Wednesday 29 June 2011

Ibiza - Day 4 - The rest

Sadly the rest of the holiday wasnt even nearly as memorable - Of course maybe thats just my opinion because I hadnt slept (Still awake from the all-nighter at Es Paradis) , I think the rest of the holiday involved...
- Ritas 1 Euro breakfast
- Swimming in the hotel pool for ages because someone left a giant mattress style float
- Strolling through town
- Breakfast at the cheap beachfront place again, including an alcoholic slush cocktail (malibu, bananna liquor, Red Slush)

We ended the holiday by once again meeting the girls, we met them at a beach near to their hotel - it was on the way to this beach that we realised that their hotel is actually really really close to ours (see maps posted on the first day, if you cut through the town you can walk it in <20 minutes, as opposed to the 4 hours or godknows what we walked around the coast)
There wasnt a huge amount of drinking or anything special involved on the beach, a little bit of drama throwing each others sandals into the ocean, the hennesys concoction (which is something like equal parts rum and coke with some vodka)
Mostly just some nice civilized chitchat as we watched the sun set, which quickly turned into sex-chat as the girls got more drunk.

We opted to not go for an all-nighter on the beach with the girls, as our flight was pretty early in the morning at around 11, and we planned to catch the 8am bus to the airport (as its an hourly bus)
In retrospect though, I should have stayed out for the all-nighter because I basically did one anyway, the room that night was stuffy and hot as hell, all of the nights I had actually slept in the hotel I had been pretty fucking drunk, trying to sleep that night was horrible and sticky - opening the balcony doors only seemed to increase the drunken shouting coming in from the streets and not cool down the room at all.

And so the 2nd night of no-sleep happened.

In the morning we caught the bus, checked out fine etc, got on the plane, arrived back in birmingham UK in the early afternoon.

An overall fantastic holiday, even if we did get robbed of phones, time and (personally) sleep by the island of Ibiza.
I cant wait for the next holiday with my housemates, skiing sometime maybe guys? :P

Tuesday 28 June 2011

Monday 27 June 2011

Ibiza - Day 2 - Holiday low point

Day 2 was designated as a beach day, the sun was scorching and temperature was probably somewhere around 30 deg C
We spent a large amount of time on the beach, probably a good 4-6 hours or something, just kind of lazing around and getting burnt by the sun.

Being that Ibiza is such a tourist trap, there are con-men fucking everywhere roaming the beach, throughout the day, overly friendly young girls walk around and sit with groups of guys (or hot guys sit with groups of girls) and offer them what sounds like the most amazing experience, some of the claims we heard was a party boat with free alcohol, a beach party with all you can drink alcohol... etc etc. These nights out are of course limited entry and stuff and as such they need to take a deposit.... you pay them 20 euro and then pay 20 euro on the night... So... we just give them 120 euro and then they walk off and we turn up to the club and assume it actually exists? IDUNTHINKSO.

Lots of banter in the ocean, including seeing Ian scream like a little girl at starfish, we are still making fun of him after returning home.

This is where the day gets rough.

Im not sure if i clarified it yet, but the people on this holiday is 4/6 of my housemates (me, luke, ian, duncan) , and 2 friends from lukes course who I'll hopefully never see again (Phil and ryan)

Our house came back from having a swim in the ocean to discover that basically all of our bags had been stolen... whilst 2 people were with them, right under their noses.
Fuck.

Losses:
Me : Phone, Vest, 5 euros
Duncan : Phone, Bag, Shirt, hotel keys
Luke : Wallet with 10 euro (all cards), hotel keys
Ian : Everything? (Wallet with all his holiday money in, full set of clothes, new phone, book....)

Pretty shitty. Especially Ian who lost probably around £300 or £400 worth of stuff
I Lost all the photos I took on my phone as well, and I was pretty much the only one on the holiday that was taking photos, this is why there are pretty much no photos of the holiday, which actually makes me more upset than losing the phone itself.

We got back to the hotel and found out we had to pay 40 euro for each set of keys stolen, as they had to change the locks and stuff. Expensive and annoying, but necessary I suppose, better than having my passport stolen.

Spent a few hours sulking, having a nap and so on until dinner, where we went to a beachfront restaurant for a cheap burger and chips or something to that effect.

The night rolled in, and we decided to meet up with the girls...
But where would we meet them? They decided to meet up at the London Bar again.
And so the 10 euro pitchers appeared again.
The girls sussed out that phil is a virgin (forever alone) and took it upon themselves to try and teach him how to pull girls, they tried teaching him a subtle technique of slowly brushing a bit of the girls hair out of their face and offered themselves as practice dummies. Phil spent the next hour or so essentially palming poor kate in the forehead instead of brushing her hair out of the way. It was painful to watch and I still dont understand how anyone can be so shit at life.
Earlier in the day, duncan took out 50 euro for Ian to survive off for the rest of the holiday (as he literally had all 150 euro or whatever of his holiday money stolen), Ian somehow manages to lose this 50 euro at the London bar, unsurprisingly he is kind of bummed the fuck out at the fact he has lost all of his money twice in one day.

The alcohol is hitting me pretty fucking hard.

We leave the london pub and go into a Vodka Bar, which was like a free entry club-bar place, the music was pretty good and they had smoke/fog machines and lazers all over the damn place.
Of course by this time I was out of it. I stumble to the toilet to throw up, but all the stalls are taken, I start to feel dizzy and worry im about to collapse - at this point an english skinhead gets in my face and starts shouting at me, I ask him to help me get to a seat, he does, I am surprised at the kindness of said skinhead.
The next half hour or so is a blur for me as I am essentially slumped on a sofa in this foggy club, the only thing keeping me conscious is willpower at this point, I pump my leg in time with the dance music to try and keep myself in the game, I have no idea where the fuck any of my friends or the girls are at this point and the last thing I wanted to do on my 2nd day in Ibiza is pass out in a club when I can barely find my way back to the hotel when sober...
I open my eyes at one point and the skinhead is like inches from my face, thankfully he skips the rape and gives me a bottle of water and we basically have a chat about how nice he is and how he hates seeing people have a bad time, who am I to argue - he was genuinely a pretty nice guy for helping me out.
The rest of my housemates find me and realise I need to get home, I promise them 'ive got this' and slump back on the sofa to sober up a little more.
We eventually leave the club and get back to the hotel alive.

Sunday 26 June 2011

Ibiza - Day 1 - Arrival and the start of something special

We landed on the island at around 4 or 5pm, and got to have a small sample of the island through the bus journey to 'Sant Antoni', from the bus station we eventually worked our way to our Hotel, the hotel Rosalia - supposedly a 1 star hotel, needless to say we werent exactly expecting much, summed up pretty well by "what? It... doesnt... look completely shit?" when we found it amongst some cafes and some other more residential looking buildings.

Sant Antoni where we would be staying for all 4 days of our holiday is basically only divided into the beachfront, and a wealth of bars, pubs and small clubs in what essentially forms a big alcoholic maze of roads which look exactly the same and young girls who desperately try to pull you into their bars with alcohol deals so cheap that theymake you question the relatively high price of water.
We had 2 rooms of 3 booked, we were actually kind of expecting a single and a double in each room but fortunately we got 3 singles - They were arranged into a single and a double but we werent having any of that shit.

 



^Heres a map showing where we were staying (Hostel Rosalia) along with some other key places i'll be referring to...

 

After faffing around with keys and dumping our stuff into the room, we hit the strip to look for food but as Ibiza is such a tourist trap, all of the food shops were crazy expensive - we ended up in a spanish pub like place, got some lasagne and chips....

So we decided we'd 'take it easy' as it was our first night in Ibiza, we didnt really fancy hitting a club or anything just yet, the plan was to get some cheap sangria from the nearby alcohol shop and then sit on the afternoon beach... However, we made the mistake of going the opposite direction of an actual beach and ended up at the marina... where we (wrongly) assumed, "if we keep walking in this direction, we're bound to hit a beach eventually"
Basically, instead of hitting 'Beach' on the map we went all the way south from our hostel, through the alcohol maze and then walked west all the way to rock beach, where we eventually said fuckit and just sat on the rocks and started drinking sangria. A few of the less typical drinking games were played, I Spy in particular (drink if you get it wrong, nominate drink if you get it right).

After about an hour sitting on this rock beach something bizarre happened. Duncan (my housemate) was identified by 3 girls he knows from UK, his best friend's (hot) little sister and her 2 friends...
Bizarro.
Little did we know at this point that we'd end up meeting with these girls (Kat, Kate and Jess) every night for the rest of our time in Ibiza. We headed to the alcohol maze to find a cheap bar...
And there we had our first run in with 'The London Bar' . Oh Goddamn.
For 10 euro, 2 mixed drinks (I think doubles or triples) of whatever you want, a bottle of peach schnappes (about 2~3 shots each for our group) and then a 2L Pitcher of cocktail to share between 2 people.
....
I nearly died. Holy shit.
But it was fine. I had this. I was the best.
Drunken banter ensued.

Ian disappeared, then reappeared very drunk, thought he had lost his phone, and had to be escorted back to our hotel by Phil and Ryan.
Eventually we were tasked with taking the drunk girls home (whilst completely drunk ourselves) - You can see their hotel on the map (The hotel Abrat), its actually not THAT far from our own hotel.... However we did not know this at the time. We stumbled arm in arm in pairs back to the beach (me, luke and duncan and the 3 girls) ... and around... through rockbeach.. It was fucking ass. And it took around an hour or more probably. Im not sure if it was just me, but i was actually expecting to stay the night at their hotel - but when we got there the guard at the door basically wouldnt let us in because we didnt live there (cockblock'd). We started heading home.... Except we didn't because Luke had different things planned for us.
We walked in the wrong direction for about 20 minutes, before me and duncan turned around. We saw many bizarre things that night, things which I likely dont completely remember, a stairset from tony hawks underground 2, a hybrid ATV-Car thing, many drunk people....



^The route we took, if only we had known where the hell we were going at the time....

We got back at around 5-6am after originally going out for a 'light' night , collapsed on the bed.
And that was the end of day 1.

 

Thursday 23 June 2011

Summer 2011 Anime

http://www.animenewsnetwork.co.uk/interest/2011-06-20/list-of-summer-season-2011-tv-anime-in-japan/

its not looking great tbh.
I may consider watching Usagi Drop and the idolm@ster anime but the rest of it all honestly looks/sounds terrible. bit of a disappointment after there being so many good series on now (spring season). Ah well, maybe i'll watch some older series like Geass/Darker than black

Tuesday 21 June 2011

Fucking holograms son.

3d Hologram stuff has always been a thing of the future, something you look at in movies like avatar and be like 'wow. how cool would that shit be...'



Mind. Fucking. Blown.

Monday 20 June 2011

Metal Gear Solid 4

Yup. Little bit late to the party, but fuckit. I played through it recently and im giving my thoughts on it. DealWitIt.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is not very good as a game, infact, about half of the time I was playing I was curious as to whether it should even be classified as a game.
The stories people tell about MGS4, saying its the best movie ever on the PS3 ( I wouldnt really know as I havent played Heavy Rain) are completely justified. MGS4 could easily be described as a 15-20 hour film with some interactive scenes - Worth mentioning also that the story of said film will make little sense if you have played through the other games, and probably no fucking sense at all if you've never played the previous games.

That said, for metal gear fans (Myself? Maybe? Im not even sure...) there are alot of cool throwbacks and flashbacks in the game, references to itself and its unique humor ["Damnit otacon pull yourself together this isnt a game"] along with a complete remake of some parts of shadow moses island from MGS1

The game is somewhere around 8-10 hours of cutscenes/codec calls, and 6-8 hours of 'gameplay' - although I feel like a fair amount of that gameplay isnt the desired type from a MGS game....
Basically alot of scenes have forced combat, which i suppose could be worse, but fucking hell the combat in that game is so shitty, the third person aiming style is pretty badly done if you need to actually move at the same time (its fine for tranq'ing soldiers in the side of the head, ala MGS2/3), god forbid you actually attempt to take cover in a full scale firefight, or aim down the sights of your gun, as you'll find yourself in a clusterfuck of useless buttons, tiny aiming area and general bullshittery.

The one big thumbs up it gets from me is for certain climax scenes near the end of the game, the game does a very cool and arty split screen style with action going on along with cutscene in the other panel, its very well done, powerful and memorable, and im amazed I havent seen anything like it before. Also, the final fight against 'youprobablyknowwho' is epic as fuck (I quite dislike the use of the word epic nowadays because its overused, but the final battle really can't be described in any other way)

verdict: Its okay if you loved the previous games I suppose, but in all honesty I'd probably say its just not worth your time unless you really really care about the MGS universe. I for one couldnt really give a shit about sons of the patriots, big boss and so on...

Monday 13 June 2011

The lull

So ive pretty much finished writing my dissertation, going to print it and everything tomorrow and then hand it in... (deadline is on weds)
Havent been doing a whole lot other than that, casual relaxation and such...

Gaming :
Replayed Resi5 with a friend (god that game is so much fun on a clean playthrough with no guns), Played through LEGO Batman because I had nothing better to do, League of legends as always, Downloaded and played some of Duke - but it runs really ass on my PC so it kind of kills the enjoyment a little

TV:
Southpark this season has been pretty disapointing on the whole, there was that huge err.... twist... or... something... at the midseason though, which has gotten alot of discussion going....

Anime:
Aside from the regular shows ive been following this season (Click Me), I recently picked up the somewhat now infamous 'Mahou shoujo Madoka Magica' along with 'Kimi Ni todoke 2'.
Whilst the latter is kind of whatever, Madoka has been very very interesting, Its bizarre in that it doesnt really fit the genre/tags it bestows upon itself, I actually gave it a miss in the spring season just because its a fucking Mahou shoujo anime (Magical Girl), y'know... one of those shows where teenage girls transform to fight evil and have a transformation sequence where they get pretty little frilly clothes and shit [see also, Cardcaptor sakura, Sailor Moon....] .
The show is however, anything but cute girls running around with bows in their hair, this is some serious shit, a dark plot and kind of twisted characters make for a bit of a sinister take on the cutesy genre, I zerged through 9 episodes in about 3 days because its really one of those anime that you want to keep watching once you start... Give it a try if you have nothing to do.

other:
This reddit is kind of fucking amazing.... http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ca4bl/time_to_get_classy/