Dimitri's Tales
I’ll try to update more regularly from now on, as nothing really time-consuming happens.
What can you do in Spain in summer? Swimming? Sure. Hiking? Possible, if it is not too warm. Blogging? Not really, since the internets in the hotel were rare. Traveling? Well… yes, but at a price.
Having a good knowledge about some possible (putting it mildly) irregularities you can face while being somewhere to the east of Germany or to the south of Austria is often not enough to anticipate this kind of things while being on vacation in the typical “vacation countries”.
Since the German law forbids me to rant about companies, I will anonymize them as much as possible. So yeah. The tale begins when I tried to rent a car. I tried several times: the first time, the hotline was unavailable, the second time, I ran into siesta, the third time, I was successful. And by 10AM in a few days I should be able to see my car.
This was obviously too easy. 10AM in the morning, I am waiting for a car to pick me up and to bring me to the place where the cars can be rented. At 10:15, I decide that fifteen minutes are a sufficiently long wait to declare that the guys are late even by non-German standards and call them. After ten minutes, a car arrives, takes me, drives for a while around to pick up similar-minded people with the wish to actually drive on Spanish streets.
Sooner or later, we arrive at a hotel where the car rental company resides. It turns out that my reservation did not include giving the car back at a different place, and it was in fact not possible to change the reservation accordingly, but it was actually possible to extend the reservation. Trying to extend the reservation worked, but the transaction was however still impossible, since I ran into the transfer limit on my credit card. Obviously, it was impossible to pay with other means.
So traveling by train it was, then. Trains in Spain are a very interesting story. In brief, the station did only feature a human-operated single-threaded and low-perfomance ticket buying interface that used a ticket computer as a terminal. Which was completely okay (as I had a lot of time on my hands), but as the ticket-selling system crashed, the whole ticket-selling process screeched to a halt. When the ticket-selling system was restarted, there were only first-class tickets. As I was cornered, I had to buy the only thing that was offered.
On the route back, I successfully managed to rent a car. In the end, it was marginally cheaper than traveling first-class by train, but far more nerve-consuming. The most terrible part started when I was close to my destination and found out that the city was a hell for drivers. I still somehow managed to get to my destination, but I burned a lot of my nerves on the way.
And now for some cute pictures from the south:
So, how do I come to participating in such activities? To explain this, there is some context needed.
The whole story starts twenty-something years ago when some bright fellow in Germany decided to organize a series of summer camps for high-school students in their last or second-to-last year. This alone was a great idea, and at some point the participants of these summer camps had the brilliant idea to organize themselves into a club to do different activities together. Long story short, the “Club der Ehemaligen” came to life, and in the last decade it has been organizing different activities for its members, most of them consisting equally of fun and education (which is often fun, too). For some time now, the CdE (as it is called internally) has been organizing activities outside of Germany for its non-German members. And here I am, describing one of them, the “MultiAka”.
My impressions from the MultiAka (and of Vienna where I went in the beginning) can be described loosely as follows:
In the end, I am pretty much impressed.
I walked around Donetsk and looked for nice places. There was an abundance of these.
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| This ball is supported by a fountain of water. |
More pictures from around the stadium:
Elsewhere in the city you can find a lot of iron figures:
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| Not the real cup, of course. A present of the FC SD trainer. |
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| Guess who? |
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| A lurking crocodile |
June 15: I departed from Norway and arrived in Dortmund
June 16: Decompressing in Dortmund
June 17: Departing to Kiev, walking around in Kiev and getting on the train to Donetsk
June 18: Arriving in Donetsk, decompressing.
June 19: Football ENG-UKR. No good pictures from the match itself (only mobile phone quality pictures), but some of the surroundings:
Today I took a walk around the city center (which is, by the way, HUGE) and made some nice pictures I hope you’ll like 🙂
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| These funny towers are kinda typical here. |
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| This monument is known among the locals as “the guy with the brick” |
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| Main text: “Say NO to violence in families” Sub-caption: “The strong ones do not bully” |
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| Metaphotography! |
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| These windows must offer a great view. |
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| “Sorry, do you know where we can find a McDonalds?” – “Er, right over there” – “Thank you very much” |
You might ask what will happen to this blog when I’m home. The answer is, I will try to update it on a more or less regular basis with random experiences — be it my current scientific adventures or sketches from life. And, obviously, pictures, as I became quite a photography addict.
which is very unlikely for a human language, but still, a nice feature 🙂
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| Bonus photo: A swan figure in a totally unexpected place |
And afterwards I made a mistake and went again to a club where the student association was inviting to. Going to (mainstream) clubs here means
So yeah, great fun. But I still managed to extract some profit out of the whole thing and made a picture:
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| Sunrise, 2:40 in the morning |
(Sorry for the probably lousy quality, this was just my phone’s camera. I am not carrying my real camera everywhere with me)
This is Gripen, a proof that SAAB makes not only good cars, but also good planes:
Yesterday Norway was celebrating its independence. It was a pretty big celebration, considering the efforts Norway put into acquiring its independence; nevertheless, it was a nice show to watch even despite the weather (+8, rain, jacket, hoodie). Generally, this looks a lot like a mix of the May 1st parade and the German Karneval, but in serious. The idea is that all city’s societies that include more than twenty people join the parade, wave some society-related flags, do some performance (optional) and carry Norwegian flags (mandatory).
By “all city’s societies” I mean literally all of them. Even the 501st legion was there:
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| “Dude, where is my Death Star?” |
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| “Hey, do you know these droids we are looking for?” |
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| The 501st Legion of the Galactic Empire of Norway |
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| Somebody always has to hold the banner… |
I discovered at least ten different big bands performing on the National Day. The most stunning part was when the band standing in front of me started playing the first notes from the “Farewell of Slavyanka”. I first thought I misheard, but then again, the tune is unambiguous and hard to confuse with something else. To explain my cognitive dissonance: The tune is a Russian patriotic march, very popular and very well-known. Seemed kinda misplaced to me.
It has to be said that every Norwegian was wearing a bunad, which is a very formal traditional dress (as depicted) or at least something that looks formal enough. It is National day, it has to be celebrated – no exceptions.
