Toy Adventures

After reading an article in a photography magazine, I have looked into photographing toys... and creating storylines and stuff like that. Anyway, I got a couple of action figures and stuff from eBay and got down to taking photos.

Here is the first episode... I deliberately excluded dialogue, too. There's no need for it.

Macht Spaß!

Ramblings...

Hello again... been a while... again!

Anyway... some updates.

About the photo thingy I mentioned some time ago, which happens to be on the last post, well... it's still going on. Just taking its time, that's all. I'll let thee know when it'll be up and running.

And... in other news.... I'm moving to Yorkshire. The Eastern bit. It'll happen sometime in July, and it's going to happen before I go into the Navy.

And on about the Navy, I recently passed my fitness test (again) by running 1.5 miles (or 2.4km) in 10 minutes and 20 seconds. The target was 11:13. So I'm waiting upon some dates for my AIB! Exciting stuff!

I've been spending a lot of time lately on the piano. I'm getting back into it now... and it's great! It's more difficult in teaching myself, but I'm sure there's a greater sense of achievement with it. Thing is... not sure if I'm not dong some things correctly or not. But I'll ask about for that...

Finally... hope Easter went well this year. It was ok for me, I guess. I worked a lot of it. Though the weather has been awesome! And the chocolate eggs are making up for it, too!

Anyhoo... I think that's about it...

See you later...

Photo album.

For years, I've been trying to set up a website or an online album of sorts, but to no avail. I've had to revert to using social networking sites to display them. And now... it's just doing my head in. I need something more 'professional' and presentable. Sooo... I thought I'd make a start using blogspot. It's a start, right??

Sooo... I'll (try to) keep you updating on this. I have photos coming out of my eyeballs... see what I did there? (A very much out-of-the-box lateral link!)

Anyway... I'm not going to make the address public just yet. I want to have at least an album or two on there yet!

By the way, I've got a post to put on here about my trip to Shropshire, Wales and Cornwall. That should be up soon. But I'm also busy at work and preparing for an interview I have with the Royal Navy in just over a week's time! So I'm not abandoning this, no matter how dire the post count has been lately!

A Quick Clean Up.

Soooo... is there much point in carrying on with this? There is... but I need to start again.

Very well. I shall quickly go over what has happened in the (almost) two years from the trip to today.

Finished the road trip. All went well. Preferred Budapest to Prague. Great roast pork in Prague. That may pop up soon.

Also visited Italy a couple of months after that. We went to Verona... unfortunately, the photos of that trip are on this external hard-drive that has since broken. But I may get them back if I find about £300 to repair the thing!

Sooo... back to uni for the final year. It was very intense! Lots of coursework and stuff... but I managed. I did the dissertation on the Ruhrgebiet.

And now I'm in Norwich. I work at Sprowston Manor, and I'm applying for the Royal Navy as a warfare officer. I'm a member of CAMRA, and I do like visiting the good pubs around here. There is sooo many! Good ales to be found and there are many little breweries. I've already visited Adnam's in Southwold and Humpty Dumpty in Reedham, but there are lots more to go to!

Now that's all cleared up, I can start again on this. It's a pity that I've let it go stagnant for so long, and it was a good thing to have a blog, too. I do apologise at my laziness... but c'est la vie!

Anyway, if there are any readers left... here's to a new start! Chin-chin!

Hungry Romans.

aah... I'm getting annoyed at myself now. I'm not keeping up with this blog at all. But anyway, what happened after Belgrade? We went on to Budapest, via Romania (we had to clean the car due to the laws against dirty cars), and into Hungary!

Budapest wasn't so bad to go around. Our hostel was just outside the city, but we had to find the tram. And the stops were difficult, because we knew no word of Hungarian. It was also difficult to explain why we didn't have any tickets for the underground. We had no coins. There was no official around for us to buy tickets from, and so we lost 20 Euros (or the equivalent) each! But anyway, Budapest is a great city. Big, though... or maybe we just thought that from all the walking throughout the day! haha! Anyway... another interesting thing happened.

Outside the Parliament building, there is a big square (complete with the usual group of demonstrators), and at the edge of this square, there are three wooden crosses. They were separated from the square by a low chain fence thing. But anyway, no matter how careful I was trying to be not to trip over this chain, I tripped over! And to break my fall, I went to lean on one of these crosses and tilting it over. Luckily, it didn't fall and it was light enough to put back right again!

hm... what else happened? Nothing special, I guess. We just went all over the place! The next day, we went to Lake Balaton on the way to Bratislava. It is such an amazing lake. Massive, too! erm... I can't think of what to sat about it, really... but here are some photos, from Romania, Budapest and Balaton, and one out towards Bratislava. There is about 20 of them...

Belgrade and the Centar.

Oh well... I am slacking again. I don’t even know why. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve left it for so long and my memory is rusting up and I cannot remember what happened next. Or it could be my willpower. I don’t know... but I’m getting there. Even if it is at a snail’s pace... and the snail has a bad foot... and has asthma... and lost... and getting on a bit... and also lazy...

But anyway... Belgrade. That’s where I left off!

So, two nights in Hostel Centar, situated on a busy main road going into the city centre. And the room? Well, it was a dorm (with internet access!) on the third floor of an old-looking building. We got there before everyone else arrived, and found these two beds (basically, they were only the mattresses) shoved on this balcony thing above the room, accessible by a ladder. It was a cosy place to stay; it was above the windows and in the ceiling area, where it was sloped due to the roof being there. During the night was warm, though... it was probably the position of the mattress beds, and when the morning came with the Sun beating down on the roof, it was surely becoming an oven!

But anyway, we weren’t going to stay there all day. We got a city to see. And getting there by foot wasn’t too bad. It took a good few minutes, but it was easy enough. We got to the Sava River, just before it joins the mighty Danube, and there, berthed on the banks, were the most rustic and poor conditioned boats I have ever seen. To be honest, I don’t know what they were. They were boats, but didn’t look as if they were. They were more like old buildings or abandoned warehouses that floated alongside the riverbank.

We made our way towards the fortress on top of the hill. The fortress, Kalemegdan, whose site has been occupied over thousands of years, stood on the hill overlooking the confluence of the two rivers running through Belgrade and overlooking to two main areas of the city, New Belgrade on the opposite side of the River Sava, where the banks and high-rise offices are based, and Old Belgrade, where the cultural and historical parts of the city lay.

The fortress was in between these areas, so all walks of life could be found passing through the fortress and the park within its walls. There are people sunbathing on the lower walls of the fortress, old men playing chess in the shade of the trees and kids asking people like us for a couple of Serbian Dinars to buy some ice cream and people on stalls selling Serbian stuff and Serbian fruit wine, which I still have a bottle of!

After a few hours wondering around the city centre, passing old concrete buildings with signs in Cyrillic, and old car with a Christmas greeting on the bonnet and lots of battered and rusty trolleybuses, we headed back to the hostel to change and ask the guy at reception about somewhere to eat. He suggested the ‘Mark of Question’. We were a bit confused about this, but when we got there, this place actually had no real name, but the place was actually called ?. But it looked nice enough... it was busy, too. The menu was also interesting. After asking the waiter what this dish was, he said it was basically bull testicles. Unfortunately, it wasn’t available that night, so I settled for simple goulash. Still good, though! But I couldn’t tell anybody that my food was a load of bollocks...

But soon after the food and a couple of glasses of local beer, we headed back. It was going to be a long day to Budapest the next day.

Remember, remember... what happened on that day again?

June 2009? Pfft... it’s been a while, and where has the time gone? Well, if there are any readers anymore, I would like to apologise to you. Just been a bit busy in the past year and that was mostly uni. But now that’s finally over and done with, I can get back onto updating this dusty, forgotten crevice of the web!

But, before I go on to what I am up to these days, I thought I’d enlighten the uneducated on how the trip around Eastern Europe went, and I shall try to remember the events that unfolded! I think a consultation with last year’s humble diary is in order... and I’ll put on some Beethoven to get in the writing mood!

Let’s see... the last time I posted was about entering Serbia and making our way to Belgrade. It was Day 7 (still), and after the bureaucratic bother at the border, we could finally make good progress to the capital city of Serbia and also what used to be Yugoslavia.

The countryside of western Serbia was very much like that in Srpska: mountainous, sparsely populated and bad roads, though very much picturesque, and naturally I stopped a few times to take a few photographs.

And has anyone heard of a hitchhiker who doesn’t want to get picked up? Well, we found one about ten miles outside Belgrade. For a couple of miles, there was a car behind us, despite it being clapped out, rusty and just plain old, it was being driven a bit erratically and sometimes got a bit too close for comfort behind us. Anyway, as I was coming up to a garage on the opposite side of this wide road, I thought I’d call in for a bit. I pulled over onto the side of the road to wait for traffic to clear and suddenly, the frantic driver behind me skidded to a halt in front of me. The words ‘hijack’ and ‘Serbian Mafia’ came to mind. A passenger got out, walked towards my car and stopped. He just stood there as if he were waiting for something. Anyway, the old car drove off and I crossed the road to park in the garage opposite.

Soon we realised that he was waiting for a lift, and after some consideration, we decided to ask him where he was going and whether he wanted a lift into Belgrade. With his poor English, he went “no, thanks you. No speak English, I want Serbia speak.”

Fair enough, then. I think it’s one of few hitchhikers who had ever refused a lift, though I can understand the reasons being the language barrier. And maybe he wanted to take in the dusty, roadside environment for a bit longer.

And so, finally we arrived in the Serbian capital after a somewhat interesting drive, with crazy truck drivers who thought it normal and safe to overtake slower (or so they underestimated) vehicles, which were often in a similar or better physical condition, when going around bends, and in the countryside of Serbia, there are many narrow and bendy roads traversing along the sides of the winding valleys.

Hostel Centar will be the new home for the next two nights...

A Day At The Office

Day 7, Part II
Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Priboj, Serbia

Višegrad seemed like a typical post-Communist town. It was in the middle of nowhere, basically. Its river had a hydroelectric dam upstream and the buildings were decaying and architecturally bland with a hint of greyness and concrete. The cars and vehicles were old and dirty, spewing out black fumes from rusty exhausts.

We looked for somewhere that would know about the price of a Green Card into Serbia, and asked in a bank, which was a small room with a metallic desk and bullet-proof glass, who wrote something down in a piece of paper and told us to go there. Presumably it was some kind of office, such as an insurance company. However, we couldn’t really find it, even though the directions were simple: follow the street to the end until we reach a square.

At the square, there was no sign of this place, and then we went into another bank. It was not as dark as the other one, and it didn’t look like some kind of interrogation cell, either. We waited in a queue behind an old woman and a young farmer wearing a faded red baseball cap and denim dungarees, who reminded me of someone from something out of ‘The Deliverance’. We showed the banker this piece of paper and led us outside to show us where it was, but she wasn’t sure herself. Then she called out Billy the Kid and asked him. As he knew where it was, he told us to follow him. I just hoped he wasn’t going to whip out his banjo and tell us to be pigs…

But no, he didn’t. Instead, we went to this office, but as it was empty, we went across the square into this pub, where the guy who ran the office was there drinking and smoking as if it was his day off. Back in the office, there were a few certificates on the wall, a computer on a desk and on the small table in the corner; there were empty whisky glasses and a few cigarette butts in the ashtray. Typical of Eastern Europe. He then took out a cigarette, slowly lit it and began explaining where to go by pointing at the map and how much it was going to cost for a Green Card. His English was very limited and was unable to string a sentence together, and he decided to shout across the square to someone else in the pub.

This second guy began staggering across the road and into the office. It turns out that he spoke German and could tell us more easily about it by the first guy talking in Serbian (or Bosnian or whatever) to the second guy, who then told us in German. It was really confusing, as we tried to ask about things, then going through him to the other guy and then back to us. Eventually, we got things sorted. We had to go off the main road, which wasn’t very main, and then go onto a small country road that took us south through the hills and countryside to a place called Uvaz (or Увац, pronounced ‘oo-vats’). It is a small place, and there it should be cheaper, roughly around twenty Euros worth.

After saying goodbye to the two drunken guys at the office/pub, we headed back to the car and left what was a very amusing and unforgettable encounter. And that’s what I like about travelling amongst other things; meeting random people in random places and trying to communicate with each other through very different languages, and also gaining a much better and detailed map of Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Leaving the country to get into Serbia, however, proved another difficult task to get through. We got to the border control, which was in this small village in the middle of nowhere. I parked outside the controls, which were just two small portable cabins with plastic deckchairs outside, occupied by border guards who were either smoking, reading newspapers or playing cards.

I went to ask one of them where I could get money from a bank to pay for the Green Card. He said it would cost about a hundred Euros, not twenty. He said that there isn’t anywhere that would make it cheaper, and the only bank in the area was the one in the village, which closes for the afternoon. To get to an open bank, we would have to drive all the way back into Višegrad, which wasn’t really worth the effort. He also said there was a bank in a town over the border, but it would take about ten minutes by car or two hours by foot.

After confirming this with the Serbian border control over the bridge, I decided we would have to get the Green Card there, but we had to leave the car between the borders until we could get the right documents. And so, we left Bosnia, got an exit stamp on the passports, which looked just like the entry stamp but in blue. The stamps were quite boring, anyway. We expected some kind of different design or layout than the others, but they were very similar to the EU stamps, but with the letters in Cyrillic.

We left the car just before the gates into Serbia, and went to talk to the guard there. She said she would have to phone the insurance woman, who would have to drive to the border, pick us up, then take us into Priboj, which was a five minute drive, then take money out of the bank, then drive back to the border and sort the Green Card out and then be on our way. But the cost was going to be a hundred Euros, plus some money for the woman who was to take us. I had that feeling it was going to be fun!

We waited for the woman to arrive and sat in the car until she did so, and as we waited, we listened to some of the Ricky Gervais Show and played Monopoly on Rob’s phone for at least an hour. We tried to figure out what car she’d drive and whether it would stop at the car park on the other side of the barriers. We wondered what type of car, too. In Bosnia, the cars were old, rusty, cheap, incomplete, damaged, smoky and were just unfit for proper roads. We doubted that the nicer and better cars would be a popular sight, and if they were around, they were probably driven by government officials, banker managers, successful businessmen and some people who make their money in dubious ways.

And then she arrived. We didn’t see what she drove, but we saw this blonde woman walking towards the barriers, crossing the street and out of view. We had no idea why she did this because all that was on that side of the road was wasteland and some railway and the border offices were on the other side of the road. Then the guards called us over.

They explained that we had to go in her car, go to Priboj, get the money, come back to the border and pay for the Green Card, then go. So nothing we didn’t know already. And then off we went. Her car was a white Volkswagen Golf, of the second mark. It had all the tell tale signs that it was being driven in a developing country. Rust, stiff door handles, unclean inside and out, with tapes strewn everywhere as well as tissues, old crisp packets and other wrapping, empty beer cans (I just hoped that they’d been there at least since the day before). The seats were really dusty and not in their original black colour. The tape deck was missing a tape player, and the rev gauge behind the steering wheel was missing the needle and half of itself. I couldn’t tell if the speedometer was working properly, though. And so we just sat in the car for about ten minutes to Priboj, and making a conversation was a lost cause, with us unable to speak Serbian and her not speaking English nor German. It felt kind of awkward.

On the way to Priboj, we passed what seemed more primitive than Višegrad. The first thing that caught my eye was this huge plain and ugly building on the side of the road. It looked very similar to all the other large buildings we have come across so far. I assumed it was a disused power station or something. The windows were either boarded up or smashed and the walls were cracked and dirty. There was no sign of life at the place, apart from weeds and plants sprouting out of the concrete.

There was nothing much spectacular in Priboj, either. It seemed busy, but what was there, I don’t know. We didn’t really go far into the place, as we headed straight back after getting the wad of worthless notes out. And after signing the forms and relevant documents for the Green Card, we got out passport stamped (which looked just like the Bosnian, but smaller), we finally were on our way into Serbia, again.

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Day 7, Part I
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina

As we got to Sarajevo rather late, we thought we’d have a quick look around the place before setting off to Serbia. The city is rather small, and could easily be seen in an hour or so. The smell of cooking ćevapi was still in the air and the crowds of people were larger, and so were the groups of pigeons.

I was half tempted to buy a fez, as they were on sale in the many shops that surrounded the square along with the cafés. In the end I didn’t, but I did see a fez on the head of this old man sitting in front of the gates of a mosque as he was smoking a rolled cigarette and possibly preaching his wise words to the passing public.

Back at the hotel, we tried to find out about Serbia, the Green Card and the tolls for the motorways there. The receptionist didn’t know, but a Polish guy, dressed rather smartly in a suit, recognised our accents and asked if it was our car outside with the Welsh sticker on the back. Indeed it was mine, and he went on about when he lived in Porthcawl for some time and we were all talking about Swansea, Trecco Bay and other random stuff about home.

We also asked him about the tolls of the motorway in Serbia. We heard that it would cost us an equivalent of 85 Euros, to which he replied was crap… of the bull kind. He said it was much cheaper, but not sure by how much, though it certainly didn’t add up to such an amount. Though he agreed that the Green Card for Serbia was significantly worse for the wallet, in places it can add up to around a hundred Euros, but in some places, especially the more isolated and smaller border stations, it can be for much less. He also told us of someone he knew had an ‘under the table’ deal with the border guards, which cost him just twenty Euros. So even the border guards think it’s a rip-off.

And so off we went and out of Sarajevo. Leaving the noise and smells and bustle of a city and entering valleys of farmland and forests with bad roads. Later on, we passed a couple of police officers or soldiers with small automatic rifles. We weren’t sure what they were there for or why they were armed like that until we went under a small tunnel and around the corner saw a large sign, both in Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, welcoming us to the Srpska Republika.

From this point onwards, things began to change in this Serb region. The roads became worse, the road signs were all in Cyrillic and the fuel prices were all the same in every garage. It really did feel as if we were in Eastern Europe, luckily, I could read what the signs, otherwise we may well have been stuck. But the landscape was still scarce of human life. There were few houses, and the villages we passed were more like hamlets and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads apart from the few small tractor like carts struggling the ascent of the many steep roads.

As we got closer to the border, we weren’t sure where the best place to go was. We didn’t have any decent maps of the area, as the government may be a bit sceptical about allowing images and mapping being loaded on the Internet. So we stopped in this seemingly isolated town called Višegrad.