Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Yesterday I went to see WRC 2009 FxPro Cyprus Rally Special Stage 6.  It’s a 30 km long stage, which pass by the famous Kelefos Bridge.  Usually it’s packed with spectators, and once the stage was even cancelled because the proper safety level could not have been achived.   Instead of watching the rally at the Kelefos Bridge view point, we went to the Finish of the stage and walked down a few turns from there.  It was an asphalt road with a few patches of gravel.   Weather conditions weren’t the best from the spectators’ point of view - cold, windy, with occasional rain drops.  But that could not have stopped true rally fans.

As always, I made a few pictures and uploaded them to my Flickr photostream.

Yesterday I attended the official opening ceremony of the WRC 2009 FxPro Cyprus Rally.  It was a pretty big event with TV coverage, cars passing the podium, FxPro girls, and a concert of Sakis Rouvas - some kind of Eurovision star.

I didn’t take any good pictures, but the FxPro press center were kind enough to share.  Click here to see more.

The surprise of the evening was that FxPro is not only sponsoring the Cyprus Rally, but also an FxPro Rally Team.

Disclaimer : FxPro is trade mark of EuroOrient Securities and Financial Services Ltd, the company that I work for.

This year, World Rally Championship is back to Cyprus after a long break.  I’ve been at the shakedown stage today and made quite a few pictures.

There are much less teams this year due to tough financial times, but those people who I wanted to see - Sebastian Loeb and Peter Solberg are here.  Solberg represents his own team and drives Citroen instead of his usual Subaru Impreza.  Subaru World Rally Team has a new car for this season, which is a hatchback.  If I remember correctly, they are the last major team to switch to hatchbacks.  Pity, as these small cars are not as impressive as the larger ones.

Tomorrow the special stages start.  They are further away than in previous years, and further apart, but should be fun to watch.  Tickets are 5 EUR per stage or 20 EUR (not completely sure) for the pass to all stages. Don’t forget to grab some warm clothes for the mountain stages as it is pretty called up there.

Famagusta Gazzette reported on November 16th:

The new Paphos International Airport will be fully operational from midnight tonight, marking the end of flights to the old terminal.

Hermes, which manages the airports in Cyprus, announced that the new building covers 18,500 square metres and has the capacity to serve about 2.7 million passengers per year.

It has 28 check in counters, three luggage conveyor belts, four security arches, a VIP lounge and specially equipped lounges for businesspeople, information systems for passengers and parking places with a capacity of 800 vehicles. It is estimated that around 1,800 people will be employed.

I’ve been to the upgraded airport a couple of month before it was officially launched and I have to say that I was really impressed.  It’s bigger, cleaner, better organized and equipped, and feels like a real airport.  The one that was there before was more like a village utility building for accidental landings.

It’ll be interesting to see how the flight schedules and distribution will change, especially with Larnaca airport undergoing upgrade as well.

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia.  It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005.  Except that:

• the sound was really crap this time
• WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by any means - much more commercial, less passionate
• both video and photo cameras were not allowed, so no pictures
• there was much more advertising for the event, and the place was crowded
• there was a warm-up band, which actually performed better than WhiteSnake at certain times

A few things that I was thinking about during the concert:

• we need more beers
• “F*ck this” and “F*ck that” in between the songs doesn’t suit the romantic mood of many songs.  Like, “Is this love?”
• we need more beers
• like we have SEO - Search Engine Optimization on the web, some over-commercialized bands probably have CCO - Concert Crowd Optimization.  Pointing fingers to random people in the crowd, waving, shouting “Let’s make some f*cking noise!”, and other attempst to engage the audience strongly suggest that.  Plus a few other things.
• we need more beers
• “Ozzy!  Bring back Ozzy!  Ozzy rocks!”
• “Smoooooke on the water!  Fire in the sky!”
• we need more beers

Overall, I did have a good time with all the noise, beers, and fooling around.  But I won’t be going to the next WhiteSnake event.  One is just enough.

P.S.: If you want to see pictures, Flickr can help you out - thanks to small size of modern cameras and huge disregard to rules by rockers all over the world.