In one of my first posts this year, I have presented a trance tune that I like very much. Now, I have found the same tune played, a “little” differently:
I am no piano expert, but the guy knows how to play the piano 🙂
—==[ #13 ]==—
Interesting DJ
April 19th, 2010A salt mine
April 18th, 2010I find myself in the same situation as I was at the time I started to write about my travel experiences. Again, I could not find too much information about the place we wanted to visit on the internet. Or… I must correct myself, I found something, but of course it was wrong… from two points of view: the opening hours of the place we wanted to visit were wrong (due to which we actually changed the day of visit) and the entry price was wrong. What was this place? It was the Salt Mine of Turda (a nearby town), which can be visited by tourists. The mine has undergone recently an extensive renovation process making it more accessible for visitors of all ages, so we said we have to visit, to see how it looks like.
Yesterday at around 13:00 we had the idea of doing this short trip. On the internet I have found a timetable saying, that the mine is open from 9:00 to 13:30, so we postponed the trip to today. We started off at 10:00 to get there on time. One little thing: look for small indicators saying “Salina Turda” they forgot to mark it on the big indicators (good thing they didn’t put out an A4 and hand-written the directions on it 😉 ). Anyway we arrived there safely and relatively easily (the short road connecting the main road to the mine which is full of holes can be ignored).
We got to the ticket-office, where to my surprise I saw indications in three languages (wow): Romanian, English and Hungarian (a lot of Hungarian tourists by the way). On one of these indicators there was also a time-table: the mine is open between 9:00 and 15:00 (so much for the accurateness of what I have found on the net). Anyway we payed the entry price of 15RON (€3.65), contrary to the internet price of 10RON and we went in. The whole visit started with a quite long walk through an entirely lit tunnel until we arrived to the actual entrance to the mine. From here a larger corridor lead us to separate chambers. Nothing spectacular there. There was however, a small, wooden staircase leading downstairs: now don’t miss that, that IS the actual entrance into one of the modernized chambers (photo below).
The chamber itself is huge: it even has it’s own lake on which people can go row boating. There is a mini-football field a small theater even a ferry’s wheel (which was stopped at the time of our visit). The view of the walls was breathtaking. The sheer size of them and the stalactite-like formations of salt give the place a unique feeling. Even the bottom is filled with salty-sand which is sparkling in the internal lighting of the place. Amongst all this salt, we met a few tourists, who have not been able to see the salt: “Where f…k is the salt? All I can see is big gray walls”.
It is really hard to write about it. One most go see. It has a little bit of ‘Sci-fi’ feeling: at first glance I thought I was in a secret underground facility where spacecrafts are built 🙂 . The whole trip lasted between 90 and 120 minutes (at the entrance it says it takes 1:30h).
Here are some photos I took.
—==[ #12 ]==—
Chill
April 12th, 2010I think I have neglected my blog for quite a long time. At the current speed the likelihood of ever reaching the magic 100 posts this year is really getting far-far away. The problem is there are a lot of things happening with me, none of them however is suitable to be posted on a blog… The only thing that is constant and helps me chill out is this:
I managed to listen to it for two days straight and not get bored. What’s more, it really helped me to clear my mind and arrange my thoughts. I think this is worth posting, so there you go, I posted it… Enjoy! :).
P.S. For the people wondering what palm trees are doing in Venice, Venice is also a neighborhood of L.A.
—==[#11]==—
André Tanneberger…
March 6th, 2010… or ATB as most of the people know him, has performed today in Cluj, at Obsession club. He has already performed in Obsession for a couple of times, but this was the first time I decided to go see (I have elready missed Above&Beyond, so I said I will not miss this…)
Before anything else, I have to say: it was GREAT :D.
The ticket price was 40RON (€10), because we bought it in advance. The ticket at the entrance was 60RON (€15). The party started with Josh Gallahan at around 12:00 who has warmed up the crowd for the star of the night, who arrived precisely at 01:00AM as scheduled and took over the DJ controls until a little after 3:00 AM.
Among other things he has played some of his well known hits (contrary to the rumors), but other good trance songs, too. At one point the sound completely changed, by ATB playing the song Killing in the name of by Rage against the machine.
Unfortunately I only had my telephone to take pictures/shoot videos. Anyway, here’s a sample I uploaded, just to give an idea of what went down there:
Concerning future plans, all I can do is repeat his words: “See you next year”.
—==[#10]==—
Big Deal
February 28th, 2010Since I have bought my car, going to the gas station from time to time to do a fill-up or to just wash the car became a habit and a part of my normal life. I chose to go to the same gas station all the time, because it is close and they have a really good tunnel-carwash: OMV.
Recently the company has launched a campaign of “Complete your Kappa bags collection”, which means collecting points at every purchase of at least 30 RON and use those points to acquire travel bags. You can find out more about the campaign here.
Personally I never knew Kappa was famous of making travel bags. Anyway, because of the relatively high “original” price of the bags I was hoping that they were of good quality. Basically the original price of a set of 2 trolleys (as it said on the brochure) was of 899 lei, but with 20 points collected, one could buy them for “just” 319 lei. Pretty neat. I do not really need travel bags now, but a set of good bags never hurts especially for this low price…
Unfortunately I never really had the chance to see them, because they were always out of stock. Last week, I managed to gather my 20 points, so I decided to ask for the bags. Luckily the gas station had a set right then on display (nobody bought it, yet), so I checked them out. Well, they are not bad quality, but… I really hoped for something better. I liked the fact that the wheels were not “sticking out” and the quality of the materials seemed good. One thing that I really-really hate, however, is that the sliding handle is not fixed tight enough and the whole thing wobbles around if pulled out. Even my current travel bag (“L. Lambertazzi”), which was a bit cheaper than the Kappa bags can do this part better. To my surprise they did not let me see the smaller bag of the two. It was inside the big one and they told me that the packaging cannot be undone… 😕 ….
I have searched the internet for Kappa bags to at least compare the prices, but nothing. I have only found one forum thread which described these exact bags from the OMV campaign. To my surprise everyone said that the bags are OK. Come on: nothing is special about them… I have actually seen a few trolleys which were better in Carrefour (for around 150-200 lei). I have also checked out some local Samsonite stores: yes, those really are high quality bags for 800 lei.
All in all I am losing my will of buying the bags. They simply are not worth the money. Maybe if you really need them, then yes, buy them. Other than that: nothing special, just attracting clients.
—==[#9]==—