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March 19, 2007
St. Paddy's Day @ Dublin
Carnage! If you ever go to Dublin for St. Paddy's day be prepared to face a hoard of drunk Irish and tourists :)
It was a bit of reunion with a few people from the past Cambodia & Vietnam trip, as expected it was a superb reunion. Everyone was quite well behaved, considering the event and location. I think because we started drinking at 1:30pm and didn't stop until 3am in the next day, everyone sort of paced themselves quite repectably - who would have thought. Yeah there were a few of us who got blind drunk, but none had to be carried home.
We tried to catch the parade, but can't see anything, the entire city was a choker and we got stuck on people traffic jam. After seeing some flags, top of people's head, some big dinosours and a drag queen we decided to give up on the parade and head straight to the pubs.
Here we caught up with the rest of the crew. It was such a weird scene getting together again with the people you met on your travel halfway around the world, it was a bit unreal to be honest. We watched the final matches of the Six Nations where Ireland had a good chance to win it, France won it in the end by the point difference (of just 4) but the atmosphere was crazy regardless. It was so much fun, the Irish soon forgot the result of the Six Nations and partied away through the night.
We almost didn't make it back home on that day. Either Opodo or Air France stuffed up our booking and put us on the 18th May flight instead. It was the day after St. Patricks day, flight was fully booked. They put us on stand-by, but 30 minutes before scheduled take off, Air France couldn't check us in because the plane was overloaded. Time was ticking and we are still hanging around the check-in desk. The check-in chick told us if we want to go to that flight we can't check-in our luggages which means throwing away our shampoo, hair gel etc and the my Swiss army knife (arghh). My only consolation was that I was supposed to lose that knife ages ago in Hanoi. Anyway no one knows wether the plane can take off and the pilot was still talking with ground control & the engineers to resolve the issue.
The clock was ticking and our chances are becoming really slim. Flurry of phone calls and finally about 15 minutes before scheduled departure they give us a green light (God knows how, maybe they had to dump half the fuel or something like that) and had to refuse 2 guys below us although they had full tickets, but they did show up later than us. Naturally the departure gate was on the other side of the aiport, we had to race through the Dublin Aiport. We were the last persons to be admitted to the plane only to be told by the pilot that they couldn't take off yet because the plane needed to be de-iced and the contractors that supposed to do that were totally unprepared despite the weather forecast, and I bet they were hung over from the night before as well! So after all that, the plane was 1 hour delayed.
Posted by vhadiant at 07:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 14, 2007
Windsor Castle
As one of the official residence of the HM The Queen, Windsor Castle is more of a palace rather than a castle. The castle has ceased to be a fort for a long time. It's still used, and the queen spends most of her weekends there.
Windsor Castle as expected is very opulent, and like the rest of the royal palaces around Europe that I've visited, a constant reminder of why we are so damn lucky to live in this modern era. Not as rich and as extravagant as Versailles, but the experience was definitely better. There was a lot less tourist there, and also this is not really peak tourist season.
It was a big place, took us a full 3 hours to complete the audio guide. The city around the castle is nice and there's a superb ice cream shop just outside the entrance to the castle. It's an easy train ride from London. Best way to get there is to go to Paddington, catch the train to Slough and change at Windsor. Then follow the crowd.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 06, 2007
Morocco Surf Trip
Here I am back after a week of surfing trip down in Morocco. It was such an awesome trip. I had loads of fun down there. The weather was amazing, sun shine for the entire 7 days I was there, the last day was particularly hot at 28 degree.
I flew British Airways from Gatwick straight to Agadir, where the people from Surf Camp Morocco. From the flight you can tell that this is a surf spot by the number if people carrying their boards, and just like me, I bet they were having a good time as well.
The Surf Camp Morocco’s house is located in a tiny Moroccan village called Tamrghat, which is a short drive from Taghazout, the main surfing village in Morocco. There’s not much in Tamrghat apart from a couple of surf camps & surf shops.
We had a good consistent swell through out the week. It was down a bit on Tuesday, up for Wednesday – Friday (3 – 4 ft with 5ft clean up sets) then down on Saturday and Sunday. Even at the smallest day (Sunday) where the waves are tiny, it was still surfable.
For most of the week we surfed Banana Point, which despite its name is actually a reef break, well the reef next to the point anyway. It’s a really nice, easy and not crowed spot compared to some of the more popular breaks around Taghazout. It’s actually perfect for my level. The guys there took us to Anchor Point, Killers, Panoramas and other famous breaks. It's fun watching all this world class break so close to each other. On last day we surfed Mysteries, yet another easy wave to surf (on that day at least) but crowded as hell.
The guests & crews at the surf camp were fun. Met this four guys who are uni friends, and they certainly know how to have fun. One of the guys had his birthday on Thursday night and I learned some new interesting drinking games from them.
Posted by vhadiant at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
