The World is Waiting for You

Just a quick post, last week I scooped up a cheap ticket to attended my first West End musical – Billy Elliot. I was amazed at the young talented actors on stage and the attention to detail in the set design. The musical has been running for 5 years in London and has expanded to New York, Sydney, Melbourne and this year opens in Chicago & Seoul.

I had an enjoyable evening and looking forward to my next visit to a West End production.

I headed to Dusseldorf, Germany in a tiny plane (Bombardier Dash 8) for my New Years celebrations. Dusseldorf didn’t seem to offer much for tourists in the winter apart from 7 H&M stores. Altstadt (Old Town) seemed to be where everyone hung out, on our first night we had a delicious German dinner. Dusseldorf has a high standard of Living it ranked 6th in the world for ‘Quality of Living’.

Sensation – Wicked Wonderland was the reason I came, the stage design was stunning. This was my 2nd time a Sensation event, the last one I attended was in Budapest Hungary with the theme of  Ocean of White.

It was great to see that the ticket included public transport to the ESPIRT Arena, which was a short U Bahn ride from the city centre. I had an awesome start to 2010, thousands and thousands of  people all dressed white and getting into the music. I wasn’t a huge fan of two DJ’s and the getting a drink was a long & an expensive  mission towards the start of the night.

I highly recommend you get yourself to the next Sensation, I personally thought the Ocean of White theme was the better one.

Enjoy the pictures of my NYE at Sensation.

Looking back at 2009 it was quite an exciting and eventful year, I met many people and visited numerous cities on my numerous trips mostly around Europe. Here a few highlights of what I got up to.

• Lady Gaga – One of the great aspects of living in London is the never ending list of bands & artists performing, both big and small. Lady Gaga was the Gig for 2009, she put on a great performance at Heaven.
• Manchester – Headed up for the weekend to checkout nightlife on Canal Street – met some great people at my hostel, we great night out
• Hamburg – Took advantage of the Ryanair’s silly fares (£5 return) and went to Hamburg Germany for the weekend.
• Nightwish – A Finish band which would probably never make it to Australia was playing in London, so it was a must do. Had an enjoyable evening at their Gig, only downside was I had to sit down the entire time
• London – So much is happening in this city visited Hyde Park, September Gig, Foam Party @ Heaven and Shortdich House.
• Brighton – Spent Easter couch surfing in Brighton.
• Armin Van Buuren – Been such an avid fan I went to Birmingham & Ministry of Sound in London (twice ) to see him DJ.
• Sensation – I flew all the way to Budapest Hungry to attended Sensation – Ocean of White, this was my second couch surfing experience. I had a great time and really enjoy my time in Budapest.
• 2 Week Trip – Spent two weeks mostly traveling by train around Europe, first stop was Amsterdam which they were celebrating Queen’s Day (National Holiday) followed by Berlin, Zurich, Rome, Venice & Barcelona.
• 46 Day Camping Trip – I haven’t done much camping beforehand but I braved the conditions and best time EVER, its one huge trip I will never forget.
  • I visited many cities, our tour started in London and continued into Paris, Barcelona, back into France to visit the French Riveriva (Nice, Cannes & Monaco),  Verona, Venice, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Capri (one of my favorites) and Pompeii.
  • We took an over night ferry from Italy to the laid back island of Corfu, Greece after relaxing, drinking cocktails & doing watersports we headed to Athens, then crossed over into Turkey one place I would love to head back to. After our time in Istanbul & Gallipoi we headed into the Eastern Block. Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania & Montenengro where very different and full of surprises along the way. We spent a 3 lovely days in Dubronivk Croatia. Hungary was next followed by Bratislava, Slovakia, Austria, Mathausen Concentration Camp, Cesky Krumlov in Czeck Reupublic then onto Prague.
  • Our camping trip was coming to an end, our next stop was Munich the home of Octoberfest, entered Switzerland, the scenery amazing we visited Lucerne & Jungfrau. Back into Germany to visit Heidelberg, St Goar & Rhine Valley. To finish up we headed to Amsterdam then back to London.
• Spent a few days soaking up the London Summer before I set out more travels. Watch out for Part 2.

I whipped up a quick salad for lunch which was delicious, here’s what you need to make your own.

• ½ lemon
• 1 tablespoon of virgin olive oil
• 220g of canned green lentils, drained
• ¼ small red onion, diced
• ¼ red capisum, diced
• 10 cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 50g of Rocket Leaves, washed & drained
• 100g Organic Greek Feta, diced

Whisk lemon & oil in a bowl. Add green lentils and mix. Add onion, capisum, cherry tomatoes and rocket leaves, mix. Add Feta and lightly toss with your finger trying not to break up the feta cubes. Now its all ready to eat, yum yum!

Makes enough for one or two as a side salad.

Well, where do I start haven’t blogged for quite some time, but I have been tweeting away on my travels. Over 5 months of traveling I meet some great people, cities and experiences that I will never forget, I have many stories & odd facts to tell.

Majority of my traveling was with Conitki (An organised tour for 18 – 35 years old) which took me through Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia & Scandinavia. I often get asked ‘Which is the best placed you visited?’, its quite hard to narrow it down as each city/country I visited has it own unique qualities. If I had to pick one city it would have to be the day we spent on the small island of Capri in Italy, the sun was shining on this sleepy, but beautiful pebble beach town. Overall my favourite country was Norway, the scenery was breathtaking.

Im back in London and have moved into a new shared house just south of Central London & have secured a short term contract in working for a large advertisement & communications agency, so things are looking good at the moment.

Over the next few months I will be posting up a selection of the 1000′s of photos I took.

In my last post I was heading down to Brighton for the Easter long weekend. The trip from London to Brighton via train was a very quick 1 hour journey, much closer then I first thought.

I had organised to stay on a strangers couch which is known as couchsurfing, this was a first for me. Your host doesn’t charge you to stay but more importantly their local knowledge of the city your visiting is what I found to be the real winner. In return you can host them when they come visit your home town.

• The first night my host took me out with his friends & flatmates to experience the nightlife Brighton had to offer.
• My host & flatmates cook up a very English Chicken Roast dinner complete with my very first home made Yorkshire Pudding.
• The Royal Pavilion – It was built in the early 19th Century as a seaside retreat for the then Prince Regent.
  
• Brighton Pier – mini theme park on the pier, was quite busy with spectacular views.
• Brighton Mania – some expensive boats & property around this area, the marina is home to variety of shops & upmarket restaurants.
• Explored the ‘lanes’ of Brighton which are filled with clothing stores, cafes & all sorts of arty & homeware shops.
• Devils Dyke – Had a beer and took in the calming views of the English countryside.

I had great weekend away meeting new people & places, the couchsurfing experince was daughtning at first but I was made very welcome and settled in with no dramas.

I have been without a job for close to a month now. The market has been quite tough especially towards the end of March, early April being the end of the financial year in the UK.

In the past week I have noticed in the area of Front End Development the contact side of the job market has improved quite rapidly. So much so I have attended a number of interviews and had 3 jobs offers! I can’t believe the turnaround. I start my new job on Tuesday working on a great project.

With the temperatures warming up and days getting longer now was a great time to get outdoors, here’s what ive been up to over the past few weeks…

• Sleeping in 
• Finsbury Park – This 45 hectare park is just up the road, its massive spanning over 2 suburbs.
• Hyde Park & Green Park – Located in central London, had a lovely day walking around.
• Heaven Foam Party – Loads of fun was soaking wet by the end of the night.
• South Bank – Nice warm weather, people were flocking outdoors for the sunshine.
• St Johns Wood – quite high density apartments which are quite sort after. Kate Moss & Sir Paul McCartney are some hight profile residents.
• Hampstead Heath – This is one of the more affluent suburbs around London, some of the most expensive property is located in the Hampstead area. The shops that line the streets are aimed at the high end consumers. Jamie Oliver is a resident in Hampstead.

The Easter long weekend is here, I am venturing down to sunny Brighton today, going par-take in my first CouchSurfing experience – im excited!

the world is waiting for you

For those who don’t know I am a tad crazy about Armin Van Buuren. Armin Only was the first event I saw Armin Van Buuren play a set live when he came to Sydney last year (2008). A State of Trance (ASOT) his weekly radio show is coming up to his 400th transmission. To celebrate the 8 year long radio show, ASOT 400 is being broadcast for 72 hours over three countries; Germany, United Kingdom & The Netherlands. I am quite lucky that I am able to make it to Birmingham next week. Only 7 days remaining!

In my spare time I knocked up  a site for the special ASOT 400 episode, I also took this opportunity to expand my skill set, this was my first PHP website. Here’s what I used…

• WordPress – The site is part of my blog working in conjunction with WordPress, this saved time from having to build the site from scratch and learnt some of the more advanced features of WordPress.
• Twitter API – Documentation of the Twitter API is extensive and well written. Using SimplePie made the process of displaying tweets on the site a breeze as it took care of the caching.
• Amazon API – I had quite alot of trouble with this API, very poorly written documentation with not many examples. One of the biggest downsides I found is the I couldn’t distingish between the MP3 downloads weather it was a single or album. I found an alternative way display just albums but its not ideal.
• Google Maps API – I have worked with the Google Maps API before, if I had more time I would have liked to of used the Street View feature.
• Flickr API – Using phpFlickr made the job easy and the well written documentation was great too.
• RSS feeds – Parsing XML feeds in php wasn’t an easy task since I was so new to the langauge, but I seem to pick up quickly

My side project is complete – http://www.armin-van-buuren.com

Last week my Facebook profile switch over to the ‘new’ layout as announced. With any new change I gave it chance, until today. As you see in the screenshot above and for 2 more pages all updates where from one person, just another example of a Facebook Fail.

Facebook is starting to get complex to use and this new version tries to ‘highlight’ what I might be interested in instead letting me control what I want to see. I think it good the Facebook is trying new ideas to present large & constanly changing content, but they need to be gradually with small improvements.

Google is a great example, with Google Labs Experimental Search, users can opt in to be the guinea pig for potential new features for Google search results page. The Google Search Quality blog post was a great read about how much time is spent improving what Google currently offers, instead of a complete overhaul. In short the KISS rule is always best (sorry about the pun).

What are your thoughts on the ‘new’ facebook redesign?