Celebrating the New Year in Bansko
There would be many, many things to say about Bulgaria in general, about the New Year and about the activity of skiing as it can be performed in Bulgaria. I will fall far short of giving a detailed account of what it was like but I will try to touch a few of the more interesting points.
(+) The fabled Bansko skiing resort is allegedly created and managed by/with the help of some Austrians. The ski slopes are many and so are the ski lifts. There are many snow canons.
( - ) Sadly, it doesn't take much in the way of bad weather to knock out most of those ski lifts.
( - ) The 7 km long gondola taking skiers from the town to the Banderishka starting area is a big fat bottleneck. Call me strange but queuing for 2 hours to get on a ski lift is a big turn off. There were also too many Ukrainians who failed to understand queuing.
(+) Food is cheap! It's also very good!
( - ) Not all shopkeepers understand manners. I am mostly talking about the guy selling the hats who didn't want to let us take pictures.
(+) Lodging is cheap. Our apartments were really nice.
( - ) Everybody finishes skiing around 5 pm and goes straight into the showers. The result is there is either no water at all or no hot water for most of the evening.
Granted, many of the shortcomings I listed above might not have been so true if we'd gone to Bansko even slightly off-season. Going skiing for the New Year is usually a bad idea anywhere.
I was glad to discover that rumours of car-theft-related issues in Bulgaria were indeed greatly exagerated. I also had one close encounter with the Bulgarian police and I was basically asked for money in exchange for my documents on account of a debatable traffic violation. So, that part is true.
The conclusion is that we will likely never go to Bansko again, which is what you should actually gather the most feedback from.
You can see pictures of the trip to Bansko, of us on the ski slopes or a decent selection from the New Year celebrations.
If anyone is really interested I've also prepared a general expense report.
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| Christian Nasulea - 04.01.2010 | |
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Chasing the Sunset
After smashing my UV filter to bits during last night's impromptu Christmas dinner party photo shoot I took the EOS on a little photo trip where the UV filter would have been priceless. As there is little snow left anywhere after the recent heat wave my weekend skiing plans had to be replaced by something else. So, I decided to code a little HDR bracketing CHDK script and take the camera kit out for a test run.
As the coding took a while and the sun had already set on my house at the bottom of the Prahova valley I had to jump in the car and chase the sunset. As I was driving up the winding mountain road I could see the sunset slowly rewinding itself. By the time I got to the top of the hill I still had about half an hour of sunset to enjoy and shoot.
After dumping the car on the side of the road I started running up the hill to get to a good vantage point. About 1 hour had passed by the time I shot 180 photos resulting in 5 reasonable quality HDR images and a couple of standard sunset shots.
You can see the results in the Chasing the Sunset album.
Notes:
- never look through the eyepiece as you shoot the setting sun with a DSLR, it will burn your eyes.
- use a tripod to ensure proper alignment of the HDR components.
- no matter how warm the weather is the top of a mountain will be very windy in at sunset in December.
To show how much running was required for this very small set of pictures you can have a look at my GPS logger's altitude profile:
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| Christian Nasulea - 26.12.2009 | |
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Christmas Traditions
As the Earth spins faster and faster I'm very thankful to have been able to keep to our time-honoured holiday season traditions for another year. We roamed the town for 10 hours yesterday, meeting people, sharing stories and singing Christmas carols.
While we were at my place talking to my family, singing and joking we had the good fortune to cross paths with the kids from our Zestrea Carpatilor (EN: Carpathian Legacy) folk group, dressed in their traditional costumes.
See enclosed picture and Facebook photo gallery.
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| Christian Nasulea - 25.12.2009 | |
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The Good Slope
Today, I managed to squeeze two hours of snowboarding in Busteni in
between the rest of my schedule. Unlike Predeal the snow was good,
there were no stones and today's -2 degrees made the whole experience
quite enjoyable.
On the down side, the slope is only 1300m long and there are no day ski
passes available. A trip on the ski lift costs 16 lei but you do have
the option a ski pass for the entire season... for 2700 lei, almost 700
EUR... for a single ski slope...
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| Christian Nasulea - 20.12.2009 | |
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Winter's First
Yesterday in Bucharest I struggled to de-ice and defrost my car twice in a single day during a three hour interval. That's how bad it was snowing. Surely enough, with all the snowfall the slopes were bound to be perfect. WRONG!!!
When we got to Predeal we were extatic at the prospect of spending a full day on the slopes. After months of waiting we finally got the chance to start the skiing season ... on 10cm deep snow.
It was dreadful. Stones were abundant, tall grass seemed to grow right out of the snow on large parts of the Sub Teleferic slope. Parts of the Clabucet Sosire slope, which had been exposed to snow canons, were covered by dense fields of ice boulders. To add to the beauty of the day the temperatures were around -8 degrees Celsius. As Tamara put it, there seems to be a lot of good quality snow in Romania blocking the roads and causing mischief, but little of it seems to have settled on the ski slopes.
There were good things about today as well, namely the sunny scenery at the top of the mountain and the fresh powder on the side of the Cocos slope.
I will end by directing your attention towards the enclosed picture of the surface conditions on the Cocosul slope.
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| Christian Nasulea - 19.12.2009 | |
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Cold Richess
It finally started to snow about 24 hours ago and the temperatures dropped a few more degrees.
The following is an analysis of the relation between climate and wealth. If you're a hard core scientist please be advised that I'm going to be throwing around allegations without providing any grounds for them and I'm going to push the boundaries of logic and I will even resort to sophism if it serves my purpose. We're not pulling any punches. The only point of the entire exercise is to launch an idea so that I might get feedback on its various aspects regardless of how unlikely or debatable some things may be.
My thesis is that countries with colder climates tend to be richer than countries with warmer climates and people who live in cold environments tend to be richer themselves than those coming from warm environments.
My explanation is simple. If you come from a land of cold, you learn very early in life that working keeps you warm. Also, in such a land of everwinter as we might imagine, if you don't work you die, usually by freezing to death. As work usually generates wealth I will infer that cold produces wealth.
On the contrary, if you are born and raised under the scorching sun of the tropics you know that working under the midday sun is very unpleasant, hard to bear and even deadly. You're more likely to survive and live a comfortable life if you avoid working under the sun and generally put things off till later. So, not working doesn't produce anything but at least it doesn't kill you.
By savagely generalizing things we can say that cold environments make people culturally inclined to work and produce wealth while warm environments generally end up deterring them.
I hope I haven't offended too many people and my explanation was clear enough. Now, your thoughts?
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| Christian Nasulea - 16.12.2009 | |
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Jet Lag
The sun-worshiping ancient Egyptians had the right idea about the Sun being important to us. However I doubt they could imagine some of the implications of our relation to the Sun and how it influences our lives.
Because my schedule is always a huge mess I believed that adapting to the local conditions in Boston after traveling 8000 km west and crossing 7 meridians would be a breeze. After all, if you have a very irregular sleeping schedule, adjusting to a new sleeping schedule should not be a problem. I never experienced any kind of jet lag traveling to England! There should be no jet lag traveling to the US either! WRONG!!!
Five days ago, I was fighting my body's urge to shut down after being intensely sleep deprived for at least 3 days. The scene taking place at 9pm (4am Romanian time) in Harvard's Cafe Algiers saw me ranting deliriously as I was hallucinating about the waitress speaking Russian. It was baaad!
In the following days I finally adjusted ... just in time to come back.
Now I have to go through the whole thing again. Looking at my sleeping patterns in the past 72 hours, including the 17 hours of nearly-continuous sleep I had after I got back, it looks like I'm on the time zone for Samoa or the Cook Islands.
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| Christian Nasulea - 13.12.2009 | |
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The Digital Rebel
Sunday, the 6th of December, 2009 I went and fulfilled a long-lasting yearning for a Canon EOS DSLR in the form of the Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i or as it is known on the old continent the EOS 500D.
I got myself the camera with its standard 18-55mm lens, the 55-250mm lens, an 8GB SD card and a bag to hold it all in. I'm happy with myself though I do realize this can only bring additional spending on photo equipment upon myself and my short-term budget.
The first photo I took with the camera was of the Sata Center at MIT, hopefully an omen of artistic, outside-the-box things to come in its future use.
The enclosed picture is a self-portrait taken between a pair of identical mirrors, facing each other in the window sill of a 38th story Boston living room.
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| Christian Nasulea - 08.12.2009 | |
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Travel Plans
As usual, to ease potential interactions I'd like to let everyone know that I will be:
- in Alba Iulia on the 30th of November and the 1st of December for the celebrations of Romania's national holiday
- in Boston, USA between the 3rd of December and the 7th of December
- in New York between the 8th and the 10th of December
These dates are subject to change without notice. If you intend to meet
me for whatever reason in any of these places please let me know by
email a couple of days in advance.
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| Christian Nasulea - 29.11.2009 | |
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Journey to Shiloh
I just finished following this movie in the background while working on some reports. The movie was the 1968 Journey to Shiloh. The movie was pretty good, well the topic was anyway, but that's not very important now.
It really got my attention when the end credits were scrolling up the screen. James Caan played the lead role aaand... Harrison Ford played a relatively unimportant secondary part. In fact this was one of Harrison Ford's earliest movies.
It's always interesting to see how great success stories are born.
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| Christian Nasulea - 29.11.2009 | |
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