What is the internet for?

This is one of the funniest online video I have ever seen. I love it. Check it out!!!

Monopoly pay back time!

The next two days (Monday and Tuesday) were not so great for Matt. Sadly I was working at least a few hours a day, and we was kind of boring. Sorry about that, man. Even so, we got to do some fun stuff. I taught him how to play Romanian Rummy, so on Monday evening we had two rounds of it. In the first round my mother joined as well. We had a lot of fun.
Then on Tuesday we got to go to the pool for a few hours. That was very relaxing also. Matt was telling me that he doesn't think that there are such places in Canada. Maybe we could open a business there. :D You know, make some money. It is inded a great place to relax at. So after we fried a bit, we got back home and started playing Monopoly. This was my payback time. I guess it was one of the longest monopoly game I have ever played, but also most exciting. We played for over 4 hours and in the end I got to own pretty much everything. Well that was a view! Even the bank was broke. I had all the money ($16335) and most of the properties, as Matt was holding hard with the Greens (Pacific Av. area) and the Pinks (St. Charles Av. area). You know, when you play Monopoly, the wheel tends to turn quite unexpectedly. Well this game it kept on turning. I was at least two times almost bankrupt, and so was Matt. It was a hell of a game. Thanks Matt for the opportunity.

Sadly, the next day, at 7:00AM, Matt left Romania. :( I was really sad for him leaving. It was so great meeting him again. He is indeed a great guy. Thank you Matt for the visit, and I hope you'll return some day so we could visit other places around Romania. Take care, my friend.

Bears Cave

Damn this week was full. I can't belive it. I couldn't get the time to write about what else happened while Matt was in Romania, visiting me. Anyway... So about this Bears Cave. Is that a cave full of bears? Or maybe it's a cave owned by somebody named Bears. Well the first option is more close to reality. It is a cave indeed, in Bihor county, Romania, discovered back in 1875 by accident, where were found about 154 cave bear skeletons. This species of bears was extinct around 12000 years ago, during the last ice age.
This is the place where Matt and I, together with Flaviu and Ioana (Christina) went on Sunday. It was so cool. We woke up early in the morning after just few hours of sleep. We took all the passengers form their beds and left the city behind. It's not a long drive, just about 90Km, so in no time we were there. I was shocked to be required to pay besides the entrance fee (about 1,5 EUR), also a photo fee(about 4,5 EUR). WTF is that? I mean why do I have to pay to take photos? Anyway. We paid and got inside. The guide started telling us about the cave in Romanian, so I had to translate to Matt. Man, that wasn't easy. The guy was speaking quite fast and my English, definately got worse since I last spoke it. Anyway, after about 45 minutes minutes of cave exploring and 200 photos later (we definately took photos for that money) we got out. Then we realized again how hot actually was outside. I've understood that inside the cave it's a constant temperature of +10 degrees Celsius, no matter the season. Well outside there were at least 30.

Ioana felt the urge to pick up flowers once we got outside. Flowers that we've called weeds all day after. It was so much fun. But she seamed really happy having them. The whole way back she was blabbering about the way I was taking turns on the road, as the little plastic bottle that she used for putting the flowers in waters, kept falling. I am sorry that the road is not straight, Ioana. :)

So we left Bears Cave, with that nice feeling that you've seen something beautiful. Well that was short, as we came across this nice museum.

It was amazing. This nice family was hosting freely a state of the art museum in their own house. It was full of old stuff. And I mean really old. Stuff dating from even before World Wars. Starting with traditional clothes and soldier helmets, continuing with tools for gardening or woodcutting, and ending with really old fireplaces and spindles, this whole museum impressed us to the bone. We even found a jack (cric) for the wagon, made out of wood. And a chain made out of wood. Wow! That was cool! We were thinking how the hell did the creator made it. It was a chain with it's rings put together, but without cutting or glueing the wood. Amazing. Too bad Matt didn't felt like joining us, as he took of he's shoes, and he was too lazy to put them back on. We were speechless when we came out.

Once we got back to Oradea, we felt like going to the pool. So we went. Too bad it was closing about 1/2 hour later, so we had to change plans again. We went back to Felix where we were supposed to meet Relu and Georgi, but, sadly we could not set up the meeting properly, so we couldn't find them. We had a nice sandwich though :)

Once we got home, around 8pm, we were so tired that we didn't felt like going out anymore. So we just hanged around and played monopoly. Obviously Matt won. I couldn't believe it. He was so damn lucky! :)

Oradea sightseeing

It has been a long Saturday. I woke up quite early, taking into consideration that last night we got home very late and got to bed even later. We had breakfast and we went to Baile Felix. We shown Matt the water lilies and other things around this place and then we went for a chess game at the Thermal Hotel. You know, those big chess pieces I've mentioned before. It was cool. Until I lost :P Nah, it was great all the way. It wasn't easy for him to beat me anyway. He needed a lot of focus :)

After that we went back to Oradea and met up with my friends Relu and Georgi to go for a tour. We saw the old buildings from the center of the town, the Theatre, and an old synagogue. It was very cool to find out more about it and about the Jews beliefs. I tried to translate to Matt as accurate as possible whatever we got from this old man who was kind enough to tell us a few words about that building and about this religion. The building was nice also, but kinda left to fall apart as there weren't enough money to make it look good. Too bad. In front of the synagogue, in the picture to the right, you can see a white tent. Well that's where it was hold an event which we also visited before the synagogue: "The Days of the Romanian Carpet". I don't know much about carpets, but I really don't think those were traditional carpets. So it wasn't much fun.

After the short religious enlightenment, we went to visit the Fortress of Oradea. Well it's a nice very old building. Quite large, dating since around the year 1000. I hope he liked this also.

Later, we went out. Well it was a hell of a night. We had so much fun, and so many laughs. Amazing. Around 4:30am, after a long night of going through different clubs and pubs we decided to go to eat. That's when the real fun began. Matt needed to take a leak so he embraced the nature. Literally! We still don't know what he stepped in, but it sure smelled like sh*t. We were sitting at the table, together with Flaviu and Ioana (well Cristina, as Matt knows her) and we were laughing like crazy. You should have seen the look on Matt's face. He was really worried about smelling so bad, but still, laughing with us. I really believe that he stepped, up to his waist, in some sewer drains or something, because it was sure as hell stinking bad. I am happy though that he didn't hurt himself. Just got seriously dirty. I can't find my words right now to describe the whole story, but I do hope that Matt's gonna present it on his blog with more details. We got home very late that night. Around 6:00 AM, just well for a few hours of sleep, to get ready for the next day, when we were to go to the Bears Cave.

Matt's coming

My team mate from the Croatian AIESEC MC is in Romania. This is a very thrilling news. Well it's not actually news, as he's been planning to come for a while now... I'm really happy he decided to come here and I do hope he's gonna have a good time. Sadly he won't see much of Romania. Just Oradea, my hometown, and maybe some other close by places. Today I went to pick him up by car from Timisoara. He arrived by train, from Belgrade. I hope he brought pictures :P I loved Belgrade. My friend Flaviu has came with me to pick him up as is a long way and I didn't feel like going alone. There we've met Codruta, another dear friend of mine and had a nice souvlaki. Well it wasn't the usual souvlaki I know, but it was very good anyway.

Tomorrow I'll take Matt to see the water lilies I mentioned in the some previous posts. So I'll be back tomorrow with more news.

101 years old man was sexually harassed

I'm shocked. During my news break I read this incredible article about an old man, August K., from Berlin, Germany who was sexually harassed by a hot blonde. He is 101 years old, and is a former movie director in Germany. The blonde "attacked" him in an elevator, rubbing herself to him and touching his (yuck!) ass. He called the cops. Maaaaan! She must have been insane, and definately he's both stupid and impotent. What are the chances that at 101 y.o. to be picked up by a hot blondie?
Anyway, if there are any blondes that would like to "attack" me this way, I promise I won't press charges. I won't mind, and I might help :P Just let me know ;)

Personal DNA

I was reading Ivna's blog today, while really in a bad mood. Good part is that it cheered me up. She generally has this effect on me. :) She's always optimistic when in comes to the others :) So, this cool post I was reading led me to this cool site where you cand find out your own DNA according to your personality. So I took the quiz and this is what I've got:

If you feel like reading more about my PersonalDNA report, just click here. I even invite you to speak your mind about it. ;)

Don't forget that you can always get your own "personal profile" at this link. Enjoy!

Bribe and Football in a "news break"

I generally have what I call "news-breaks". These are moments when I just read newspapers online, in order to relax a bit, have a few laughs and think of something different than work (or in this case study). So today, while reading the news I came across two funny articles. One about bribery in Romania and the other about some women that hate football.
So what's funny about these two subjects, you may ask. Well bribery is not funny. It's common in Romania which makes it even less fun. I hate that you have to/can bribe policemen, administration, doctors, taxi drivers, anyone. This is not good and not fair. So, after other anti-bribery campaigns that were ran in Romania, the government comes up with a new one. This one is funnier somehow, as they want to print 0 (zero) lei bills which tell people about the lack of morality of bribery. I think it's a wonderful idea. I just hope that no one will try to bribe someone with this bills. haha!

The anti-football women protest I find it also really funny. Some women from Spain started this and then their friends from UK became solidary to the cause. Fighting for "a Football-free England", they invite you to "rise against the World Cup tournament". It's so funny. They said they got sick of not getting enough attention from their hubbies and of the fact they can't watch their favorite soap operas. I don't like football that much but I still watch some important games. So for me it wouldn't be the greatest loss. But the point is that this whole freedom of speech is getting beyond limits. I mean we all have the right to do things we love. Guys love football, so what? There's nothing you can do about it. You wanna watch soap operas, buy a new TV or wait until the championship is over. It's not like it lasts for years. Also guys respect the women's need for shopping, gossip and shoes.

Study time

Hard times are now for me... I have to study for my last exams and prepare properly for the licence thesis and exams. It's more difficult than I thought, but it'll be just fine. It's just that it takes a lot of time and energy.

This is why I won't have much time to write on my blog. Even so, I'll try to keep it as updated as possible.

So, wish me luck and stay tuned. :)

Sunday out... in Felix Spa

There's this really cool and famous (in Romania at least) thermal baths resort right near my hometown, Oradea. It is the biggest of its kind in Romania and it's called Baile Felix - Felix Baths/Spa. Felix in Latin means happy so these would be the happy baths. It's a really nice place. I went there today with my friends for a walk and some fresh air. It was nice, really nice. :) I also took my camera with me so I could catch a few moments and to the right you can see some of the coolest. I'll try to explain a few things to you.

I'm not religious but I love beautiful buildings. And that church over there is really nice. Entirely made of wood, it was disassembled, brought to this marvelous place and reassembled. Quite a lot of work. This is quite amazing in this part of the world. There are a lot of churches. Here in Felix Spa I've seen at least 2 and in the surrounding area there should be at least 3 more. That's quite a lot taking into consideration the area we're talking about.

In one of the pictures we have a frog on a water lily. I don't know how many of you knew, but Felix Baths's thermal water lilies are in a natural reservation and protected by law. Other water lilies like this in their natural environment can only be found in Egypt.

And the last thing I want to tell you about tonight is the large size chess "table" that the Termal Hotel is offering for use, free of charge. You can see us playing in the pictures. It was so much fun playing chess with such large pieces. It doesn't give you a very good perspective of the table and situation, but it's still very cool.

So this is what I was doing this Sunday sunny afternoon, when I should have been studying. But hey! A little bit of mind relaxation it's just welcomed in this moments. If you ever feel tense, and there's a sunny day outside, I strongly recommend you to catch your breath in this marvelous place.

Damn University!

The damn, piece of shit, university of oradea is fucking me up again. After my hopes regarding my graduation this year rose to the point where I almost thought I'm gonna make it... here comes this bad news. I have some exams left-overs from previous years... so they have this remaining exams session next week. One week for all the exams for all the forth year students. Anyway, it should be achievable. But there are two big problems rising for me:

1. I'm still not cleared up about my exams situation I was writing in a previous post. They still haven't figured it out if I passed or not certain exams which I'm SURE I passed.

2. I have 4 out of 5 fucking remaining exams set on next Thursday. How is anybody supposed to do something like this? I have exams from 9:30, 10:00, 12:00 and 15:00. Damn! I still don't know how am I going to attend the second since the first one will definately take longer than 1/2 hour.

Dude, this sucks! It ain't fucking fair! I know I know. Life isn't supposed to be fair, but still. This is really shitty. And that's not all. If they still haven't figure it out with my grades situation, I might have a few more. And take a wild guess when! No, not on Thursday, but on Tuesday... at the same time, 5pm, in two different places. This is gonna be so cool.

So... fuck the university and the narrow minded people that set up this exams schedule.

European Adventure

Ok. It's in Romanian language only. Sad! But it's still the coolest online game I have ever found. So I guess you're still asking yourselves "what's this all about?". Well simple. You get an avatar which "travels" around europe and asks your questions about the places he gets to. Nothing special till now. The cool part is that in order to answer these questions you have to search the web and read about those places. So you get to find out really interesting things about Europe, and maybe, plan your future trips even better. I strongly recommend this game to anyone willing to learn more about Europe. I'm lovin' it! :) Oh! And also there are prizes to get which makes it even more interesting. Read more on the website.

Learning about the place you live in...

Today I had to make this little big project for school so I needed to research a bit regarding the geography and demography of my hometown, Oradea. So wikipedia and google were once again besides me in this moments of despair. I was shocked how many things I never knew about my town. A few weeks ago, actually I was walking around downtown and while looking all over the place I realized that I know nothing about the buildings, the history or the culture of the city. I was ashamed, so I told a few friends that we should do a sightseeing one weekend to learn more about this, indeed beautiful place. That didn't happen yet, but today I am even more determined to do thing. I found out today that during medieval times the 0 meridian was considered to pass right through the heart of this town, so all the maps in that era were mentioning this. Nowadays just some maritime maps still recognize this place as the center of the world.

Now I can say that I was born in the center of the world, just that I missed it by a few centuries. :)

There are a lot of unique things about this place. It has also quite a long history as the first documents mentioning its name dated since the year 1113. I know you'll say it's bad luck. Well it didn't have actually lots of luck as it suffered many damages during the pass of times as many people have tried to conquer this place and sometimes they have obviously succeeded. I don't see this as a bad thing though. Through this the culture and population of this place has ben enriched and developed so there's a good side of it. I was impressed to read about the evolution of the population. Check this out:

year 1910: 69.000 (Romanian: 5.6%, Hungarian: 91.10%)
year 1920: 72.000 (Romanian: 5%, Hungarian: 92%)
year 1930: 90.000 (Romanian: 25%, Hungarian: 67%)
year 1941: 98.621 (Romanian: 5,17%, Hungarian: 92,08%)
year 1966: 122.634 (Romanian: 46%, Hungarian: 52%)
year 1977: 170.531 (Romanian: 53%, Hungarian: 45%)
year 1992: 222.741 (Romanian: 64%, Hungarian: 34%)

year 2002: 220.732 (Romanian: 70.4%, Hungarian: 27.5%)

Obviously there are also other ethnic groups but much smaller. The next in the rank would be the gypsies (Rrom) which have 1.2% of the population. I wouldn't say that this is good, but we gotta accept them too. We are very culturally open, right? :P

I would love to write more about this but now I gotta get back to study as the time passes too fast. I will return with more info and eventually pictures of my lovely hometown. Meanwhile, in case you want to visit, let me know. I believe it's worth it.

Cheers!

Thank you readers

When I started this blog was mainly because I wanted to put some thoughts one next to another so I could keep them somehow safe from forgetfulness. Now, just one month later, watching the statistics I realized that over 250 unique visitors from over 20 countries around the world, have visited at least once my blog. I was not expecting this, so I just wanna say thanks to all of you who read this blog, to all of you who returned to read more and all of you who even posted links to my blog on your own. I hope I won't let you down. Cheers!

Love or Friendship?

I've got this amazing quote from a good friend, of mine, a nice girl from Constanta... It said "One day Friendship and Love met. They introduced themselves one to the other. Then Love asked Friendship: "If I exist, what's your role in life?" And Friendship answered: "I leave a smile where you drop a tear".
Touching isn't it? I was deeply impressed. :)
Thank you Bubulici for this wonderful words!

Another nice quote...

I was browsing through TV channels on Friday afternoon until one moment when I came across this old looking movie. It was interesting so I stopped. The movie was Moonstruck (1987) starring Nicholas Cage and Cher. It is a really cool movie, definitely worth watching. Sadly I didn't catch the beginning of the movie, just some of the middle and the end. Even so, I was lucky enough to get this quote which is SO cool. Check it out:
Ronny: "Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!"

666 - The Mark of the Beast

Today is the day 666. It's the 6th day of the 6th month in the 6th year of this millennium. Ain't it funny?

So I googled "what does 666 mean?". 6,310,000 results for this words. That's a lot. :) Anyway, I found two sites saying pretty much so I'll just take it as real. They say that the Bible, written 2000 years ago, describes "the beast", the devil, under the number of 666. "666" - the mystical sequence of number that causes many to catch their breath and recall verses from the Bible. The sequence of numbers representing one less than perfect (777). But what does it mean? When will it happen? Could it happen today?

What does 666 mean and can a name be calculated from it? Strangely, the answer is a resounding "yes". The Hebrew alphabet does not distinguish between characters and numbers like the modern day English alphabet. For any given letter there is a numerical equivalent. Using the table above you can calculate a numerical value from a word by adding the numerical value of each letter in the word (click the image for a full size view of the table). What does "Jesus" calculate to? 888. One more than perfect (777).

As stated above, many believe that the numerical value - 666 - represents one less than perfect (777) and further support this by the fact that "Jesus" totals 888 (one greater than perfect). Others believe that it represents a numerological value of the Beast's actual name. Some claim it's merely a representation of some sort of number based system that will be implemented to buy and sell products.
UPC barcodes, when first introduced, caused many to speculate that the tagging by the Beast was about to begin. Decades later - no evil tagging was initiated. But today, a new method of identification sounds strangely similar to the warnings given in the Bible and many people are beginning to panic.

If you want to read more about this just check this webpage. Enjoy the 666 day! :)

Marriage...

My colleague from work, Adi, has got married yesterday. Yeah well, he made the step. So me and the boss, Sanyi, we were invited also to the big event and were also happy to be part of it. But there were some moments which kinda got me thinking.

I never attended marriages in other countries so I don't know how it goes there, but here there is this lady representing the state, which asks you if you want to take each other. I'm referring to the legal part and not the church wedding. Anyway, this lady yesterday was really fast, which was good as we didn't wait for long speeches, but that bad part was that she was TOO short! Like "Citizen X, do you take citizen Y to be your lawfully wedded wife?" "Yes" "Citizen Y, do you take citizen X to be your lawfully wedded husband?" "Yes" "I declare you husband and wife. Please sign here." Nothing more. I was expecting informing people like "dude, are you really really really sure? :P ". Just kidding. It was alright. :) But also strange was seeing this guy, who is also my age, taking this big step in his life. Well this got me the creeps. It really freaks me out the idea of me standing there and saying that "I do", and knowing that "That's all folks!". Dude!

So this way, in case he's gonna read this blog someday, I just wanna say that I'm truly happy for them and that I wish them a "happily ever after" life story :)

New age clubbing...

I'm not into clubbing that much anymore... there are several reasons for that happening. One would be the style of clubs in my city. I'm not much impressed of them. I only like a few and even them are less than I saw in other places. Anyway, the one that I've visited last night was a mess. Actually I even know the owner and he invited me several times to his new club. Well, dude! That place kinda suck. Last night for instance, lots of things went wrong there, but let me tell you the whole story.

I got there around 10:30pm. I was in quite a good mood, taking into consideration that I was tired like hell. I was supposed to meet some friends and go to a place I always liked called "Joy". But last night they picked this "Club 45" thing. We went there and quickly realized that the place is almost empty, without mobile coverage and with a heavy smell of mold. We sat down, had a beer and all of a sudden the the lights go out. They kept us there for about 10-15 minutes in dark, with no music or lights. I felt like in the "Ceausescu era". Maybe they forgot to pay the bill and then they switched to the neighbor's energy supply... :P

After they fixed the problem, I was hoping that people would start coming and eventually, they would start dancing even if the music was a big disappointment. But no, that wasn't gonna happen. I guess last night was the shortest night I ever spent clubbing. At 0:15 I was home, in bed, with my laptop, reading. A hell of a night...

I've got a new favorite quote ;)

Today I decided I should open MSN messenger just to see what's new... I don't use it as much anymore, so it's good to check it out from time to time. Anyway, I am happy I did it, as I found this awesome quote: "I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves". Strindberg said that and I think it's awesome. :)