Productive beach holiday.

The previous 2 weeks have been quite a productive holiday for me:

• I wrote the start of a bazaar java library.
• I learned the intro of The Call of Ktulu on the guitar (My brother happened to bring a guitar along and I had the tabs and I wanted to stay in practice, although nylon strings hardly breaks the skin).
• I finally started reading The art of community (17% so far on my kindle)
• I played a little of Warzone 2100 but got stuck on a transporter mission.
• I finally got a new personal communication device (Samsung Galaxy SII)
• Went to the mall almost every day.
• I listened to 2 books, one driving down and one driving up. (Millionaire Upgrade - it was free ok, and Love & Respect)
• Oh yeah I also went to the beach, built some sand castles and played with my son Dawid. It was his first time at the see and at 15 months he is the cutest boy in the world right now. He was a bit of a hand full on the beach, exploring far an wide, making friends, breaking my sandcastles... 
• We also went to Croc-world and uShaka Marine World.

Some more photos

European experience

My wife and I recently returned from a tour of Europe (2008-08-08..2008-08-24) and I just want to make you guys a little jealous.
We decided earlier this year that we should probably see a bit of the world before the kids arrived and I thought
Europe is a nice diverse, architecturally and historically rich place to go.
We had to organise it pretty quickly since my wife is sort of forced to be on leave in august (private school holidays),
which worked out to be a fairly quite time with regards to projects at work.

Without going into too much detail, we first flew to Dubai and after a 2 hour stop over,
we flew to London. There we stayed over one night and then embarked on our Trafalgar tour, which I must say
was extremely well organised, we had the best driver and tour director ever!
During our tour we slept over in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Ludwigshafen (Germany), Innsbruck (Austria),
Venice, Rome, Florence (Italy), Stans (Next to lake Luzern, Switserland), Paris (France :) .
We drove mostly by bus and had lots of interesting outings at the places we passed by.
After the tour we had two nights in London again, where we saw most tourist sights using the tourist buses.
Finally we had a night in Dubai where we also had a short Arabian Adventure, which was also extreamly well organised and very nice.

On this trip we did aeroplanes, big boats (ferries), medium boats, little boats (including gondolas), big buses, little buses, a train, a mono rail, a cog rail and cable cars (big and small),
we walked quite a lot too (I got some blisters even), but we didn't do any cars.
We saw lots of old and new buildings, a lot of country side and a lot of famous attractions.
The places we visited had way more water than what we are used to, a lot of towns have BIG rivers running through the middle.
We made great friends and met people from all over the word, where the most of the tour group was from Australia.

This was deffinitely a worthwhile and value for money experience, which I can highly reccomend (even though the pound and euro is so much stronger than the rand).

For some photos, checkout:
http://picasaweb.google.com/amanic/EuropeanExperience

From European Experience