Fire to screen

Hello there,

last Friday i went to another concert of one of my favourite bands: Green Day. Now, on rock concerts, of course it'd be best to be in the crowd in front of the stage. Unfortunately i checked for tickets quite late when it was already sold out. But i was lucky and got tickets from a friend of a friend who couldn't go. Great to be there, but our places were 'somewhere up left' with no access to the 'field' in front of the stage.

Great show, as expected after having been on an American Idiot-concert. An interesting thing was also to see the Web2.0-thingie going on. Usually on such concerts you might see a lot of lighters when the band plays a ballad, but this one was a little different: since i overlooked the whole crowd from my viewpoint i saw that there were amazingly many lights on all through the crowd. All the time. Not fire from lighters, but from a sea of screens of digital cameras and mobile phones. Easily distinguishable by its blue glow.

Having realised that, check this: search for "Green Day Wien" on youtube. And you'll find a lot, really a lot of videos from the concert. Of course they're all in crappy quality, especially the sound. But fascinating nonetheless, to have so many recordings from a concert you've just been to. To give you an idea of my not-so-great viewpoint, it was more or less like this, but on the other side of the stage (video quite bad).

Anyways, more about the concert. I was quite happy that they once again played an Operation Ivy song and announced it as the highlight of the evening.
They also once again brought three fans on stage to play their instruments. King-for-a-day moments of those young musicians, for sure ;-) and in the beginning of the show they got a younger fan up on stage 'for baptism' according to their show. Turned out he was a brave young Slovenian. Hope that inspires them to play more shows in our neighbour's country as well.
Speaking of making it a Viennese concert: besides addressing us by shouting 'Vienna' and 'Austria' numerous times the lead man also played 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' on his electrical guitar every now and then inbetween songs. Pretty good one that.

Anyways, 'nuff said, to give you a taste of the concert i embedded this video:

Magritte toilet

I've been to Brussels recently. Wonderful city - if you don't mind the rainy weather. But i love the international atmosphere and all the European institutions, and, well, Belgians are cool people anyways. Hehe.

They also got their fair share of interesting museums. And they had a new one since my last visit in March 2008: the recently opened Magritte museum. Now, i love his surreal work. And i can recommend that museum. Well, it's not the ultimate Magritte experience because many of his famous paintings are spread all over the world's big museums (and private collections, i guess). But there are many good paintings on display and the new museum architecture is also worth a look.

Taking pictures was forbidden inside the museum. But if you know me well you might have guessed i couldn't resist shooting photos anyways. So here a shot of the interesting Magritte-esque mirror in their toilet:


Cool, huh? Unfortunately they weren't selling any mirrors like that in the museum shop. So i just bought two magnets.

Cheers.

57 tickets

It's that time of the year again - the annual movie festival of Vienna is about to start. The Viennale. Last year i missed the day they started selling tickets. And they're usually sold out quite fast. So this year, me and some friends who also wanted to go went there on the first day.
Knowing that there'd be an ridiculously large crowd waiting in the morning and that buying through the web would be almost impossible on the first day, we met in front of one of the tickets shops in the afternoon last Saturday. And guess what, it was impossible to get tickets.
Felt like the organisers of Viennale thought that this year, for some unknown reason, there'd be much less people to buy tickets on the first day. All their servers broke down and they couldn't sell any tickets in hours. Well, anyways, i agreed with my friends to meet on Sunday morning, some time before the ticket store would open.

And so we did. Got there early, just to wait one and a half hours. And when we finally were first in line, just before getting to buy our tickets, they starting giving out numbers. Well, at least we got number one, pointless as it was, though :-) and then we got to the counter and bought 57 - in words: fifty-seven - tickets. I have never ever bought so many movie tickets at once. Hehe. And i can definitely recommend queueing up with friends. A social and quite fun experience.

Looking forward to a lot of great movies in the next two weeks, with a bunch of good friends.
Cheers!

Vienna - the BEST way

Hello there,

if you know me you know that this May i was showing my wonderful city to ten Serbian friends. As part of a so-called cultural exchange organised between my group and BEST Nis. One of them made a video of this week in Vienna. It was project for university, and a lot of fun. The video's actually quite nice, so i wanted to share it with you.
Here you go, enjoy:

Cultural exchange - Nis - Vienna from Ivan Antic on Vimeo.

Wrong bussi in A

Hello there,

i hope the title of this entry didn't confuse you. I am talking about cream filled gummies that look like this. While being on vacations - yes, visiting friends - in Germany in 2007, i discovered a new Haribo product called Jogi Bussi. Weird name, but being friends with all things Haribo i tried it. And really liked it.
Supposedly it was a new product, consisting of three different things. Deliciously put together, with the cream filling being the new idea. Well, actually it's a yoghurt filling, hence the name. I read later that it even won some candy-related prize. Apparently they have that in Germany =)

So far, so good. In the year after that, they tried to follow-up on their success with a new variation called Fruity Bussi. Basically the same, but instead of the yoghurt filling it had a kind-of jelly filling. I don't like that one at all. Really, not my thing. Yuck!

Now, until recently they were selling both kind of bussi only in Germany. But today i found out they have already brought one of the two to Austria: you guessed right, just my luck, now here we have Fruity Bussi on sale. But no Jogi Bussi! Who needs that sickly-sweet Fruity Bussi. I want Jogi Bussi!

Well, anyways, eating too much sweets only makes you obese, so thank you Haribo marketing experts, one less temptation for me in Austrian supermarkets. Nevermind the teasing.

And to you, my dear readers: if you think blogging about candy is lame, well, at least i'm not the one reading it ;-)

Cheers
CGA

ps: German "Bussi" translates to kiss. What were you thinking?

Corruption

You know, you always read that in this and that country the corruption is to high, they are doing something against it, it works or not, they have to improve the situation to join EU or whatever... all pretty abstract when it's all far away.

So, two weeks ago was the first time that i got into contact with actual corruption. Nothing big, but still. And if you've read my last blog entry you might have a guess which country i am talking about. BUT it's not like that: the Serbians were perfectly ok, i mean, i've seen nothing like that there. And that's including the Serbian border controls. Perfectly fine, just checking my passport and asking if i had anything to declare.
Where i have seen corruption was well inside Schengen. To be more precise, it was at the Schengen border where the Hungarian border police let us know that they are corrupt. I was travelling by bus, inside a Serbian bus. After passing the Serbian border control we moved on to enter the Schengen area, still in a queue with other buses. There was an announcement in Serbian. I expected that it would say we should get ready to get our luggage inspected by Schengen border control - i had heard from a friend that they check every piece of luggage for smuggled cigarettes. I asked the lady sitting next to me and she explained to me that the border police had informed us that they want one euro per person to let us through faster. Otherwise they would "do it by the textbook" which meant checking everyone's luggage. That might take several hours more. We had one guy on the bus who was rather keen on collecting the one euro from everyone. When they came to check our passports his was one of two passports that they took with them to inspect it further, so he his passport was neither Serbian nor EU. Anyways, most of the people on the bus paid. And nobody checked any of our luggage. Could've had anything in my backpack, everything passed.

50+ euros per bus, i-don't-know-how-many buses per day; you do the math.

Corruption. Disgusting. How normal it was for everyone, and all people were pretty happy about "one euro for two hours of my life". Well, i don't have any solutions to offer here, who am i to judge especially all those commuters going there everyday.
But it's definitely not allright this way.

Burek for breakfast

So, last week i took some days off to visit good friends in Serbia. It was the second part of a so-called cultural exchange, meaning that my friends were already in Vienna last may and now me and some other people went to visit them.

Anyways, i'll tell you a bit about my experiences in Serbia. First of all, i ate a lot. Yummy food. And because it's Serbia, most of it is meat, of course. I still don't feel hungry, even though i left Serbia about five days ago =)
I ate a lot of Pljeskavica. With and without cheese filling, at any time of day or night, bought in little sausage-stand-like stores or personally made and bbq-d by friends... wonderful fast-food. Wouldn't mind having more of that here in Vienna. A picture to give you an idea:

Nice, huh? Also notice all that meat in the background. Of course i also ate other food. Niš is the world-capital of Burek, or so i was told. Not only that, they also had the annual burek festival while i was there (Buregdžijada according to Wikipedia). Nice little festival with lots of good burek to eat, life music, and so on, each year in a different part of the city. Yummy again.

General observation in Serbia: toilet doors cannot be locked, almost everywhere, be it in public places, restaurants, or at private homes. Well, i guess some can, but most of the ones i saw had a lock but no key inside. At least that's what i saw, not making any assumptions here.

Back to Niš. My friends also took me to a place calld Radon which is one of the hotelst in Niška Banja spa. The water with supposed healing abilities is radioactive. Which is definitely not one of its healing factors :-P but whatever. You are only allowed to stay for it for one hour at a time, so that's what we did. Quiet fun in the hot pool.

Another cultural thing, and again this wets my appetite, was the Slava: a truly Serbian tradition. Every family has its own date for it. Basically it means that you invite all your family and friends and eat together. Lots of nice food, some traditions. Ooooh it was nice. They organised it especially for us, even though we weren't there at the date of their actual Slava. So nice.

A not so nice but very interesting thing in Niš was the visit to the concentration camp. The Nazis built one there. Smaller dimensions than the ones i have seen so far. Still horrible.

Niš also has some 'celebrity sons', most memorable for me was Constantine the Great. He was born there and returned to the city several times throughout his lifetime. They have a huge area where they started uncovering ancient villas. With beautiful mosaics. And a lot of it is still uncovered because there simply isn't enough money to properly preserve it. Until there will be, keeping those mosaics covered is the best option to preserve them. Bloody shame that those treasures of old aren't visible for us. If anyone feels like investing, do it! ;-)

Anyways, i had a great week, thanks a lot to my Serbian friends!
I'll leave you now with a picture from the skull tower, and impressive monument of the first Serbian uprising against the Ottoman empire: