Well it’s 4am a d I’m just getting up to catch the bus for my travels to Cancun, Mexico…

This will be my second trip and I’m looking forward to some R&R after 7 months of working on a kick ass game project, which I can’t talk about yet and will post here as soon as I can.

My buddy Jason is meeting me in Mexico since he’s flying in from Canada and this should be an interesting trip.

More as the trip progresses… Stay tuned ….

Seattle Skyline

Last weekend I took a quick unexpected trip to Seattle to visit some friends and do a surprise visit to my biz partners. This was my second trip to Seattle and I do have to say I really like the area how ever I don’t think I could deal with the weather so much. Out of the 4 days I was there the sun only came out for 2 and boy it was like a celebration for everyone.

I guess living in sunny California we take the nice sun for granted, when the sun comes out in Seattle its as some miracle has happened. While on my visit I was able to swing by Valve Software, take a small tour and play test a bit of Team Fortress 2 which I had a blast playing.

I’m headed back up that way at the end of June so if anyone has any recommendations of things to check out, bars to visit, hidden Seattle gems or anything else hit me up or leave a comment in the blog.

This photo was taken from my buddies balcony during one of those rare sunny days in Seattle.

Looking though some of my pictures from Europe there are a few odd ones that stand out that I have labeled “WTF”.

I figured I would share some of my odd photos of signs, items, places and ads that I think you guys might get a kick out of. If anyone has any ideas on the last photo of the bunch I would love to know, just drop a comment in the comments section below.

While in Budapest its worth taking a small trip outside of the city to see Statue Park. What is Statue Park? Well during the rain of communism in Budapest a lot of statues where placed in and around the city. After communism fell 1989 in Budapest and the government of the city decided to have all the statues moved to a park which is located outside of the city instead of destroying them.

Visit Gigantic Memorials from the Communist Dictatorship in south Budapest. Cubist busts of Marx and Engels and a bug-eyed 15-foot statue of a triumphant Soviet soldier are among the surreal highlights.

I highly recommend taking a short trip out to see this park and It will only take about 45 minutes to view all the statues. You can take public bus but we where told that can take you over an hour and it isn’t easy. We took a cab from our hotel, it was about $40 US, and the cab driver waited an hour while we looked around which worked out perfectly.

Here are some photos I took of Statue Park during my trip to Budapest in May 2007.

You can see more photos at my Flickr account here and the actual Geo Locations where I took these photos since I traveled around Europe with a gps logger that allows me to tag the exact spots where I took my photos.

Full Picture of Budapest at Night
Map Location

Here is yet another photo from my collection of 700 photos taken earlier this month on my Europe Trip (Munich, Prague, Vienna and Budapest). I’m a compete shutter bug and for anyone who knows me I usually have camera in hand or in my pocket waiting for that prefect photo opportunity.

The first night we arrived in Budapest we went on a long walk up to Buda Castle had a great dinner and Hungarian wine (Polgar) at Apetito. During our trip we liked to explore the streets, alley ways, and off beaten paths of the cities we visited. To my surprise we found our selves in a great location for a night photo shot of both the Hungarian Parliament and Buda Castle region.

Of course I only had my Canon SD900 camera (point and shoot), which isn’t great for night shots like a nice DSLR and tripod, but using my handy timer trick I was able to find some what of a stable location to set my camera and take this shot.

Hungarian Parliament Building
Originally uploaded by Gate-Way.

While looking though my trip photos (all 700 of them) I came upon this one that actually turned out really nice giving the circumstances of light, distance and lack of a tripod. This is the Parliament Building in Budapest and we are standing across the Danube river in the Buda Castle district. Here is a snippet from wiki about this building.

“The Hungarian Parliament Building (Hungarian: Országház) is the seat of the National Assembly of Hungary, one of the world’s greatest legislative buildings, a notable landmark of Hungary and a popular tourist destination of Budapest. It lies in Kossuth Lajos Square, right on the bank of the Danube, at Budapest”

I was surprised as to how this photo came out and most of the night photos of buildings usually turned out blury but I remembered a trick to do when you don’t have a tripod handy.

Most point and shoot cameras have a timer function which counts down a number of seconds and takes the photo. So finding a good stable place to set my camera i used the 10 second function, which as you can tell worked out nicely. Just a friendly photography trick to keep in mind.

If your ever in the city Budapest and you have the itch to drive a tank I have just the thing for you. While in Budapest a week ago I saw a flyer at a local internet cafe that had printed on it “Drive a Tank” of course this caught my attention and I had to find out more.

Here is a quote from their website:

“”Rushing off the road, I have the steering in my hands. Under me, a 22 ton monster of steel roars. I’m in control, nothing can stand in my way! It is only the two of us: man and machine.”

Have you ever wondered, how it feels to experience such a magnificent ride?”

It seems from the web site they have three types of tanks you can try out:

1. GSzP-055 – “Táltos”
2. ZSU-23-4 – “Shilka”
3. T-55 ARV – Technical rescuer vehicle

Unfortunately we didn’t have the opportunity to do this and its a bit of a drive out of Budapest but If anyone does this let me know im sure the next time I make it to Budapest im going to give it a shot or better yet shoot it with my tank

Below are pics I scanned in from the small flyer I picked up.

This is one of the 700+ photos I took, I haven’t had a chance to sort though most of them but I liked this door in Prague, it Belongs to the Týn Church. I swear Ill post a bunch of photos soon, its so hard to find my favorites. I just quickly posted this to flickr to get at least one photo up Here is a link to the wiki about this Church and believe me I have plenty of photos that will be coming soon.

I’m nearly recovered from my trip to Europe and hopefully will have some time in the next week or so to post some photos but I wanted to write about an experience we had in Prague with Absinthe and the dangers that can happen if not done right. We decided to do one of those pub crawl tours which takes you around to a few various pubs and explains the history of Prague and the beer. At the end of one such tour and probably 6-7 beers into our adventure my travel partner wanted to try out Absinthe.

“Absinthe or the Green Fairy as many call it is a is a distilled, highly alcoholic, anise-flavored spirit derived from herbs including the flowers and leaves of the medicinal plant Artemisia absinthium, also called grand wormwood. Although it is sometimes mistakenly called a liqueur, absinthe is not bottled with added sugar and is, therefore, classified as a liquor or spirit.”

This drink is prepared in a special way (my guess is cause it tastes like crap with out it) where you use a spoon, sugar, some water and fire. Now this seems like a good idea and everyone loves to play with fire but add an additional 6-7 beers before hand and things can get out of control quickly which happened in our case. (their seems to be many ways to prepare Absinthe)

My travel partner (I wont mention names) asked the bartender to work his magic and prepare this drink for him, unfortunately he didn’t speak any English so our young tour guide did a bit of translation as to what he was doing. From what I remember he put some sugar on the spoon, poured some absinthe on the spoon, lit the sugar on the spoon to allow it to caramelized and then dumped the sugar into the glass which lit the whole glass ablaze. The tour guide said something to the effect of drink or blow, I don’t remember now, it happened so fast and my buddy tried to drink the whole glass of Absinthe while it was still on fire and spilling a bit on his face. As you can imagine the group gasped in horror as we saw my buddy face go up in flames.

Here is a quote from my buddy on what happened:

“The actual confusion was that he mimed blowing out the glass, but it looked like taking a drink, so I said “chug it?” and he said “yes, chug it”, thinking that chug meant blow out or something. My fault for using vernacular.”

After what seemed to be like 10 seconds someone finally patted his face down putting out the fire, and the looks of horror and amazement where plastered on the groups faces. After checking with my buddy to make sure he was all right, we all burst into laughter but still a bit socked as to what just happened. I guess the tour guide didn’t really translate that he needs to blow out the glass before he takes the drink. I guess this is common sense to anyone who hasn’t been already drinking or thought that this was the way to do it. So this is just a word of warning to all wanting to do Absinthe blow out the freaking fire before taking a sip

My buddy is all fine, he had a nice case of 2nd degree burns on one side of his face and is healing fine, poor guy. He still claims that he could of drank the whole thing while it was on fire, I guess we will never know unless we head back to Prague some time soon.