Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Best trips are usually spontaneous. No planning, no strategy - just a will to have some fun. My friend Dmitry and his wife Lana called me up today and said that they are about to leave on a trip to mountains and asked if I would join them. I did. It’s been a while since I went up there so I was glad I had a chance to go again.

We drove up to Platres and parked near the famous Psilo Dentro restaurant with a trout farm. Dmitry and Lana convinced me to take a walk to the waterfall. It shouldn’t have been any futher than a kilometer away, and the walk was supposed to improve our appetites. I’ve been numerous times to the Psilo Dentro restaurant, but I never went to the waterfall. Today I decided that it’s finally time to see it and be done with it. So I agreed.

The road turned out to be much tougher than I expected. It was long, heavily upstream and with lots of obstacles, like huge stones and waterstreams that had to be crossed via stepping stones. It would have been much easier if I didn’t have the camera to take care of.

Anyway, about 40 minutes later we finally reached our goal - a small waterfall. There was nothing particularly spectacular about it, but I made a few snaps anyway.

Quick return to the restaurant for an outstanding pork chop and beer. Now don’t get me wrong - I am all for grilled trout. Especially when it comes as fresh as it can possibly be. But Psilo Dentro pork chops are perfect. They are of the proper size and also juicy, and delicious.

On our way back to Limassol we had lots of laughs as Lana navigated us through the brief history of terrible Russian pop music. The tour ended with one of the tapes getting stack in the player with no hope of being removed, stopped or paused. It’ll play until the age of times. Or until Dimitry will get himself a new car.

I had a great time today. I should go again some time in the near future. I want to go together with Olga and Maxim. They need a good day out with some fresh air.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-09-11_Troodos

I attended an excellent musical event today. It was a hard rock party in Stork club. Basically, it was the crowd from the forum with all those KSP musicians - Alexander (Doors), Albert, Slava Dyrdine, Tony, Victor, Andrey, etc. There were few new music masters too.

I had an enourmous amount of fun. That is my lousy excuse for not taking a lot of pictures. It was the good thing that I put the camera back into bag as I got pretty drunk by the end of the evening and could easily lose or brake it. But I didn’t. Yey! Hopefully there will be lots of pictures from other people.

Oh, and if we are lucky enough someone might have even caught me on video. Dancing. In the most embarrassing of ways… Told you it was a lot of fun!

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-09-06_Hard_Rock_in_Stork/

Update: More photos from Alexander Avanesov are available here.

We didn’t go to the Jumbo today, but it didn’t stop us from feeding Maxim. He seemed to like it although he was very confused about all the fuzz. And the spoon thingy… He was trying to suck the food off it, like it was a bottle or something. The whole thing seemed like fun and only fun, until we realized that Maxim was actually eating the food. He had at most three spoons, but he ate a lot less breast milk afterwords. I just hope that he will digest it nicely, otherwise he might not eat it again. Whatever. So far so good.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-07-21_First_Food

Finally I got my act together and processed all the pictures. Out of 250 frames I selected 125. Mostly those are of Ian Gillan with a microphone. Steve Morse with his guitar and Don Airey up at his keyboards are the next most covered. Basist Roger Glover and drummer Ian Paice were on the other side of the stage, so their pictures aren’t as spectacular as of others, but I’ve go them covered anyway.

I’d like to thank Slava who started the whole argument with the security stuff and found out that it was OK to bring in the photo camera and that only video cameras were banned. If it wasn’t for him, I would leave my camera in the car and none of this pictures would have seen the light of the Web.

Without further a do…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-07-15_Deep_Purple_in_Cyprus

Today we started the beach season at Kurium beach. Unfortunately the water was still way too cold to have a proper swim. We planned to also seabath Maxim for a bit, but had to cancel it. I think there were overall about 10 people in the water for the whole length of the sandy strip. Not only the water was very refreshing, but it was rather windy too. Not the ideal conditions just yet.

Anyway, I walked up to the neck depth and stayed in the water for the whole 10 minutes or so. Olga and Tatiana went half the way, but spend there about 15 minutes.

While sitting on the beach, I entertained myself with photography. It’s been a while since my last beach visit, so I saw some things from a different perspective. This time I am more satisfied with the results than I usually am. I guess that will not last too long though..

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-06-22_Kurium_Beach