The other day I found a cool site showing pictures of celebrities. No, this is not what you might think. These are old, odd and rare pictures, often putting a new face on familiar characters.

Some of my favorite pictures from the site:

Oh, of course. The URL is www.thisisnotporn.net.

Cheers!

The last week I’ve been in Rome, Italy. Monday to Friday I’ve lived in Frascati and worked in Morena, and during the weekend I’ve stayed near Termini in central Rome together with M.

Frascati was okay, I guess. Small, worn down but not completely without charm. We found one good restaurant there with both good food and nice staff.

Work went well and the clients appeared very happy with my part, so no worries there.

The bad and the ugly
Going into central Rome, I realized that the worn down thing was not specific to the suburbs but the city core as well. The streets were very dirty and we often came by areas that smelled very bad. The traffic was horrible, and the subway stations felt like nobody has bothered to renovate or otherwise improve them since 1986.
Everywhere on the streets people were trying to sell us cheap imitation bags and various crap with a very intrusive attitude. This was worst when eating at outdoor seatings, we often had to tell the peddlers at  least 3-4 times that we were not interested before they gave up. And came back again 30 minutes later.

Speaking of eating; I don’t know if we just had bad luck, or if the italian restaurants really are very bad. About 3/4 of all meals we had were a major disappointment. Service was most of the time terrible, and even though we always tried to be friendly and start the conversations in Italian, we were often treated with arrogance and not the smallest of smiles.

The good
The ice cream/gelato was good and the wine was cheap.

Sure, Colosseum was impressive and there were a lot of ruins, fountains and statues that would probably be reason enough for some people to go there, but after a while things start to look the same everywhere.

For us, Rome was all together quite a bad experience.

I hope I don’t have to go here again very soon. It will be really good to go home tomorrow.

Last weekend me and M went to our friend Yosabeth’s 25th birthday party. The theme was “Hat”, where accompanying clothes were encouraged.

Jolly good fun!

Recently my good friend André finally got married with his Tina. Nice wedding!

Yesterday there was a real thunderstorm here. The biggest one I’ve ever seen, I think. Sometimes you could see something like 10 flashes within 5 seconds, and hear some really loud cracks just a kilometer away or so.

Anyway, me and M went out to the balcony to watch, and after a while I got out my tripod and camera and started shooting in hope to get some good photos. Most of the time the clouds were so thick that you couldn’t see the actual flashes, but rather that all the clouds got immensely lit up.

What surprised me was that most of the actual lightnings that we could see went sideways instead of up and down. Is that normal?

No image manipulation at all was involved in these pictures, I just had the shutter open for a few seconds at a time.

Top right corner shows some of the lightning. The sky is lit up almost as in the daytime, even though it is around midnight.

The clouds were nicely lit up, and sometimes they even looked like Aurora Borealis.

Lucky shot of a lightning that goes almost completely sideways.