Weekend at the Cottage
Last weekend me and my friends stayed in our cottage in the nearby village of
Vrchy. The goal was simply to grill, drink beer and relax. Just an usual weekend
and the cottage with the head switched off 
.
Me and my friends at the cottage.
I think we have fulfilled the goal completely: we consumed all 160 beers, ate almost everything we brought and definitely had fun. See for yourself in the gallery.
Last week trips
During the last week we went to visit the fire fighting museum and also the city part Ostrava-Vitkovice. On the other day we went to see the chateau Fryštát in Karviná city centre. You can see the pictures after clicking on the links below.
Me in the firefighting museum
On the top of Lysá hora again
My friends planned to go to the top of Lysá hora mountain. Since I have not been there for several months, I agreed to join them. The weather was extremely hot and the parts of the journey on the direct Sun were very difficult, but in the end we made it.
Lysá hora
On the top we refreshed ourselves, had lunch and headed quickly back, because the storm was coming. And just as we sat down into the car, it started to rain. We were quite lucky.
RAYNET people, paintball and wine cellar
Two weeks ago I attended a trip to Hustopeče with RAYNET. We had an accommodation in a very nice guest house „U Radů“. On Friday evening, we stayed there in the garden, grilled large piece of meat and consumed formidable amount of wine, gin and vodka and had a lot of fun.
Since we had booked a paintball session, we had to get up quite early (about
8 o'clock). For some of the people (and their stomachs) that was a truly heroic
achievement . The paintball battle itself was an unique
experience for me, especially running in the uniform and mask for five hours in
the thirty degrees heat was very tiring. We played several scenarios: team
deathmatch, two kinds of capture the flag and a fortress siege. All of them
required a big deal of tactics and communication skills. I got hit several
times and the „bullets“ left marks on my body for several
following days.
RAYNET people
After coming back from the battle we went to the wine cellar to have good local wine. At first, we tasted almost all kinds of wine they had there, then everybody could drink as much as possible.
On Sunday we woke up and went home. It was a very good weekend, I enjoyed it properly and certainly hope that it was not the last one.
Stroll to the Belmontas Mill
The last days' weather in Vilnius is very hot. During the day it is very hard
to stay outside for a longer period of time. Since sitting in the apartment for
the whole day is very daunting, we decided to take an evening walk to the nearby
Belmontas mill and have a beer in the restaurant there (that is always a good
motivation, isn't it? 
).
We went on foot from our home and after an hour we reached our destination. The mill was very nice, I really liked that place. The food and beer were very good too.
The Belmontas mill
Our plan of going home was to take a bus, that would take us closer to home, but in the end we missed all of the buses (by a few minutes) and had to also walk back on foot. Fortunately there was another route and our evening walk changed to a nice 12 km stroll.
Another short stop in Warsaw
Travelling from Ostrava to Vilnius involves changing from train to bus in the Warsaw city centre. Since delays of the Czech railways and the Polish railways combined are far less predictable then occurence of solar flares, it is a good idea to be prepared and have a large time reserve. In this case it is about five hours.
As I was traveling together with Alina (surprisingly for the first time), we used this five hour window to explore the city centre of Warsaw.
Presidential Palace in Warsaw
We saw a lot of interesting places and made a list of the most interesting for us. We will go to visit those next time, probably in the middle of July.
Verkiai Regional Park
The weather was very sunny lately and we used that opportunity to visit the Verkiai Regional Park, that is just few kilometres from our home.
In southern part of the park there is a Way of the Cross. The way symbolizes the journey Christ took in his last days. The locations of chapels exactly imitated the topography of Jeruzalem in the time of Christ. We walked the whole way (it has about 7 km), that is why you can see many chapels in the pictures.
Chapels on Way of the Cross
After finishing the way we took a lunch and headed back home.
Relax in Druskininkai
Last weekend we visited town of Druskininkai. We stayed there in Eglė
spa, where we had accommodation and three days of treatments (for action
price ). Treatments contained massages (normal and
underwater), mud bath, excercises swimming pools and drinking some sort of
herbal tea. It was fun and a good experience.
Mud bath. It was fun except the cleaning part .
I have to mention the food, it was just great: buffet three times a day, so we were almost permanently stuffed.
On Saturday afternoon we visited Grūto parkas, which is a large park with large exposition of soviet sculptures and artifacts.
Sculptures in Grūto parkas
It was a very relaxing weekend, maybe we will repeat it some day.
New HDR experiments
I made some attempts to make HDR tone-mapped photos. Comparing to the last one i made, these photos are composed out of three separate shots (-2 EV, 0 EV, +2 EV).
Neris river close to the Šilo street (larger version)
Postprocessing has been done with Luminance HDR. For the first picture I used Mantiuk and Fattal filters combined in Gimp, for the second one I used just Mantiuk.
Neris river in Verkiai Regional Park (larger version)
Lihuanian Energy and Technology Museum
During the week me and Alina used sunny weather and walked to the city centre to visit the Lithuanian Energy and Technology Museum. We saw many interesting things, old cars, motorcycles, parts of various power plants and a documentary about construction and decomission of the Ignalina nuclear power plant.
Some of the cars in the museum
The exposition also contained lots of gadgets and physical experiments you could try on your own. It was very similar to Universum in Bremen that we had visited visited last year. Although it was significantly smaller, the fun level was the same.