Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

I'm in a backup internet cafe right now, as my regular one told me they were closed even thought the door was opened :) The only problem with the one I'm at is that they have a really slow connection, especially for uploads, so I can't upload all my sunday pictures, it would take a day at the current speed... (and apparently my upload is saturating their DSL router which doesn't seem to have traffic shaping, so I'm filling their upload queue and slowing down the entire internet cafe (people are complaining, although they don't know it's probably me :) )
I went back to my regular internet cafe that evening, and I'm currently uploading the pictures (at much better speed too). Mmmh, I also noticed that I have 60MB worth of pictures for sunday, which with 16KB/s (128kbit/s upload speed) yields more than one hour... I guess I'm going to rack up a nice internet cafe bill :)
Mmmh, yall have the day off today (monday) anyway, no wonder no one is on AIM or viewing blogs/doing Emails.

Anyway, I ended up waking up sunday past 08:00, which meant I got a good 8H of sleep (boy that felt so good). Alain was comatosed from coming back from the Privilege past 06:00, Seb didn't want to get up, and I slept right through it, so we indeed didn't make it to Space.
Alain wasn't feeling too well due to his cold, so we gave up waiting for him and took a bus to Ibiza city (Eivissa is the local name) for a little sight seeing, and checking the camera stores. We confirmed that just about everything is closed on sundays, even in the Island's biggest city, but we saw a church that was way full: Spanish people definitely looked like very devoted Catholics.
Luckily, we found what was probably the only open camera shop in the Island, and they had exactly one Canon S500 for sale. Ideally, I'd have bought another S400 to replace mine, or the slightly updated S410, but I didn't really have the luxury of choice, so I coughed up the 430 euros for the S500. This is probably close to $200 more than I'd have paid for an S400 online in the US and about $100 more than for an S500, but online US prices do me no good when I want a new camera today. Not only, you're better off, because you won't get to hear me further explain how my other camera is dying a little more and being revived a bit through screwdriver CPR every day :) and I won't get the stress of having a somewhat non working camera that I can't use to take proper pictures anymore. All in all, $200 for the piece of mind, and enjoying my vacation is a small price to pay I guess. At the same time, I now get 5Mpix (ok, I was happy with 4, but whatever :) but more importantly, I know get 640x480 videos (much nicer than 320x200).
I guess I confirmed that I can live without a camera on vacation for about as long as I can live without chocolate (well, actually, I can live without chocolate longer than that :), but I didn't learn anything I didn't know about myself already. If you know your addictions, you're at least one step ahead :)

Oh, today was the 4th of July I guess. Well, I didn't notice here, people were more worried about formula 1 and the soccer game tonight (not that I overly care about those two either :)
Seb and I spent that time in bars with nice music at the famous Playa Den Bossa (very nice and long beach with warm water, bars with music on the beach with people dancing). He spent most of his time resting while I walked the whole beach from end to end back and forth (not sure how long it was, but it took more than an hour which was fun to do considering the scenery :)



you can find the rest of the beach pictures in case you need a little distraction from work :) here

On the way back from the beach, I asked to walk the harbor, and then got to walk through the historic and very old part of the city next to the citadel. It was very interesting to walk through it, although it was also sad to see how dirty it was, and seeing some graffiti. Quite a pity really...



you can find the rest of the old city pictures, including some very cute kitties here

After heading back to San Antoni (other side of the island, where we stay), we had dinner with the new recruits for the week, and headed for the Tunnel Trance Force party at Privilege (the biggest club in the world, which can take more than 10,000 people). Their huge party is on mondays though, sunday night was a small one, but it was still a fun evening. The only annoying thing was the almost full body search that they do to stop you from bringing cameras and other things in. It didn't stop me from getting mine in, but it got really close.

(yes, the DJ is on top of a swimming pool. Privilege is a bit crazy that way :)

Pictures from Sunday (the rest of them: harbor, beach, privilege, etc...)