Category: Cyprus

I live in Cyprus for many years now. It is a beautiful little island in Mediterranean Sea. It features warm weather for most of the year, sea, very kind and hospital people, plenty of jobs in IT industry, good food and plenty of alcohol, stable currency, and more. It’s really a nice place to live if you can handle small towns and villages. It’s also a great place to raise the kids.

Not much happens here. It is a quiet and simple place. Yet, when something happens or when I write about it, I post it to Cyprus category.

WRC – Day 1

First day of the rally. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make, since it’s Friday, but I guess I haven’t lost much. There were only 4 stages and all the real meat comes tomorrow and on Sunday. My preparations included buying a Golden Pass set with the journal, cap, and all maps hard copied. Carefull study and planning of tomorrow’s day. If everything goes as planned, we’ll watch 2 stages: 9 and 12.

Keeping up with the results of the first day pushed me to a little effort. “WRC Online” site is down for most of the day, and all the rest have no idea how to put the results up. Of course they have driver tables and all that, but, for some strange reason, noone is publishing results in the form DRIVER/CAR MAKE/POSITION/TIME. It’s either the car make or the driver. Everyone is expected to be knowledgable about the issue, it seems. Anyway, RallySport.com is the proper place to check the results as well as to read some fine articles.

Keeping up with the mood, I’ve ordered a couple of DVDs about rally sport early in the morning (from the WRC Online, while it was still up).

Draught Microbrewery

After WRC openning ceremony Lev, Hazard, Olga and I were going for a few pints at Chesters, when Vladimir Kanguin called and said that he found a new nice spot with excellent beer, so we turned around and after 20 minutes of searching and seeking we were in the place called “Draught MicroBrewery”. You don’t need anything else except the name to recognize what kind of a place that is.

Ale, pilsner, lager, wheat – you name it, they have it. Unfortunately though they were out of wheat by the time we arrived, but that didn’t spoil the evening. I’ve tried a bit of everything else and sattled for lager as my choice. Hazard did the same. Olga was drinking pilsner. Lev did a mix of ale and lager.

It is a very nice place – lots of room, air condition, good snacks. No pictures of that place yet, though…

WRC start

I couldn’t have a very productive day, due to the fact that today is the official start of Cyprus stage of World Rally Championship.

Hazard, Lev, Olga and I went to see the service area first, but we were not allowed. We didn’t have some mystical “pass” that was required. The guard there couldn’t speak enough english to explain WTF that was and where to get it. Anyway, we went to Molos area to see the official opening. Hazard was filming the whole thing on his new ditital video camera, so I got the pleasure of using his digital photo camera to make a LOT of pictures. Most of them will look the same though.

There were suprisingly many cars. It’s the first time I actually see the opening, but there were usually about 20 cars in the race, plus few cypriot cars. On the opening though, I think we’ve seen about 80 cars or something like that. Now I am waiting for Vladimir to publish the pictures, so that I could resize them properly and put them here.

Here are a couple of links for the event: Cyprus Rally Official Website – a place where Rally Guide and all the maps can be obtained in PDF format. WRC Online – the best place for rally coverage that I’ve found. All the latest photos, interviews and other cool stuff are published there regularly.

Event closed with extensive fireworks and disco. Disco was something that we didn’t even think of attending…

Cyprus State Fair Exhibition

Olga, Lev and I went to Nicosia to visit Cyprus State Fair Exhibition. Hazard was already there.

We saw lots of nice stuff. CYTA was presenting there miVision technology, which is a kind of cable TV, Internet, and phone pack over ADSL. Looks not bad, and is promised to be around 40CYP/month (40CYP =~ 80USD).

After returning back to Limassol we went to check out the Finbarrs, but it was closed. Suprise, surprise! A bar closed on Friday night is a dead bar. Whatever.

Spent rest of the evening and most of the night at Lev’s place drinking (guess what?) beer.

Random bits

First of all, “Matrix Reloaded” starts today in all local cinemas. Since enjoying the movie is a more important factor then time difference between watching it and the release date, probably I am not going to watch it today. I expect all cinemas to get crowded, and that spoils it for me. But I’ll pass by just to make sure my expectations are correct.

Today I’ve had a fastest perl scripting session ever – we’ve got a new termometer for the server room with a bit of an ugly web(!) interface, which we needed to adopt to our Nagios/MRTG environment. Together with a small fix to convert F degrees to C degrees, it took me around 5 and a half minutes to script the whole thing.

Educating myself a bit on the topic of washing machines. Our old machine is almost dead – it takes roughly 50 hours to wash each load. First match was this review by some gadget freak. Then, this review by a repair man. The last for today, was this site with a long price list of different machines and other useful information.

Off for a beer with Lev, before the cinema hunt starts.