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.

Just a shot update, we are in Prague right now just sitting at an internet cafe. I have been having a blast with my buddy Brooks and its been alot of beer drinking esp in Munich. It seems like the culture in Munich is based around drinking good German beer which being German my self isn’t quite so bad. Only booboo that has happened so far on the 2nd day right before our bike tour (Mikes bike tour) I dropped my camera and boom the 8 gig flash card died on me. Grrr, that sucked but thank god it was only the 2nd day and not to many pictures where taken. luckily I had a spare flash card which then Brooks and I backtracked and retook alot of the photos.

anyhow just a short hello from the road. If your ever in Munich I highly recommend the Mikes Bike tour and our guide Adam did a great job.

I’m off to Europe for two weeks and will be visiting Munich, Prague, Vienna and Budapest but with one small catch a small bag. Ok well maybe its not so small for your backpackers but for me im used to a decent sized luggage. However I was pretty surprised as to what I could fit into my Swiss Army Victorinox Travel Bag.

Here is a run down for anyone interested in these type of bags or want something smaller than normal luggage to carry around.

• 4 Blue Jeans
• 1 pair Dress Slacks
• 6 tee shirts
• 2 dress shirts
• Extra Dress Shoes
• 2 Shorts
• 1 pair of swim trunks
• Bunch of Socks and Boxers
• Restroom Gear
• Electronic Gear and Chargers

Of course this doesn’t seem like a lot for a two week trip and I’ll need to do laundry at the mid way point but the convenience of having a small bag that has wheels or can be carried as a backpack is going to work out well for the number of countries we are visiting.

Lets hope the airlines don’t give me hell with all the bathroom gear, as I read on the TSA website you can have 3 oz items that fit into a small zip lock bag but their was no word as to how many 3 oz items you can have.

Anyhow Off to Europe, I will be taking plenty of pictures and making sure to geo tag them look for updates while im on my trip.

I saw a few pics the other day of some guy in Russia who creates soldiers, people and other stuff out of wire’s. Below are some images from his site. If you want to see more visit his site here. He also has has a tutorial on how to do this your self, how ever all of this is in Russian so your on your own.