Journey To Dacia

I just got back from a trip to Bucharest, Romania to visit my sweetie Raluca and it was a blast! I stayed in a different place this time and it was a little nicer than the last place...except the washing machine didn't have a drying function this time! Grrrr. Hanging clothes out to dry is *so* 1940's.

One of the days, we walked around a massive park that had a lake in the center. It took us 2 hours to walk it. Crazy. We took some pictures there as well (the ones with the water in the background).

This time it was nice and sunny as opposed to the cold winter of the previous times. Soooo nice. Even so, we probably spent the same amout of time outdoors as we did before because we're both indoory people.

We did go and see Secret Window at the "Hollywood Multiplex". Heheh. It was a nice theatre though - 10 screens. The mall the theatre was in had some interesting food chain names: Broaster Chicken and Daylight Donuts!

I'm not big into wacky food and eating out is a rarity for Raluca so we both spent foodtime at McDonald's. Yeah, kinda sad but I *never* eat it here at home so it was different at least. If I had kept it up much longer I would have started looking like Grimace though.

Here's what Moscow actually looks like, right outside my hotel window. There are very very few of the neat bulb-like building tops (as seen below) - those are really only on churches/cathedrals. It was cold and snowing there since it was February.

This awesome architecture is typical of the buildings we saw in Moscow. Very cool.

This is the famous St. Basil's Cathedral at the end of Red Square. The Kremlin is to the right (not shown) and is surrounded by a long yellow wall. This cathedral was built in the 1550's! They're always renovating parts of it (it's really big)

Here's a huge red building at the beginning of Red Square. You enter the square to the left of this building. In front of the entrance isa marker that marks the beginning of the Moscow road.

This is the huge auditorium where the award ceremony took place. There were 17 awards given out for various categories. Tom presented award #4 - Best Game Design and I presented the final award #17 - Game of the Year. The award went to the awesome FPS called Stalker (published by THQ here in the US).

Here's a shot of one of the floor areas where games were being shown. Our favorite in this area is an FPS called "You Are Empty". It's very Russian in its design, in fact, it's all about Russia! They're sending us a poster because the art on it is pretty cool.

This is the room where I gave my talk, in fact that's the stage that I was on. A nice big screen to show the PowerPoint slides and speakers for the computer sounds and the microphone. Five long hours to do three presentations but it turned out just great and went exactly three hours. Right on time! The most impressive thing is that these guys had their stuff together perfectly - there was no problem in the set up at all and everything worked without a hitch.

This Russian game magazine is celebrating the 10th anniversay of DOOM and has a huge 7-page "History of id" in the DOOM article. Really cool. That's my Pocket PC Phone with Raluca's picture on it. :)

The Russian language isn't too difficult to decipher. Really, most of it is letter substitution and many of their words are English analogs. There are definitely lots of pure Russian words that you need to learn after you translate the letters, but Tom and I started to pick it up near the end of our visits. This sign, for instance, says RESTORAN, which stands for Restaurant. But Tom and I would always pronounce it exactly as we saw it just because it was funny. "Hey Tom, I'm gettin' hungry. Let's go to a pectopah!"

This was my first trip to Russia and it was a blast. We stayed for a whole week and enjoyed every minute of it. We went shopping, saw the sights, stayed in a plush hotel, and were treated like royalty by everyone. In fact, I've been telling people here that I think I know what the Beatles felt like when they came to the USA. It was non-stop photos and autographs every time we entered the KRI area where everyone was checking out the games. Really, really nice people. Tom and I got to see how Russian gamers are no different than ourselves - we all want to play games and have fun! Except, well....they talk kinda funny! :)

Oh, and I was hoping to eat some really yummy food there. Um...look at this very typical menu. Lots of the food there was...interesting. One night we went out to eat with another person and he ordered a seafood salad. Well, it had a BUNCH of seafood on it - and on the top was an octopus. He used his fork and cut the head off and ate it. Tom almost puked. All that and chickens running around in a cage inside the pectopah! Oh, and another interesting thing: everywhere you go, you must give your jacket to a coatroom attendant. They don't allow you to bring your coat inside the main areas of restaurants.