Van Gogh in London

Took a rather pricey trip in time to Victorian London at Tate Modern today to see an exhibition about Van Gogh's influences and influencers (trendy word these days) in London.
If it wasn't for Loving Vincent i would have probably skipped this but it was such an emotional and immersive film that it was great to discover more about this genius.
The star of the show was the starry night which normally lives in Musee d'Orsay and i should have seen when there but have no recollection.
And how silly of me, as now i consider it as one of my favourite paintings, up there with the girl with the pearl earring.

It was extremely vivid and the way the light shone on the paint strokes from above emphasized the mysterious twinkle of the distant stars, their cool light contrasting with the warmth of the artificial illumination just introduced in the town.

And what better way to end the day, the day after Halep won Wimbledon, than with bubbles and cakes at Ferran Adria's brother's joint at a fancy hotel in London...

Cheers!

Letters live

I've been fortunate enough to find about this wonderfully intimate happening, already at its 23rd iteration called Letters Live: famous letters brought to life by renowned artists.

And what a show it was, from the legendary Reply Of The Zaporozhian Cossacks To Sultan Mahmoud IV (below)

to a heartbreaking letter from a 17 year old to his brother, about to be killed in 1944 Budapest just because of his religion, to awe inspiring letters of advice to the younger loved ones such as 'Live like a mighty river' performed by Jude Law.

Needless to say, I'm hooked for tomorrow's performance.

http://letterslive.com/

Botanical pleasures

My name is Florin and I'm an undeclared botanist :) In an alternate life, I would have been a forest ranger, horticulturist or tree-hugger.

Today I've visited the Kew Botanical Gardens, one of the largest if not most impressive in the world.

Situated on a former riverbed of the Thames, the gardens are completely flat and have a soil layer of about half a meter at best. Given some of the magnificent trees, hundreds of years old, one wouldn't notice that.

Wondering if I did some digging around to find this? I just happen to have been on 2 wonderful guided tours. One about the many ways in which pollination occurs, an another introductory tour for first time visitors. Now either I haven't been on an English speaking tour in a long time or they were really well done, so much so as I feel the urge to tell you about it :)

As a photographer, I found out that flowers present themselves very differently in infrared and that insects may not necessarily perceive them as we do. The fine ridges and indentations in some petals provide contrast and detail that insects find appealing. Unlike trees, who have the wind, flowers need to impress and reward these creatures in order to multiply.

Some insects try to cheat and get straight to the nectar without the hard work of carrying pollen but flower species such as http://www.thepoisongarden.co.uk/atoz/digitalis.htm prevent bees from piercing the pollen sack, forcing them to enter the flower and swipe the pollen away.

Carnivorous plants aren't just some mean fuckers, they have evolved this way because of the bad lands they grow on, which provide insufficient nutrients.

Some plants, such as the cocoa tree, flower on the stem, and get pollinated by crawling insects rather than flying, because they lay low in the thick tropical forests.

The garden complex was built by king George the IIIrd, supposedly a bipolar chap whom people thought was crazy and force-fed various kinds of medicine, including some that made his pee purple.

The Victorian greenhouse was an architectural feat in its time and was a big attraction of the expo in the 19th century (forgot the year).

Much of the park's wildlife is spontaneous and lives in relative harmony with the surrounding plants.
Less so can be said above the planes that pass every 5min on their way to heathrow.
 

Primavaraaaaa

My neighborhood

Yep, my little planet, Namesti Miru, a first attempt at a polar panorama!!

If you wanna make your own, it can be fairly easy provided you have the right tools.
Here's how.
If you've watched the movie and want to get that action he mentioned (and you should), go here.
Also, highly recommended is to make use of the content aware fill feature in cs5 for filling up those empty spaces in your panorama, rather than cropping the image to fit a rectangle! It takes a few tries but it's worth the effort!

Exploring flavors!

Since this blog was taking a dangerous culinary turn, i decided to start a fully dedicated blog to share my experiments.
So, enjoy!

Strobed beans

White Bean Hummus - aka fasole batuta!

Obviously, with delicious

gaaaarlic!

Yummy!

Porkopolis

Yes, I live here, I know, it's hard.
You'd better see for yourselves:

This is just a teaser for the No Reservations show, the Prague episode.
Look it up on the torrents!

Fields of gold

Fields of gold, originally uploaded by Florin Draghici.

while going cherry hunting!

Voilà le soufflé!

It's rhubarb season and this souffle is absolutely amazing!

It's actually not so hard to make, so go ahead and buy those stalks!

Entropa

To my own delight, I finally got to visit David Cerny's Entropa which was on display at DOX Prague for almost a year now after it had finished shocking the Europeans in Brussels.

This David Cerny is one hell of an artist, he sure knows how to provoke and take the piss out of stiff issues in our world. I love his work because it's thought provoking and is not gratuitous - that is, there's always more than meets the eye and some meanings reveal themselves after a bit of thinking.

Of course, not all of his stuff may be emanating meanings and symbols but it's most always fun.

Have a look at the official booklet for some interpretations of the pieces, and think of some personal ones :)

Malta

Italy - football players getting off with they balls

Bulgaria - this has caused the greates rage, however there's more to its meaning. I've learned about the chilly relations between turks living in bulgaria and etnic bulgarians so this brings a whole new meaning to the depiction turkish squats.

France

Finland

Germany

Greece

Slovakia

Czech Republic

Slovenia

Holland

Latvia

Romania - we got away quite easy on this one!

Luxembourg

The big picture

p2p microfinancing

I've been spending almost 2 hours reading about online "p2p" microfinancing and how it can positively impact the ones less fortunate than us.

Reading my way through the footnotes on the wikipedia article about kiva i delved a bit deeper into the whole charity versus loan issue and about the psychological effects of real cases on one's willingness to participate.

One of them caught my eye especially and I think it leads to some intriguing ethical questions.

My opinion is that if the whole effort is honest and has good, measurable results, the means are justifiable for the greater good it produces.

I encourage you to have a look and judge for yourselves.

This is my 100th post btw, yaaay! Good reason to resurrect my blog a bit!

Torihoolic!

 

 

 

 

Czech your wallet

 

This little 'innocent' price list has been in Karlstejn for at least 3 years because I remember it from the time i first visited the place...

I'm surprised that nobody pointed out the ridiculousness of having the price written in letters!! for people who understand czech (therefore more or less locals). They probably did this in order not to make the 'foreign tourist price' seem like a rip off.

Well, guess what, it makes it look as twice as much the rip off, having that embarassing price list hung up there...

Oh and, btw, I took the czech version of the tour (i think they give out some english leaflets actually) and it wasn't much, almost not worth the STOPADESAT KORUN... sheesh!!!

Cloudy days can be fun :)

PIXAR - Partly Cloudy
Vezi mai multe video din Film

Tort diplomat

by Cristina

prima incercare :)

Bublin' Dublin

Dublin was the first trip of the year and it came unexpectedly as a spontaneous idea from Cristina who had read about St Patrick's day and a great offer to stay at a castle!

It was very difficult to resist it, especially since it qualified as a very nice birthday present for me :)
So a couple of hours later we were good to go the following weekend to Dublin.

We got there late Friday evening and went straight to the 'castle' which was definitely the coolest hotel we've ever stayed in. There are sooo many reasons to stay there and indulge utter comfort. It was a truly unforgettable experience.

But Dublin was definitely much more than that. First of all, it was bursting green while in Prague it looked like spring gave up any hope of beating the gloomy winter. Green and springy with a permanent wind performing disco-like effects with the sun and clouds.

That must be a reason why the whole city is so alive! Despite not having a great deal of imposing architecture nor dramatic views (which i pursue fiercely wherever I go) Dublin has a great personality as you will see in the videos i shot in a matter of a couple of hours walking through the city center.

Dublin's houses are rather modest looking: basic Victorian architecture of what was at the time a mere provincial town of the British kingdom which could hardly dream of one day becoming a prosperous capital of its people. Even so, they are very well kept - especially the doors. It seems a great deal of effort goes into maintaining a nice shine on the thick, colorful paint layers carefully laid on these symbolic and yet so functional inventions.

We spent the whole Saturday admiring the city unwinding along the banks of the Liffey and we ended the day with a fulfilling creamy experience where else than at the Guinness factory. Word of advice though, get your tickets online to get in smoothly without waiting like us for almost 2h... It's cheaper too... Anyway, it was worth it - the museum is really cool and highly interactive. The best aspect of its interactiveness is getting trained to pour your own perfect pint
of Guinness - a skill which becomes ever more important in the partner selection these days :p


Top that up with a view of the city (albeit not very impressive but nice nevertheless) from the Gravity bar, a 360 glass bar on top of the museum (which is part of the old factory in fact) and you won't even regret not catching the St Patrick's day fireworks display which we thought ought to have happened at the other end of the city when in fact it was happening in a completely different town in Ireland.

We've called it a day after wondering through the temple bar where there's no temple and no bar but in fact tens of them. There's this bar of sand which belong to the Temple family where all the bars were built in what's today Dublin's cultural core.

Sunday welcomed us with a sunny breakfast in the castle that was just amazing and kept us filled for most of the day. This day we got to experience the local flavour a bit more intensely as we walked through the pedestrian streets and parks of Dublin. We came across a great open air kids fair and witnessed the Irish baby boom - basically every family had at least two kids swirling around them. It's kind of understandable, which such nice events and opportunities for kids there's probably never been a better time to be one!

As we were headed t0 another park nearby, my eyes slipped across the firm of a very uninspiring pub and as they read ''O'Donoghues", Rory's pub advice came to my mind and we had to give it a try since we were so lucky to run into it. Rory's Irish and i met him during my monster days :) And how glad I am I did! The people you see in the video below are regulars of the 200 years old pub and we had just managed to pop by their Sunday afternoon session. It was the most flavourful Guinness we had enjoyed so far!




After crossing the park we were headed for in the first place, we saw this nice dancing troupe performing:


And finally, as we were spending our last half an hour in town before heading to the airport, from an alleyway came a most intriguing deep bass and fanfare sound from these guys.


They had no less than 6 drummers!!!

Maybe some of events that spiced up our stay were due to the St Patrick's celebrations but even without those, Dublin has always something surprising to offer and amaze! So go and green yourself up a bit!

More pictures here