A mini vacation in Gozo

After Easter and all it’s celebrations were over Ann and I took a 3 day mini vacation to the neighboring island of Gozo. The weather when we went up there was pretty bad as you can see in the film above.

Gozo is more slow paced, greener and more rural than the main island of Malta. Life in Malta can be pretty hectic and for the week of Easter we did a lot of things so it was nice to spend some time alone with Ann before my parents came.

We also went to Gozo when I was in Malta last year. One of her aunt’s have an apartment in the fishing village turned resort of Marsalforn which was really quiet while we were there because it is still out of season. Here’s a view of the village as we walked back to the apartment after having had dinner.

On our second day there we went for a long walk. All along the northwest coast of Gozo you see these types of salt pans. The salt pans are filled with sea water over winter by the waves hitting the coast. Then over the summer the water evaporates and the salt can be collected. Some of the salt pans has been in use since the Roman times and is still used today.

We left the coast and turned uphill towards the village of Zebbug where we came across a street mirror where you can sort of see the road going down the hill from where we came.

There was a great view of the green island from Zebbug. However what I found most interesting was that on the spot in the village with the best view over the Mediterranean you were met by this truck with the ironic “I ♥ my truck” written on the back-end.

We continued on and was met with a great view of the UNESCO protected Cittadella fort at the center of Gozo. We followed the road and caught a bus back to the apartment from Victoria.

The day we left Gozo we had great weather so we shot a bit more film as we were leaving.

Easter in Malta

The image above is the last statue to be carried through the streets of Haz-Zebbug in the Good Friday procession but more about that later.

I came back to Prague last Tuesday after spending two weeks around Easter in Malta with Ann and her family. And for the last 5 days my parents joined us as well. It was again a really nice trip and great to see Ann and her family.

I’ve just finished uploading all my pictures and this time round Ann and I shot a lot of video that I hope to turn into 3-4 different videos. All that takes time but the videos will eventually come up over the next couple of weeks.

I’m used to celebrate Easter with bunnies, colored eggs, “gækkebreve” and with an Easter egg hunt as the highlight of the Easter dinner. Most of these Danish traditions have little if any religious content. This is in contrast to Malta where Easter, as the most important feast in the Roman Catholic Church’s calendar, is celebrated in many unique and colorful ways.

On Maundy Thursday we eat Qaghaq ta’ l-Appostli (the apostles ring bread) a sweet white ring of bread. I think it’s to represent the last supper (correct me if I’m wrong). For Easter these breads are sold everywhere from the back of cars and in the shops.

There are also some sweets called Figolli which I will spend a whole blog post on some other day and KwareÅ¼imal which are one of the few sweets that is suppose to be eaten during lent.

The night of Maundy Thursday a lot of Maltese people go out and visit seven different churches or go in of seven different doors of the same church saying seven different payers. So there is a lot of people in the streets as the towns are buzzing from people strolling around. In the churches the main cross and alter is covered or removed and instead the attention is directed to a side-alter where a display with a halo/sun as the centerpiece is made for this event.

We went to Rabat/Mdina in the middle of the island and visited churches there. If you click on the pictures above you can see the special decorations made in churches we went to.

Good Friday was the day of Christ’s long suffering and this is commemorated with processions in Malta. We went to the processions in Haz-Zebbug. This is a parade of groups of people dressed up in various costumes from the times of Christ. Everybody looking sad or solemnly as they parade in front of us in very impressive costumes. Between the groups were life-size statues depicting the different stages of the Passion of Christ on big wooden boards carried by 8 men in white robes.

The costumes where very detailed and it was fascinating to see them. For some reason I thought it would be over quick but because the statues they carry through the processions were so heavy they would walk some 20 meters and then take a break, so it took some hours for the whole procession to walk through the town.

On Easter Sunday there was another procession. This time to celebrate the Risen Christ so gone were the solemn face and now there was a band with the procession. The procession we went to had one statue and it was one of Jesus rising from his grave.

The statue itself was very impressive but the most impressive by this event was when they ran with it, several times. This video shows them running with the statue and lifting it up at the end as paper confetti is thrown from the surrounding houses, the band playing in the background and people cheering:

I’m not a particular religious person and I find these displays a bit overwhelming in their expression compared to how private religion is practiced in Denmark. But the Easter celebrations in Malta are really impressive shows of devotion and I’m glad I finally got around to see it for myself. I had some great guides into the Maltese traditions by Bernard, Cecelia and Ann 🙂

Look out for the next blog post about our trip to Malta.

I'm in Malta!

Tuesday I arrived in Malta for the first time in nearly a year. It’s great to see Ann again, good to be back and everything looks so familiar yet still different from what I am used to. Wednesday we started out at Paula, a friend of Ann, who gave us both snazzy haircuts 🙂

Since I met Ann I’ve been following a couple of Maltese bloggers. Two of them we met last night for dinner and had a great time. Meeting other bloggers is always fun as it feels like you know a person even if you have never met. We had a nice evening at with La Delirante and Red a Salvadorian/Maltese couple. It was great to meet them and time flew as we had dinner.

Obama in Prague

Sunday morning at 5.45am my alarm went off. Obama was in town and I wanted to go see him so that’s what I had to do. I went through the city as the sun was getting up – not something I do a lot. Here is the sun rising over St. Vitus Cathedral in the middle of Prague castle.

I got closer and ended up in this street where I could not see the beginning of the line. But for some reason there was a sign that said Walk Through and Food and I wanted to do both so I did – and avoided the line 🙂

In the area I met up with Christoph and Sue and we stood around waited from about 7.30 till Obama went on stage sometime around 10.30. It can be tiring waiting for so long.

I ran into Karen from the Empty Nest Expat blog which I seem to do quite often. It was fun catching up with her and someone at BBC had read her Open Letter to Obama and wanted to interview if it could be organized. I haven’t heard if they managed to interview her, but keep an eye on her blog. She also wrote a very nice piece on the Czech Democracy.

Obama finally showed up and the crowd was roaring. We stood on the grass quite far back and could not see Obama very well but there was a screen in front of us so we saw most of the action on that. Not as fun as seeing the real thing but still very cool.

Obama talked about US leading the world into getting rid of nuclear weapons as well as the historic significance of Prague, the Czech people and the peculiar situation of him, a black American president standing in a city that was under a communist regime just a few decades ago.

Glee with the help of a friend got into the VIP area so she ended up within good sight of Obama and the rest of the shananingans. She kindly let me borrow the shot above so you can see the guy who it was all about.

Pavel and Helge has collected a number of resources and news reports about the event, from before, during and after.

I’m sitting in Germany as I’m writing this as tomorrow morning I’m off for two weeks to Malta with Ann 😀

Beer garden season has started in Prague

Yesterday the temperature snuck up around 17 degrees which was enough to drive most of the Prague population outside after work.

I went to my local beer garden on the hill of Parukarka (or is the hill called St. Cross, I’m confused?) 5 minutes from our place. There was a long line for the beer but eventually I got one just before they ran out of glasses.

You buy the beer at either a small booth or inside a tiny pavilion pub and then you can take the the beer with you into the green field and hang around while watching the sun set over Prague. Here is a 360 shot taken outside the beer booth.

Just before the sun set the pub ran out of beer. But that didn’t matter I still had my beer and went further up the hill to see the sun set behind the Strahov hill just to the left of the big castle on the other side of Prague.

Did we just skip spring and went straight to summer?

Spring is here!

Saturday 9 of us started out at 8am from the bus station in Prague. Our goal was a small town called Mseno where the hike would begin. Throughout the week leading up to the trip we had watch the forecast go from good to decent toÂ sketchy. But most people were still psyched for a hike so we set out anyways.Â

As we got in the bus and set out for the hour and a half bus ride it started to rain. It hadn’t stopped when we got out of the bus and as we started out for the walk everyone was in an overly cheerful mood as if the sun would come out if we just kept smiling.

We started out down the path through a small alley in Mseno and soon we found ourselves walking in splashing mud across fields. Luckily we later got on to paved road for parts of the trip.

The rain finally stopped as we made it to the first lookout point on our route. Further along we came to a part leading through something out of Lord Of The Rings with narrow passageways through the sandstones covered in bright green moss.Â

Staying in fairytale world we later came to the castle of the day Kokorin CastleÂ where we took a break.

After a late lunch we realized we still had 10km to go before we would get to Melnik so we tried to pick up the pace. At the same time the sun came out and we were walking along a beautiful path up and down hills past lakes on a river.

Leigh Anthony Dehaney one of the other guys on trip (and an artist and wizard with film) made two really cool films of our trip.Â The creepy flick below and the one with people here (you need a facebook login).

We made it to Melnik at the other end of our route in time to catch the 18.40 bus back to Prague. It ended up being a trip of somewhere around 20km and the first time this year I experienced two digit temperatures, saw flowers, deers and heard bird song 🙂 Finally spring is here.

Thanks a bunch to Grace for organizing.

Living as a Dane in Czech Republic

This blog post is part ofÂ World Blog Surf DayÂ – where 24 bloggers not living in their native country around the world writes about the experience of living in a different country. At the end of my post you will find a link to the next blog in the circle.

I have been living in Prague since theÂ summer of 2007Â when Femi and IÂ decidedÂ to move here for a period while growingÂ our company. The initial plan of staying for 6 months has so far turned out to last for 22 months.Â

Prague has a big (huge?) expat community of people from all over the world but Europe and US in particular. Whatever brought these people here in the first place most start out from scratch with building a social circle so it’s been easy for me to make new friends.

As a Dane I’m use to communicating in English whenever I’m not dealing with Danes because Danish is a terrible language to learn and we’re a small nation. When I came here in the first place I had little intention of learning the Czech language because of my short stay and because it sounded as complex as Danish to grasp. As I realized that my stay would last more than 6 months I started thinking and talking about taking Czech lessons – but it stayed that way. There was too little incentive, too many other interesting things to do and I was too lazy.

The Czechs are usually not that good at English unless they have a degree or have been abroad. Â So with almost all my friends being foreigners and no language to communicate with regular Czech’s it feels to me like I live in this parallel society of Prague. In this parallel are we that work in companies where the language is English, our friends are English and the media we follow are English.

I have realized that whenever I return to Prague from being abroad (usually from counties where I speak the language) the first think that strikes me that I am back in my parallel world of not speaking the local language.

But apart from my inability to speak the lingo I am having a very good time in Prague, there are still plenty of reasons why this is a great place to live and why we’ve stayed here for this long.Â

The city itself has a great atmosphere, I can still spend a whole day looking up at the marvelous buildings that are everywhere in Prague. Danes sometimes ask me about how dangerous it is in Prague and I must say that it is very safe – there are not the knives/guns problems of Copenhagen or the drunken crowds of London.Â

The prices for food and beer are very reasonable compared to most places in Europe, it still puts a smile on my face when I can go to for a meal in a restaurant and have a beer or two and a meal for less than 6 Euros.

I’ve got lots of good friends who I have the time and opportunity to see several times a week and plenty of place to go to do stuff be it sports or other activities or clubs, pubs or concerts.Â

One of the topics that has come up quite often in conversations over the last couple of months is that a lot of my friends in Prague are starting to move elsewhere.Â

For many people like me Prague is a place of transit, a place to enjoy life and the good times before moving on.Â

I doubt that many of the people I hang out with today will be in Prague in a year. In a way it’s sad to think about but on the other hand it’s a nice reminder to enjoy the people and the place every day – it’s not going to last forever.

Some people go to Prague for a couple of months, some for a couple of years. The next blogger in theÂ World Blog Surf DayÂ moved to Prague from USA to be with her Czech husband and start a new life in The Old World. I wish Sher the very best of luck in her adventure and hope you, the reader, will read Sher’sÂ Living as an American in the Czech RepublicÂ and the others stories.

Have a nice Saturday!Â

My first time on snowboard

Last weekend started off great with a dinner Friday night at one of my favourite eating places when we lived in Prague 6. TandoorÂ is a small restaurant at the bottom of a small alley almost hidden if you don’t know of it’sÂ existence. The interior is quite modest but the food is great and reasonably priced.Â There were seven of us there and some could not get it hot enough.Â

At the next table over I heard the people speaking Danish and I’m always a bit giddy when I hear Danish in Prague. It’s not that often I get to talk Danish and it’s nice and homey to hear it. This time I got the idea that one of them was a blogger I had read before so I went over and said Hi and it turned out that it actually wasÂ Nicolai fromÂ auramin.com. He’s been in Prague for almost two years but it’s only been about 4 month’s since I discovered his blog. He always has some great pictures of the food he makes or eats and it was cool to meet him.

After the meal Kathleen, Carljan and I decided to takeÂ a night walk across town through some of the prettiest parts of town in the cover of darkness with many of the streetsÂ abandoned of people. I forgot to take any pictures tho.

Saturday I spent with Hermann geeking around trying to rescue the lost blog posts. More about that in a later post but things look bright.Â

Sunday I was up early and then I went with a bunch of friends to the hills in HerlikoviceÂ . I haven’t really taken full advantage of having mountains 120 km from Prague but at least I got my second time in snow this weekend. Many of the others were on snowboard so I decided to give it a try and I really liked it.

I got some hard falls and sometimes the board was running way faster than I wanted it to, but controlling it wasn’t that different from skiing so I made some good progress. I never figured out how to make a a turn with the board facing downhill tho.
On the way home we stopped in a small village with a quaint square for a well deserved dinner 🙂

Restoring blog posts

So first step in resurrecting my blog is done. With the help of Hermann and TomasÂ I have managed to salvage 230 blog posts from Google and Yahoo Cache using a script called Warrick from some of the researchers atÂ Old Dominion University.

I now have the posts as flat html files and need to parse them to get them back into the blog system that might take a while. But if you are just here for what’s new with me everything is back to cool 🙂

Oh sh*t, continued

I’m usually fairly good at keeping backups of my data. But as I looked through my various vaults I realized that I had numbers of copies of the files for my weblog but I didn’t have any copy of the data. My laptop died in December and I think I might have had a copy there.

So my second attempt at getting back my deleted blog posts was to get my web hosting company Mondo (formerly known as DHT) to recover the database from the previous day. I was naive enough to think that this would be a courtesy action and a fairly simple operation to perform. I was wrong.

Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 22:41 from mondo support:

Dear Michael Carøe Andersen

Thank you for sending your support request regarding: Rollback of the database onÂ gelle.dk.Â Your request has been assigned the case id:Â Â 227037

A technician will take a look at your case and will get back to you as soon as possible.Â You are welcome to include any other questions/comments when you reply to this mail.Â Any new information will then automatically be added to your case.

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 08:30Â from support mondo (my translation):

It is possible but it will be at a rate of 150 Euros plus VAT per hour.

Reality strikes and I see that this might cost me some dough.

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:04 from me (my translation):

Hmm ok. I will consider that.

How long time would you think it takes to dig out a database dump from march 10th and uploading it?

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:08 from support dht (my translation):

Well that depends on how big your database are, so it is hard to say. Do you know approximately how big it is?

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:23 from me (my translation):

The database is gelledk on server2 with 113 tables and a size of about 5mb before compression.

I’m getting impatient and again thinking that it can’t be that big a deal. So I keep fishing for an estimate.

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 16:49 from me (my translation):

Can you give an estimate of how long you would think it would take to roll back the database gelledk on server2 to the state of 9th (or 10th of March before 9pm)?

The database is gelledk on server2 with 113 tables and a size of about 5mb before compression.

I would think it would be easiest to take the whole database and just recreate it. But if it has to be more specific it is these four tables I would like to have rolled back:

blogging_gelle_postmeta
blogging_gelle_posts
blogging_gelle_term_relationships
blogging_gelle_term_taxonomy.

It feel’s like ages and I’m getting a bit desperate and want to get something started in terms of a recovery. I’m still thinking it will take 15 min.

Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 13:04 from me (my translation):

Hello again,

It does not seem like You want to provide an estimate of how long it will take (or how long You will be invoicing me) to recreate the database.

Let me flip it over and say that if you can do it in half an hour then please start. If you expect it to be more I will probably have to do it manually, but please give me a response.

Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 13:29 from support mondo (my translation):

I am afraid we cannot make a backup of a single webhotel on the server where you are hosted. If we have to make a backup we need to recreate the whole server and that would amount to an enourmous bill.

Ok, they could have told me that before. I’m not going to throw hundreds of Euros after this project (at least not yet). So this halted the idea of a quick solution with the help of my host.

Next up is to try and team up with some hard core perl coding friends and see if we can restore the posts from Google and Yahoo’s caches.

Lesson learned: Review your backup routines.