My blog is being replaced by Facebook

Hello to all,

To those who haven't noticed, I haven't made a post for more than a month.
The facts are simple, usually I do posts to show photos or videos of places where I've been and normally there isn't much to say. What has been happening is that I'm posting the photos and videos links in Facebook, but I still use Picasa Web and Youtube to host the photos and videos respectively.
People can subscribe to feeds from these applications:

• Picasa Web


• Youtube (this is not a regular feed, but it can be subscribed anyway...)

Having this said, I will only come back here when I need to "say" something, that may take weeks, months or years... don't know...

Well "see" you all next time!
dfm

Lost photos from June and July

Hello again my friends!

It seems that I forgot to download the photos from my mobile phone to the pc for a couple of months.
No big thing to say, just some photos to show, which include:

• "O GRANDE IST" (The Big IST)


• St Peter's Parties @ Porto de Mós


• My Super Cats: Parafuso and Bolinhas


• Bike tours

Pack June and July 2009

See you,
dfm

Geneva Pre-Parties

People,

Here I am with a couple of new photos, this time in the Geneva Pre-Parties, yes there are two parties here, the Pre-Parties, more soft and less important, and when these are over, the real Geneva Parties start :) Interesting naming convention...
I went alone, no big deal and not that much fun or no fun at all... but since everything was new to me it was interesting to see. I found two persons that I know, which was also good.

Here are the photos:

Geneva Pre-Parties (July 18)

See you,
dfm

A really hard bike journey

Hello People!

This last weekend I went to give a bike tour with my friend Pascal, he lives close to the Jura, so the tour was mounting one of the hills of the Jura... as you can imagine, it was hard has hell!!
I was not able to mount everything on bike, I mounted on foot for about 2Km.
Now the big question: Was it worth it? Yes it was! The view from top is really beautiful, from there we can see:

• Almost all the Geneva lake


• The Geneva water jet


• The Divonne lake


• Lots of villages that I don't know the names (either in Switzerland or in France)


• The Alpes, it was petty that the sky was not clear, because from there we could see the Mont Blanc


• The Salève (which is the other mountain from the other side of Geneva)


• Lots of anthills


• Some cows

The other fun part was role down the mountain :) We caught a really good speed, which gave a good adrenalin injection.
Once down the mountain we went to see a water fountain, I have some pictures of it, but I could not locate the place on the map, I've asked my colleague to see if he helps me locate it.

Well that was it, here's the photo album:

First Bike Tour in the Jura

Ciao,
dfm

Update 2009/07/17: The water fountain photos are now located on the map. Thanks Pascal!
Update 2009/07/18: Since Sunday that I've not been able to sleep right because I didn't knew the ant species name, but today I can sleep well! According to my biologist colleague Crespo, the ant that I photographed is Formica rufa (they do seem alike...). Thanks Crespo!! :)

SLB made me a surprise

Hello again,

I didn't expected to be here so soon, but here I am.
To introduce the subject I just want to let you know, for the small minority that doesn't already know, that my soccer club is Sport Lisboa e Benfica (www.slbenfica.pt), simply SLB, or "GLORIOSO SLB" like we like to call it.
So once that I'm emigrated in Geneva and I don't see them live for a long time, they decided to make me a surprise by coming to perform their pre-season in Meyrin, about 500 meters from where I work :)
This is it! Today I went to see one training session, and from the map that is with the album you will see the place where I work, which is near the crossing of Rue du Mandement with Rue de Meyrin is really close to the place where the photos were taken.
Here's the album:

SLB @ Meyrin

Hasta la vista,
dfm

St Peters Parties @ PMS & DMB Day @ Montreux

Hello my friends!

A little bit more than two weeks have passed since my last post, but a lot has been going on!! Well... a lot means more busy weekends than any other thing.

To start, I took holiday on June 26th and 29th, this made me a 4 day weekend. Friday I had dinner with some old friends from Credito Agricola, then I went to the Lisbon Airport to get my brother (that I didn't see for about one year), and we went straight to Porto de Mós, once there was a party there in MY castle (the one that is the background of the blog title). I do like to call it MY castle since it is about 100m from my parents house, the house where I grew up.
This was the first weekend of the St. Peters Parties, my village traditional parties. This is the best time of the year for me, where we see almost all of our friends, and there are even friends that we only see once a year in these parties! It's long nights that last until the sun comes up, always outside in the fresh air! Well sometimes it rains, like it happened this year, but happily it was not cold. So as you may guess it was there that I went Saturday and Sunday night :) Monday was the day that I came back to Geneva, so no big deal to tell.

The next weekend, July 4th and 5th, Rita came to visit me in Geneva, once it was the Dave Matthews Band concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival :). So Saturday, beggining of the afternoon we went to Montreux, where we went to see Freddie's Statue, then we walked near to the lake until the Château de Chillon. We visited the castle, it is very nice and well maintained. I want to thank to the friends that told me that the castle existed and that it was really worth to visit. After the visit we went to eat something and then went to the concert.
This day of the festival had three groups, started with Steely Dan, then DMB and finally Chickenfoot. We were only interested in DMB, and since we wanted to be sure that we would stay in a good place we were there when the doors opened. Steely Dan passed, and then came DMB and the fun began!! :) They entered the stage in a very calm way, without playing any music, they thanked the applauses and then they started!! Excitement to the top! They played several musics from their new album (Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King), which is, for me, the best album they have, then they also played some older songs. Dave talked a little bit, made some jokes, told that the song Alligator Pie was made to put his younger daughter name in a song, because she asked him "Daddy when you gonna put me in a song". DMB seemed to be really enjoying the concert, once they were almost always smiling, and Dave was always dancing in his "strange way" to dance :) The only sad thing about the concert was that no photos could be taken... Finally DMB finished and we went away, we were already tired and Chickenfoot was not of our interest.
I have some photos of this excellent day that we passed in Montreux here:

DMB Day @ Montreux

Wel... and that was it for the last two weekends.

See you soon,
dfm

I vs Salève (and more...)

And the winner is... ME!!!

Yesterday, Saturday, I decided to go to the top of Salève, which is a mountain in France that goes up to 1400 m (according to this article from wikipedia).
It isn't very far, but it's mounting all the way, it was hard as hell, I had to find my rithm and mount all the way without stopping. I only stopped one time, after 25 minutes always mounting, because I didn't came in the correct rithm, but after that I didn't stop until I got to the top (more 50 minutes mounting). After being on top I could move around and visit some places there, but since I was a little BIT tired I just climbed a little bit more near to a high view point to take a look around. I think that next time I will go and visit other places there, when I'm more used to climb :)
Some numbers:

• Climb lenght: 9Km


• Time to climb: 1h24m


• Time to descend: 15m


• Maximum speed: 63.2Km/h


• Average speed: 13Km/h


• Total Km: 27.1Km


• Total time: 2h05m

Today, Sunday, I had a very nice barbeque with Portuguese people that are in the Geneva, Lausanne and in between region. We also tried to play a little bit of volley, but I don't think that I can say that we really arrived to play it...
I didn't took photos, but there are some in facebook, I don't know if everyone is able to see them, because I don't understand nothing from it... I just registered to be able to see the photos and that was it.
So for this I leave you only with the photos from my victory over the Salève! :)

I vs Salève

See you,
dfm