places, most of us weren’t living in the country we were from either! A strange group.
Back on the shores of European Istanbul we made our way back to the pillow street. Unfortunately there were no free pillows available but that was no problem. The waiters rushed around and took us around the corner and set us up our own pillow area. We had a final drink, a final apple flavoured Nagileh, and a final goodbye to our friends, some we wont see for another year.
Nothing much to report about our trip home. The flight was filled with our Irish friends that were at the conference with us and their families. I said goodbye to the sun as I stepped onto the plane at the airport in Istanbul, but there was no need it was warm and sunny when I stepped off in Dublin. It was like coming out of a dream to arrive back home again.
We had another great day at the conference. I chatted with people in the cafeteria all morning, the main discussions today were about the future of the desktop and ideas about that. Ofcourse there were plenty of concerns about things breaking and being unstable while they build new things. I really enjoyed my lunch this day too, just in the canteen, I had a beef hot pot served with some spinach and yogurt, mmm. I loved that beside the sauces, pepper and salt there were pots of different fresh herbs to add to the food as well.
In the afternoon there were lightning talks and then the closing of the conference. Gnome Foundations Sys Admin got the pants this year. We made our way back to our room and I was exhausted so we decided on a simple dinner. We found a shop selling pastries Borek filled with either cheese, meat or spinach, it was amazingly delicious and exactly what we felt like. We napped for a few hours.
The closing party was held at another nightclub The Ghetto near Taksim. Jan and I enjoyed our walk down the main drag Istiklal Caddesi and some locals yelled out welcoming us to their city as they rode holding onto the old tram down the hill. Being a friday night this street was packed solid with people. The modern shops were all open and welcoming. Restaurants were filled to the brim and smells of food and music were coming from inside. It was a great night to be out in the city. The Getto was a cool nightclub, it was like an old church or theatre, inside was pretty dark, made much darker when the power failed a few times. The ceiling was painted domes high above us. Google had a funny set of light projections going on with 3D people and their logo swinging around the place. We had quite a few beers, they were warm Efes filling half a paper cup, the other half was all foam. I actually loved the loud music and was having a great time chatting and dancing. We even sang Andy’s song ‘Oh Penis Mus’ (sung to o christmas tree) to our friend Murray who owns a business Openismus.
After a taxi home we sat at a different pillow bar than usual, this seemed to be run by a 12 year old boy who brought us many beers and pipes and tried to convince us he was 15.
Another busy day at the conference, so much going on and plenty of good conversations with people. Afterwards we went out for dinner with some people to BeerPoint. Down the road from the conference venue and again on the water. I was fascinated with the multi coloured matches and Jan found they had a photograph in the bathroom of a bathroom he had been to somewhere else in the world. It was of girls looking down and laughing and making fun.The main discussion of this dinner was BZR vs GIT. Jono and Pal bought a 2L beer that came in it’s own cooling dispenser.
Next we walked down for the Collabora cruise on the “Lufer-6″. This was a large boat and we only utilised it’s roof sections. There was so much carlesburg beer and we had a great time chatting with everyone on board. The scenery was amazing too, looking across the city and getting close up views of the bridges. The main bridge to asia has a lightshow at night too so that twinkled above us and in the background as we cruised around. They served turkish sausage sandwiches and I had a bight of Andys.
The first event on the cruise was an icecream eating competition and Jan came third!! Pretty impressive. Apparently the winner hadn’t had dinner before hand.
The second event was SMASHED the Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers. This basically means people bring along Wiskey to be tried and judged. This meant lots of yum and drunkenness too. Finally there was cake for Collaborra being three years old and GNOME being 10 years old.
The boat came back into harbour so people could get home. They got people to do announcements in every language to get off now or stay on for one more round and to continue partying. We stayed on the boat for another round and the deck level turned into a dance party. We all did some pretty crazy moves and danced another circle around the golden horn and Bosphorus. One of the turkish guys I was dancing with said I was a great dancer. Anyway it was hilarious and we had a fantastic time, probably the best Guadec party I’ve been to.
Back on shore we were ready to continue on Miguel suggested we all head to Taksim and grab some tacos! These were the best tacos of my life. They were ofcourse very thin turkish durums with delicious flavorings served with fresh salads, herbs and lemon juice mmm. Miguel also convinced us all to eat the hot chillis, At the same time we were all handed yummy salty yogurt drinks called Ayran. Jono and Aaron ended up having a chilli eating contest with Jono eating 15 and Aaron by far the winner with more than 20. There was some tension between a couple of drunken bums in our group but in general it was a great end to the night.
