Celebrate

Dear friends and visitors!

I invite you to celebrate.

You can celebrate what you want and prefer in this holiday season.

Enjoy this glass of wine...

Happy holidays!

Mikulás

Do you remember your first Mikulás?

Mikulás = Saint Nicholas, who comes on 6th of December, and brings presents to kids. You can read the legend of Saint Nicholas here.

I have very vague memories about my childhood, but I have an image in my mind about one Mikulás evening.

I was so anxious to see the good old man and prepeared to meet him. I cleaned my boots and put near the entrance door. I was in my room at the window to see Mikulás coming. Suddenly the bell rang at the door and I rushed out from my room to the hall... and I saw through the window of the entrance door a shadow going away, and I heard his steps as he was going down the stairs .
I did not meet him, but I saw his silhouette...
I was a bit disappointed that he was faster than me and could not see him.

I was about 4 years old...

On the picture you can see Joulupukki, the Finnish Mikulás.

Haystacks

I adore haystacks. They are my favourite "things".
If I see them staying on the hills I feel a strange emotion and I want to hug them. They look like some old little people that climb up on the hill.
I love their peculiar shapes, their curved lines.
I admire them during the sunset, when the sun-rays draw long shadows around them.

I decided to make a collection of photos presenting haystacks from all around the world, as I am curious how they look like in different regions.
If you are interested in haystacks or you have photos that you can add to my collection, please visit my flickr group called HAYSTACK.
Thanks :-)

Brighton SCHMAP-Guides

One of my photos posted on flickR was selected for Schmap-Guides.

FlickR Mail:

Schmap Brighton Fifth Edition: Photo Inclusion

Hi Zsofia Nagy,

I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo has been selected for inclusion in the newly released fifth edition of our Schmap Brighton Guide:

Royal Pavilion
http://www.schmap.com/brighton/toppicks_attractions/p=171863/i=171863_33.jpg

Thanks so much for letting us include your photo - please enjoy the guide!

Best regards,

Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

My photo in Schmap-Guides

This is the original photo, on FlickR.

Recycling day - October 04, 2008

For the third time this year electronic waste is collected in our town. (And in others as well, as it is a national campaign.)

You should know that my town is relatively small and one of the poorest in the region.
Or maybe not?
The interesting thing is that every time this huge container was full of computers, TV-sets, fridges and other electronic equipments!
That means that people bought new ones and this means that they had money to change the old ones.
Are we really as poor as we pretend to be?

Citius, altius, fortius

"Faster, Higher, Stronger"

... is the Olympic motto, proposed by Pierre de Coubertin and introduced in 1924, and ever since athletes all over the world respect it.

At every sport event athletes are better than their predecessors, improving their performances. And their results are recorded as world records. And the values for speed, time, distance, hight or weight change rapidly, reaching extremes.

But how far can they push the human performances? Is there a limit? Or what is the limit?
I mean the natural limit...

How fast can we swim or run, how high can we jump, how much weight can we lift?
Is it natural that new generation of athletes are better, faster and stronger?
Are they super-men and women?

Modern technology has a tremendous impact on sport performances. But how much can technology improve sport performances?

We see high-tech sport equipments that help athletes, as they are designed using aerodynamics, special, flexible materials and even space-technology ... as athletes look like some super-heroes.

Athletes aspiration for glory is a natural desire. But is this hunt for better performances and new world records pushing sport competitions to the extremes?

Is this the era of super-humans?
Or all is a fake, and most of them use performance-enhancing drugs and "accessories", that can't be detected by the "official" tests.

The road to the Fish-lake

I haven't been biking for a long time, as the roads were always under construction and it was dangerous to bike on the side. But years ago I went regularly biking, every afternoon, day by day, until the first snow.
It was a pleasant afternoon, perfect for taking out my bicycle and take a ride somewhere... anywhere... but out of the town! Hmmm... Let's see... what is it at the fish-lake?
Leaving the main road, you find yourself in a beautiful valley, where the road is surrounded by smooth hills, corn-fields and meadows.



There is a small little house at the end of the village, it is like it was dropped there from a fairy tale...










On your way you can see some people making hay...







horses pulling carts...







sheep grazing on the top of the hill...








scarecrows waving along the corn-fields...








birds flying all around the bushes and even a sleeping cat on the tree!






The lake was quiet today, only few fisher-men were staying with their fishing-rods on the shore, no trace of tourist, who usually come here for camping, sunbathing or swimming on weekends.





The water surface was rarerly disturbed by small waves, created by some jumping fish. All was calm and relaxing...








The wind was shaking gently the leaves, the reeds were whispering softly, swallows were gliding over the lake to catch flyes, the sunrays were reflected by the water and the lake was shining...

The sunset was approaching sooner than I expected...

I took a last picture of the tiny cottage and pedalled fast to get home before getting totally dark.

Master's on-line and team-work

In October 2007 I applied to a master's course, Communication and Public Relation in Business, in Bucharest, at the ASE (Academia de Studii Economice). The condition for admission was a university degree.

It is a two-year program, the study method is very interesting, a special form of distance learning, classes are off-campus, everything is "on-line". There is a special web-page created for us by the University, where we registered and logged in at the beginning of the courses. Each Monday our professors posted on the site the new topics, homework, questions, polls, projects and we had a deadline to read, learn, do and send back the homework and projects. There were forum topics and chats launched, where we could write our opinion about the topics and we could read others' opinion as well and could reply to them. The teachers gave us a feed-back after reading our answers. Everything was happening in a virtual world, we could enter the site any time we had free time, but we had to respect the deadlines and the requirements. The condition for entering the exams was to had activity on the forums, to do all the homework and projects for the deadline and to had certain amount of points/marks for these activities. The only occasion we could meet each other and the professors were the exams, as they were held in Bucharest.

We studied PR, communication, psychology, negotiation, e-marketing, deontology, human behavior, IT. We had a lot of projects to do, some were individual but there was a team-project, too.

As we didn't know each other only virtually, by reading each others' answers or interventions on the forums and seeing a small photo and a name next to the answers this team-project was the most interesting and challenging task. I was so lucky to be part of a great group, with 6 girls: Raluca, Gabi, Iza, Corina, Cristina and myself. Iza was so inspired to invite all of us in the group, choosing us after she was looking at our activity during the semester. (Very clever idea!) And she was right as all of us are hard working girls and active all the time, posting all the answers and homework in time. So we formed a wonderful team, even if we didn't know each other in real life. We had a project about how to develop the Romanian Black-Sea tourism. After a month of planned and organized work we finalized the project, but meanwhile we became very good friends. We did such a great job in communication and negotiation during these weeks that our professor was very pleased with our team-work.
We were anxious to see each other and decided to meet at the exams. To recognize each other easier we decided to wear red tops. Our live meeting was wonderful, we forgot all the stress of the exams and spent memorable moments together, finally, in the real world.

NATO Summit 2008, Bucharest, Romania

I am not going to write about the 2008 NATO Summit, for further information here you have the links below...

http://www.summitbucharest.ro/en/1.html
http://www.summitbucharest.ro/ro/1.html
http://www.summitbucharest.ro/fr/1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Bucharest_Summit

... but I would like to present my view of the place where the meetings are held.
Bucharest, the Romanian capital city is the host of 2008 NATO Summit - April 1-3, 2008.
The biggest NATO Summit ever is organized in the biggest building in Europe: The Palace of Parliament in Bucharest.

The House of Parliament - view from Carol Park. Even from this distance it looks huge.







From this angle it doesn't look so scary... but it is at least 1 km far from this fountain.









The Palace of Parliament, the biggest building in Europe.







As you get closer it becomes bigger and bigger.

Tokaji wine

Last weekend I visited Sárospatak, a pretty town in Tokaj region, Hungary. I went there with 3 pupils for a physics competition. While the kids were preparing their projects, the teachers had an "extra school" activity: a visit to a wine cellar.

I was really enthusiastic about this visit, as I always wanted to see a real wine cellar. As I descended into the cellar, there were lots of butts of different sizes along the pathway.

The Tokaj-Hegyalja region has a volcanic soil and the cellars are dug in the volcanic rock, too. This special micro-climate makes the wines of this region so special:

“The Wine of Kings, the King of Wines”

In the cellar

The cellar I visited is relatively new, but the walls were already covered by "noble mould", which has formed due to the dew that rises from the wine butts.

Noble mould on the walls

Tokaj - Hegyalja wine region is a well know wine region in Hungary, with the famous Tokaji Aszú, a sort of sweet white dessert wine, made of dried grapes.

According to the story, in 1630, during a Turkish raid, the people vintage in mid November, with a delay of several weeks. The grapes had shrivelled and become dry by then. They produced an unequalled wine from this vintage. This was the first dessert wine produced by adding dried grapes.

Here is the technology of the Tokaji Aszú wine. (aszú = shrivelled)

During the making of Aszú the dried grapes are separated from the whole berries, are collected in vats and processed into a paste resembling dough. From this so-called Aszú paste they add as many times 25 kilograms to 136 litres of fermenting must (=grape juice) as the number of butts they want the Aszú wine to be. (The vintage butts used at the time, in which they put the Aszú grapes, could hold 25 kg, and the traditional wooden cask for fermenting Aszú held 136 litres.) Only 3,4,5, and 6-butt Aszú wine is produced in Tokaj according to the tradition of several centuries.

After fermentation the Aszú grapes are removed from the new wine by a process of careful pressing and the wine is aged for at least 3 years in a wooden casks.

The different butts of Aszú also mean the distinction according to remaining sugar content: the 3-butt Aszú contains 60–90 g/l, the 4-butt Aszú 90–120 g/l, the 5-butt Aszú 120–150 g/l, and the 6-butt Aszú 150–180 g/l of leftover sugar.

A 6-butt Tokaji Aszú with honey-like colour



We were served with 6 different sort of wines:
furmint, a dry fresh white wine,
hárslevelű ("linden-leaf") 2005, medium sweet white wine,
hárslevelű 2006 - late vintage, medium sweet white wine,
szamorodni, an other speciality of the region: the regular berries and dried raisins are processed together as they ripen. Depending on the sugar content of the must – and the amount of Aszú raisins – the wine will be dry or sweet after fermentation.
aszú 3-butt,
aszú 6-butt.

My favourite was the hárslevelű - late vintage, as it has a mild, fruity taste.


Hárslevelű - late vintage 2006




For more about Tokaji wines, see the link: http://www.kfki.hu/~rw2003/bor.html
Visit the cellar we spent a wondeful evening: http://www.evinor.hu/