Just got back from a week of skiing (ended up snowblading the entire week and not snowboarding at all). Weather started off kindof meh with lots of myst making it difficult to see the difference between sky/snow forcing you to be very carefull.
Luckily the last 3 days we had clear blue skies!


Me sitting at the highest point you could get to and a view of Italy!


The Austria side, pretty amazing slopes (some very long ones)

We were with a group we almost always go with that consists out of about 35 people and is just always lots of fun. I have some group pics I might put up later.

I was suppose to think and decide on what I want to do from now on in my life during this trip but just was to busy enjoying the vacation that I didn't really get to it.

I did read Bill Bryson's: Walk in the woods


I found it kindof a dissapointment after hearing such great things about it, but it was still a decent read with some fun stories. I had already kindof decided to push 'walking the pct' back one or two years to gain some experience hiking first and most likely I will attempt it when I stop playing poker.

I am going to get a wisdom tooth removed in the hospital in 2 days and after that I will start making some decisions on what I want to do/ where I want to go this year. There are also going to be some changes living-wise coming up.

One of my roommates is going to live with his GF (in about a month) which kindof sucks because it was alot of fun having him in the house, it also means that a room is going to open up and because of the layout of the house I don't really see any options of anyone else moving in. So I don't really know what I'm going to do with this.
I'm considering selling the house and starting a pokerhouse somewhere in another country but those are pretty big decisions to be made and this year I've been pretty undecisive with what I want.

I guess I have some serious thinking to do now
Robin out.

I decided to just post a couple of pictures I've come accross on 2+2 and other places that I found interesting and thought I'd share with the people on leggo... to start off with:


All of these pictures are going to be irrelephant!




With the melting ice the polar bears are going canibal on their young to survive



Makes me wanna learn how to surf, although I will probably never be hitting these waves ever...



Famous boulder in Norway hundreds of meters above the ground...



Circus back in the day... nothing like having the wind blow through the hair of your sidecar-lion



The effect of drugs through the years



One of the most beautifull pictures I've seen. It's from the spaceshuttle Endeavor launch.
The picture is called: "Waterway to Orbit".



You can find happiness anywhere in nature...



The famous Ellison Cave




Vulcano eruption with lightning, I just think it looks very pretty But I always love how lightning looks.



Sinkhole in Guatamala, you don't see those bitches coming! (ok it does rumble for a couple of weeks beforehand)



SpiderHeaven...



Frozen Waterfall in Colorado



The famous Mandelbrot fractal



This bird is actually called a 'Robin' which is why I decided to include it



Going skiing next week, won't be this extreme though...



A man's best friend...



Solvay Conference 1927, with an impressive list of attendees who went on to collect 17 Nobel prizes.

BACK: A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, Ed. Herzen, Th. De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin;
MIDDLE: P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
FRONT: I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson



found it an interesting picture




Would you have the guts to sit here?



Nature can be beautifull



Hyena's as pets in Nigeria...



I mean, this has to be a japanese 'picachu cat' right?


The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across



The Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes. The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth




Most of these pictures are from 2+2topics but these are the ones I liked the most. If you want to see more from the topic go here.


Enjoy.
Robin out.

Song I've listened to about a 100 times today

I wrote a big entry about my life going nowhere at the moment but after reading it back I didn't want to post it so I figured I would blog about something else instead. (I think somewhere this week I'll retyp most of it, because I like having a blog which contains my thoughts/ideas to read back in a couple of years)



I've started watching The World At War:


It's an 30 hour documentary about the second world war, starting at Hitlers rise to power and highlighting all the major battles that took place in 1939-1945. I haven't finished it yet but it is pretty amazing because 80% of all the material is original footage shot during the war which is just unreal to see how all the bombings went down and battles were.
Another great thing about this series is that it shows all the sides of the 'story'. It was made in 1973 and contains an incredible amount of interviews with Germans, Brits ,Russians, Japanese, Americans, etc. Because of school I knew the basics about the war but when you watch this it's just amazing that all of this happened not even a century ago! It's unimaginable how brutal some things were and I'm happy to not have lived at that time.

There is a reason why this documentary has a 9,7 on IMDB (second highest I've ever seen there) and even almost 40 years after it's release it's still amazing to watch because of all the original footage.

Besides this I've just been watching my fair share of tvshows, most are pretty solid however some are absolutely terrible (for example: 'V'). But with so much free time on my hands I still watch too much.

Robin out.

Just watched the first two episode of this new show and must say that I like it sofar.

The first episode was about living from the sea and they show many different ways of catching all sort of fish, including catching a whale in just small wooden boats with sticks.

The second episode was about life in the desert and what you have to do to get water there and it was just great to see different cultures in a very well filmed documentary imo.

I've seen planet earth but think I like this even more.


Will post more news on future travel plans soon. First upcoming trip will be skiing in Austria for a week in februari, very excited to go again because I missed last year while traveling.

Robin out.

Because I had such a busy year last year I decided I needed a vacation to start of this year (uhm ok maybe not such a busy year ). So me and Denny (The_end) decided to go to the Bahama's for two weeks, getting away from the cold dutch weather.

After 3 flights we finally arrived in Nassau and after taking a cab-ride which we were unsure if we were going to the hotel or getting robbed (we thought the hotel was about 10 minutes from the airport but it turned out to be about 30-40 mins) we arrived at the RIU Palace hotel on Paradise Island. For the first week we would stay in this all-inclusive hotel.

Overall this hotel was great, because not having to think about prices while drinking yourself into oblivion is always nice and just getting whatever food you want anytime helps.The downside was that there was no internet in the rooms itself, however my adapter and Denny's laptop both failed us on day 1 of the trip so it didn't really matter that much. It was very annoying that mobile phones don't work in the bahama's (well only some from the US did but none from europe) but on the other side it was nice that nobody would disturb you.

View from our room:



We started off most days with a healthy breakfast:


Then during the day we would chill on the beach, enjoying the free cocktails/food that was available from staying at an all-inclusive hotel.


In our room we also had our own alcohol'bar':


Instead of just laying on the beach for two weeks we decided that we should also do some stuff while being in a place we both had never been before, we started off by exploring the main island of nassau and went to a 'pirate museum'



The next day we planned to go into mini-submarines for some underwaterexploring, it turned out to be okish but just diving is alot better but more on that later, the mini-subs were fun but they weren't as mobile as we hoped so you couldn't really manouver that much while underwater. We did see some nice underwater-life and held crabs/seastars and chased fish. In the end the sea became to much for the asian in the group and had to hang over the side of the boat for a while.






Because we really wanted to go scuba-diving but Denny didn't have his PADI-certificate yet he decided to get it here and the next 3 days he was busy getting certified and I was on my own during the days, so I decided to explore Paradise Island (the island the hotel was on) for a bit and walked down the beaches until I got blocked by rocks/houses. Probably came on some places I wasn't suppose to like this private beach for personal mansions:


On the small Island Iw alked by they were building their own mansion:


The private golfcourse, there was a danger sign for flying golfballs:


Some friends of Denny where also in the Bahama's because of the PCA and Max was playing in it, so we met up with them and went to Senor Frogs for some food and drinking:



They were already staying in the Atlantis hotel so we already got to see what was going to be in store for us the next week when we would also move there. The Atlantis hotel is absolutely insanely big and there will be plenty of pics of that when you get further in this post. The view at night is really nice as well.

While Denny was still doing his certification it was nice to have some time to myself and I got to think about the plans I had for the rest of this year and decided that even if I don't find someone to join me I will start the Continental divide trail at the end of March/beginning of April by myself because even though I enjoy being around people alot it is sometimes good to spend time by yourself. I still hope people will join though but decided that even if they don't I will conquer the Rocky Mountains.

I spend the days just walking down the beach, reading some books ('A walk across USA' and 'Lamb' which was recommended to me by Matt and was an absolutely hilarious book!) and chilling at the beach/pool. Then in the evenings we would go to either the Buffet or one of the 3 'specialty' restuarants in our hotel. Since Denny had to get up at 7 in the morning each day it usually didn't get really late although I'm sure that one day he was still drunk when waking up to start diving.

After a week of basically just relaxing we moved to the Atlantis hotel, no more free food/drinks became clear when we got two beers for $12 a pop

Here are a bunch of pics from Atlantis to give you an idea on how big this place was:





At night it was also very nice:


It is hard to show on the pictures how big it is but it would take about 20-30 mins to go from one side all the way to the other side.

We also met up with Max, Tim and Rowin in Atlantis again, here in the 'marina village' part of atlantis:



The first day we basically spend exploring atlantis and the waterpark which had an amazing Lazy river over 1 Mile long, with rapids and a big wave and more in it. (yes the lazy river wasn't all that lazy at some points).



For the next day we had Sharkdiving planned which turned out to be amazing:


We did two dives where in the first dive we just explored the reef and a shipwreck while being surrounded by sharks, in the second dive they fed the sharks while we sat around at the oceanground watching and being bumped by sharks who wanted to get food. So sometimes a shark would also hit you while passing by you or come straight at you and then missing you by like 10 cm. there were about 40 (carribean reef) sharks swimming around us and you had to keep your hands close or they might think it was fish and bite them off. There is also video material of this but will have to see on how I'll get that online.

It was really amazing...

Some of my plans for 2011 have fallen through so I'm looking into what I want to do now instead.

It looks like I will be going to the US somewhere at the end of March/beginning of April and I'm looking into walking (part of) either the Appalachian trail:


The Continental Divide Trail:


The Pacific Crest Trail:



I know I won't be able to do a thru-hike (hiking it in one go) Because I already have plans to go to vegas from june 15th until july the 15th. So what I want to do is start at the beginning of one of those 3 trails and walk until it's around time to go to vegas and then finish the trail in the future.

I am looking for people who are interested in walking (part of) this with me because I really enjoy traveling with other people and even though people walk on different paces I think it would be great to at least start at the same time and travel together as long as people like to keep on going.


If you live somewhere along one of these trails and would just like to join for a certain part that would obviously be possible. Right now I'm just looking into the option of doing this and seeing if there is any interest from other people.

So who would like to experience hardship and pain just for some pretty views but an experience of a lifetime, I'm a very laid-back person and consider myself very easy to be around and if you have concerns about spending lots of time with me ask around the people who've lived with me (Matt (probability), Denny (The_end), Steven (Oord), Jeff (Lostinthesaus), Pat (Beans), Jaymes (JaymesBond), etc).

Story of someone who walked the Appalachian (pretty good read).
There is lots of information to be found on any of these trails and stories of people who have walked or failed at it.

Either sent me a PM, hit me up on aim/skype or post here if you are considering taking part in this.
And if you have any questions about it feel free to post!

Robin out.

I was thinking about what things I want to do before I either Die or am to old to do them.
So I guess I'm making a bucket lists and am taking suggestions, here is what I currently have:

[ ] Run/Finish a Marathon
[ ] Break the top 100 in Squash in Holland
[ ] Go skydiving
[x] Learn how to Dive
[ ] Visit every continent
[ ] Climb on the Pyramids
[ ] Walk on the Chinese Wall
[ ] Make a transatlantic sailing trip
[ ] Walk a famous trail (Appalachian, Pacific Crest or Continental Divide)
[ ] Become a Miljonair
[ ] Learn to play this song
[ ] Visit/Survive on an unihabited Island.
[ ] Understand the Universe


I wonder what other people's ideas/suggestions are
Robin out.

Just booked a 2 week trip to the Bahama's in January with Denny (The_End).



We will be there also during the PCA but most likely won't be playing any pokers because it's just a vacation getting away from the cold dutch weather!

Will make a more elaborate post about it later because I have a squashtournament tomorrow that starts early in the morning...

Robin out.

I decided to buy the Roland F-110:


I got it delivered today and man do I still have a long way to learn on how to play piano, already have trouble reading the notes I guess I'll just have to get lessons instead of messing around w/ it myself

Yesterday I spend the entire day watching the show Louie CK (After reading K_man's blog) and it's pretty funny at spots although fairly disgusting

Since I still have no drive to play poker and yesterday on the last day of the month decided to do one last 5/10 shot (where I ended up busting my PKR account) I feel like this month will be mostly just me learning the piano, reading a bunch and enjoying freedom of the year before starting again in January to grind a decent amount.

I started this book yesterday:


So let's see if I can make a dent into that today

Robin out.

I seem to get into this pattern where I come up with the greatest ideas/plans for the next few days/weeks everytime the clock goes past midnight. How I am now going to spend my time doing usefull things instead of clicking the same pages/watching the same youtube clips/watching tv-shows I've already seen/ etc...

Whenever I wake up the next day I've either forgotten these plans or decide to do them 'later'. Usually later turns into never, well that is until that faithfull clock reaches midnight again... when it's time for more plan-hatching....



I do sometimes accomplish plans I make, however those are usually the easy-fixes like cleaning the room, doing laundry, buy fruits (still trying to eat healthy). However I'm pretty sure that of all the bananas/grapes/pineapples/apples/etc I've bought over the years I've not eaten more then 50% because at the time of feeling hungry there is no desire for fruit.

At the end of october I decided I needed to make some plans for the upcoming month of what I wanted to do... A couple of days ago I changed the text on my whiteboard from:
Make Nov Plans ----> Make Dec Plans...

I'm yet to make any plans for December

I did go out to look for an electric piano, however they range from $500-$15000 and I was not informed enough to make an impulsebuy on it (although I got really close to buying one for $1200 which was on discount and sounded pretty sweet) and got a friend who has some knowledge about it helping me pick one the upcoming week. So lets see if I can complete that plan


One of my plans was to play 100K hands in November, I got to 14K hands...
I make all the plans but can't get all the pieces together to do it



I ordered some books on traveling around the world and just finished:


It was ok, definately made me not want to circumnavigate around the world alone though... However I did get a little interest to do some sailing trips with a group of people But already got so many plans that this will probably take a while to happen unless I run into an opportunity by accident

In this month of doing basically nothing I've been thinking a decent amount of what I want to do with my life but have yet to come up with any answers except for exploring this planet, the problem is that every place I seem to visit I really like and wouldn't mind going back too.


Since it's already past midnight again it's time for me to hatch more plans.


Robin out.