Postcards from Russia - Moscow and the defenders of the land.

Hey there!

Red Square (Moscow)

Just returned from a holiday in Moscow and Saint Petersburg with my camera full of pictures (yet too many) and even more things to share with you.

Curious place, with curious habits and curious people to say the least and nearly 500 pictures I will not bother you with, just my personal favourites. Today, my take on the Russian authorities.

I suppose Russians will be used to their huge hats but to me they looked like something brought from the past.
The truth is, I felt carried a couple dozen years back while passing their way. It doesn't help that at least 8 of them permanently watch over Lenin's preserved corpse during opening hours or that they make a very odd yet fun looking "dance" while changing guards at the tomb of the unknown Russian soldiers. Even their own "kin" watched them curiously as three soldiers lifted their legs and hit their waepons while maintaining a difficult balance.

The walls of the Kremlin (Moscow)

During the weekend dozens of young cadets (recently graduated by their looks) filled the streets of Moscow leaving some very fun and odd pictures. Walking with their girlfriends and their impossibly high heels (post in the oven in this regard) or just walking along the Red Square with their proud mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, nieces, cousins...



I started to feel too touristy and decided to stop taking pictures, until the morning after, when I came by this:

Smile boys!

More to come on Such is Life's trip to the other side!

Enjoy your summer!

Such is life.

Melon. Yet another "Such is Life" story

Remember me?

The laziest blogger ever? Well I am finally on holidays and ready to provide you with yet another typical "Such is Life" story. Enjoy!


MELON:

What if your mom cared so much about you eating well at work that every morning she would cut a nice slice of melon cut it in pieces, put it in a lunch box and leave it in your bag for you to take to work? wouldn't that be nice? Sure! Awesome, thanks mom, it is lovely.

Or not.

What if you forgot to eat half your melon and realized just on the elevator that takes you home. What would you do? You don't want to dispappoint your mom (let alone let her repeatedly tell you how unhealthy you eat and how dreadful it is that you forgot your melon).

So back to the elevator, there you are, 11pm, back from a long's day work and you panic: S**** there is melon in my lunch box! Think M, think! You live in a very high floor, the elevator is going to take at least a minute and a half to get there. Eat! Now! go! So you start to eat your melon at "12 campanadas" speed (will explain what "12 campanadas" is later), and by the time you reach your floor, chocking and still trying to swallow the last two pieces, guess what?

Your sister and father are waiting for the elevator.

You try to greet them casually, trying to hide the fact that your hand is dripping with sticky melon and that your mouth is full of melon, and that the lunch box is opened in your hand. Oh! i da', sis'er wha' ar' you do (*cough*) ere?

Sister laughs, you finally swallow. Hey dad, I was just eating a forgotten piece of melon. I'll go home now. Bye!

Your sister whatapp's you countless laughs, you finally laugh at yourself, and even more when your sister tells you what your father said: Does she really think I'm going to buy that "one melon piece" thing?

Why not dad? It is perfectly normal to eat melon as fast as you can in an elevator at 11pm on a Tuesday night, right?

Lesson learned, never forget to eat your melon, and if you do, don't lie kids. You'll get caught.

THE END

Such is Life!



12 campanadas: In Spain, we receive the new year eating one grape for each time the bell rings at midnight on December 31st. Chocking is quite common, starting the year spitting grapes to the face of the ones you love too. So. Much. Fun. You have to eat the damn grapes so fast to make it twelve before January 1st that you can barely breathe.

GoT

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There's no middle ground.

Mr. George R. R. Martin, we may have to meet this summer...

Such is life

My life is trash

They say we are what we eat, I say you live what your trash says you live. And I'm living hell.

I have undertaken a sociological experiment with myself and have come to that conclusion.

So please pay attention to the following findings if you are trying to decide whether you would be happy in my shoes (i.e. being a total loser).

Here's how it goes:

You live what you trash. Episode I

Day 1: The Big One

There is a day in the life of a jr lawyer when you f*** up big time, it can't be avoided. Sooner or later the Big One comes, and you enter into a spiral of stupid and avoidable mistakes which is very hard to come over.

So, you eat lunch and have dinner in front of your deask while trying to cope with disappointment on yourself, at times you can't stop tears (i.e. the bunch of tissues).

Day 2: You've got growing up to do

And you've got to rise from you own ashes and start climbing the mountain again. Losing confidence in yourself leads to more stupid mistakes, and you suddenly start questioning all your actions inside and outside work. First you try your luck with the lottery, wishing that you will become a millionaire and send many many people to ... (there is no translation for esparragar). But you are not lucky enough to win the lottery, losers don´t win the lottery for God's sake! There has to be another way, a professional way out of your missery... You look around your desk and decide it looks too personal and are determined to redecorate your life in a very proffesional way, and thus get rid of all those things that make your workplace less of a rat hole and more of a human desk.

Bye bye Wacky Woolies... Truth is, I really don't think it was necessary get rid of all my cute stuff, but I had to do something, and nothing better came up (resigning is not an option (yet)).

Day 3: Sheds and pieces

So you wake up, it is wednesday still, and you have to go to work. You plaster a smile to your face and try to confront the fact that you have to keep doing what you do, even if all of a sudden you feel your work is trash, your knowledge is trash and of course, your life is trash. All you can do now is start the climb to a better situation, right? WRONG.

Very very very wrong.

Day 4: The accident

There comes a time when you realise you may not be as sane as you thought, and you decide that holding a red hot metal bar cannot burn your fingers, cause, why would it? Physics don't exist, Walmart invented them, just like Christmas or Valentine's Day. Burnt fingers lead to sticky fingers, lots of plaster and freaking burning pain. Yet you have to load yourself with caffeine and keep rowing in your own personal galley.

Thank goodness, it is not so bad, and by the end of the day you are back to full health conditions, or are you?

Day 5: In sickness and in health

As Murphy once said, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. How very true, so, to add pain to the aggravation you get sick, very sick, as in thousands of tissues a day + old man's cough + teary eyes. And yet you have to go to the office again... and keep trying to fix your loss of grace despite the fact that all you want to do is go home and stay in bed all day long.

Worst of all, it that prior experience tells you this may last days, weeks, even months.

Day 6: Happy Birthday

And you turn 26 sitting in front of that desk, blowing your nose at a rate of 10 tissues and hour and being unable to celebrate as you feel you deserve. You sing happy birthday to yourself and receive greetings from family, friends and colleagues while still typing in front of your computer. It is then you realise your life is trash, you are caught up in a vicious circle of work, your ass is growing the size of your chair and your skin is ashy pale and sunlight hurts your eyes.

Time to shake up and make a slight change of scene and society. Well maybe not society, cause the good thing is, even if your life is trash, you share it with the best colleagues you could imagine.

And those colleagues may not be colleagues but good friends, who provide efficient and quality solutions to your trashy existance:

Ha ha ha, not too bad for a loser right?

Suck it! Such is life

Origamad

Every once in a while I discover some kind of handcraft that soon becomes an obsession until I get tired of it.

Just the other day I dropped by a japanese store with a work coleague where, a pack of brightly colored papers with various patterns caught my attention. Origami paper.

At first I thought I could use it for anything, pretty paper is so pretty you cam make up anything just to use it, to cover boxes, notebooks, just to keep it and look at it... but then, back at the office as I waited for our server to come back to life (not surprising but totally nerve-racking), I googled ORIGAMI and, oh surprise! Welcome to a new world.

I started with a simple shirt, easy, then I went on browsing and discovered you can use origami to make useful things, like toothpick cases or clip stands (cause of course everyone has a pocket full of toothpiks in every pair of jeans they wear). And then I went completely crazy. I crafted a very cute tie, a tropical fish, and discovered you can make balloons with paper and blow them!

I realised then this was the kind of silly little thing my sister would love, and just then, I could easily see the kind of madness I would unleash if I showed her my origami paper. And I did!


There's this very cute origami website where they have all kinds of origami categories with instructions and diagrams...they have a page for everithing, and... oh, look! here it says Accessories, lets click here... Oh! you can WEAR origami, WEAR it, as in origami bracelets, origami rings, origami necklaces... and then and there I decided I could leave my sister the difficult parts and go for fashion. I may have done twelve origami bracelets in the last two days (lol) and next weekend: Origami beads for an  origami bracelet!!


I went out on friday night on friday and found myself being "that crazy girl folding paper", I made some more shirts and ties, and fish while at dinner, and wished I had sticky tape to make some more bracelets, but of course, that couldn't be. Crazy girl folding paper was seen again on Saturday afternoon folding paper at a cafe while having lunch with Agnes, wearing her super fashionable paper bracelets, which, by the way, are not waterproof, the rain in Madrid made that veeery clear.


Anyway, just as I had anticipated, as soon as I told my sister about origami, she went crazy too, and soon became the real origami master in the house, she made an amazing cactus and she has announced she is working on a car which may take her a while but will be awesome.

Origamad as we are now, I had to, HAD TO, get origami paper to fill a whole house. I got tons of origami paper from the same store on Saturday afternoon, of course, couldn't wait any longer. Our plan is to fill a huge box with them, or maybe we can decorate rooms, houses and castles with our origami creations.

Or maybe we'll get tired in a few days and will have just tons of colour paper we use for nothing (a very likely option).

Of course there is a dark side to this silly story. My hands are full of papercuts, and they sting like crazy.

Such is Life!

Postcards from... Budapest for Blackberry

Crisis over, Bb functioning perfectly and time to look back to my holiday in Budapest.

Some facts about the city include the oldest metro railway in mainland Europe, the third largest Parliament building in the world and the place of birth of the inventor of the "biro" or ballpoint pen, Sir Biro László József.

As I walked about the city I came up with some very impressive sights and others not so interesting but beautiful. Truth is, as I went through the pictures just a minute ago, I realised most of them were taken in a 60º angle with the ground, if not 90º, therefore, I've spent most of my holiday looking up.

And these, appart from some serious losses of balance, are the results, I've been trying to decide whether I should explain every caption and bore you with the details of the pictures, but finally concluded I want to gain readers, not lose them, and considering what I missed just the other day in Budapest (read below) I might as well keep you all happy.

So here are some of my favourite takes at Budapest with my Bb camera:

The Danube bank, city of Pest:

Buda Castle district:

 Liberty Bridge:

 Anonimus:
 Fun fact? If you touch this guy's pen you become a better writer, guess when I found out? Five minutes ago when I was looking up some fun facts about Budapest (just like the thing about Mr. Biro). Of course it didn't pop my mind to touch the shiny pen just for fun and thus improve my writing skill not even wishing to...

Detail of scary horse in Heroes' Square:

The dome of St. Stephan from below and in between:

Applied Arts museum, an unexpected surprise:

Also, here's is the proof that, just like Sheldon Cooper, I would have made an excellent elf:

Just as I announced in my "Hungarian update", this is my first attemp at Archery (Second target from the right, arrow in the white zone).

Just for the record, yes, all pictures are mine, which is a novelty!

Hope you all had a great time on your Easter holidays (if you had any).

I shall enjoy a last day of freedom before going back to my quest of blue narnian donkeys fluent in chinese.

Such is Life!

This proccess may take up to 30 minutes

So I'm back home from Budapest, transfering my pictures to my laptop and I have a brilliant idea: "Let's update my blackberry software and see if I mess the whole device up"... Hadn't updated the thing in months so there was a lot of stuff to update, and 12 steps to complete.

Step 1 to 7 seem to go on easily, 8 to 10 are a bit slower than I am comfortable with, and then I got to 11, and for the last 37 minutes there is a screen on my computer which reads: "This proccess may take up to 30 minutes"...

Why do I bring doom to myself so easily?

Humpf.

Such is Life