Silence / A visit to Varsamos beach and Kallithea

Middle of June we made a tour from noisy Pythagorion to the calm and silent west of Samos island, going down to the coast to visit Varsamos beach.
Nobody else but us was there, the tavern there seems to be closed.




On the way back, a spontaneous stopover in a small tavern in Kallithea around sunset - to record a song video - developed into a gathering with local people and singing a couple of songs together.
Many thanks to the men and women of Kallithea involved in the "party" for the Ouzo and Souma!


"Silence"



Sing along in Kallithea:

30 seconds Samos 2011

I have published a series of short video clips called "30 seconds Samos" or "30 seconds Spring on Samos" on YouTube. These are/were taken in May 2011.

The idea is to give you a short break and lookaround at different points on the island of Samos, almost giving you the impression you yourself stopped on your way and were there yourself.

Interested? Here you can find them!

Two examples of these video clips:

Virtual milling yields presentations out of the cloud!

Automatically generated presentations, offered by several companies, will soon flood the internet, especially the so-called social platforms!

We - as the industrious ants - deliver the content: photos, videos, audio files and text can be uploaded to the companies servers and are processed somewhere "in the cloud" in the internet to yield professionally looking presentations.

While this technology will mainly be interesting for advertising business (searching the internet platforms for free photos and videos and "creating" theme-specific hundreds to thousands of videos automatically over night!), those who have taken themselves some party or holiday photos can easily generate those professionally looking presentations and put them online.

Some basic services are offered free of charge. With these free of charge offers they try to suck you into their system. "Anfixen", make you dependant upon ..., as we in Germany say.

But - guess what - if you want quality, more control over the "creative" process, and videos longer than one minute, you have to pay! O.k., if you like your friends (or the rest of the world), you will be willing to spend 3-5 dollars to use the system and generate and down- or upload a high quality (HQ) or high definition (HD) presentation in full length. Not too bad, if you do it only 3-4 times per year, or?

One of these companies offering "virtual photo and video milling" is Stupeflix, which is boosted by YouTube.
I tried the cost-free version (this is why Stupeflix is shown all the time on the video), played around a bit with some of my Samos photos and added some text, resulting in a 1.12 minute long video with 270p resolution.



One thing is sure: it will be raining presentations like cats and dogs from these "clouds" in the near future.
At first glance they look impressive! The way of showing the content will be (or will become) more fascinating/important than the content itself! It looks sexy, that's why they ask you to pay for it! Sex sells! ;-)

But after you've seen a couple of these automatically produced "cloud products", all processed in the same manner, it might happen that you will be bored to death.

A pretty sad example for such a boring type of automatically generated presentation are imo the TripAdvisorTripWow presentations, which flood YouTube in these days (approx. 18.500 "videos" as per today!). I would rename them "TripYawn"!
A recent example dealing with the island of Samos you can find here!
The problem, as I see it, is: even if your photos/videos are good, the way they are going to be presented by these "virtual mills", the machine generated "milling" processes involved, will destroy individuality and end up in uniformity.
Process dominates content!

Are you ready to invest some content and a little money to become an honorable member of the Society for Virtual Milling (SFVM)? Bring along with you some time, when clouds are dark because servers are overloaded.
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Or like today, April 21st, 2011, Stupeflix is down already for hours because cloud servers at Amazon are experiencing big problems! (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) outage)
See here, here and here
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April 25, 2011
Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned

Samos 2011: exploring the island!

In 2010 I spent quite some time on the island of Samos taking photos of parts of the island, where most of the tourist will not go to. So here is my new photo-presentation, 23 minutes long, mainly about the natural beauty of this east aegean island and about the local people celebrating their panigiria.

The music that accompanies this presentation I recorded in the village of Leka on July 16th, 2010. There I happened to come to in the evening without knowing in advance of the event in this night. So I decided to stay there. And to have another late night trip on the motor scooter back to Pythagorio!

Four local musicians forming one of the best groups of Samos were playing there on the village square during this event organized by the voluntary fire brigade. I had met these musicians before on other occasions, e.g. in August 2008 in Kallithea (panigyri) and Kastaneá (charity event).

The musicians are:
Mavrikis, Kyriakos: main vocals, guitar, bouzouki
Liapis, Giorgos: laouto, bouzouki, vocals
Sarantou, Vasilis: violin, vocals
Mytilinos, Giannis: keyboards, vocals


I added some copyright watermarks to my presentation. ;-) Despite that, I hope you will like the photos and the music from the beautiful island of Samos in Greece.

The presentation is intended to be non-commercial. No embedding allowed on websites with primarily commercial focus!

Samos Bouzouki School / Yannis Loulourgas

Tired of wasting too much life time on the beach?
Having the wish to come to lovely island of Samos to spend a different type of vacation, an active holiday?

Are you interested in music, in understanding greek music, and would you like to learn how to play bouzouki ....


... or how to build a greek instrument, e.g. a baglamas?


In addition, experience parts of Samos you never knew or heard of?

The instrument maker, bouzouki player and singer Yannis Loulourgas in the village of Pythagorion has started his "Samos Bouzouki School". With many years of experience as a singer/bouzouki player and instrument maker, he offers first hand knowledge!





"Samos Bouzouki School offers two workshops: ‘Build Your Own Instrument’ and ‘Learn To Play Greek Music'. Depending on your choice, in one week you will learn the process of how to build an instrument or you will learn to understand and play Greek music."

"Meeting people who can convey peace and quietness from within is rare … and can only be achieved when what you do, it isn’t a job, it’s a passion…
Born in Pythagoreio there is only one word that can describe the way Yiannis Loulourgas views life: Music!"

If you want to know what type of music Yannis Loulourgas plays, here is an example with songs from his CD "Rebetika Tragoudia":

Changing for better?

A comparison of two photos taken of Ano Vathy from the road going down to Samos town. Click on the photos for larger size!

Ano Vathy in May 2004:


Ano Vathy in October 2008:


The long white front without any windows of this new house spoils every photo taken of picturesque Ano Vathy from the west!
With regards to size, in my opinion this building is like a "tank" in comparison to the old buildings.

Here are 4 photos of Samos town and Ano Vathy, taken in lovely May of 2004, with an IXUS 430, a 4 Megapixel camera:

Halcyon Hills: reality check on planned building site

Warning: footage and pictures taken are no computer simulations! You are confronted with reality!


These are some phrases from advertisings over the last 2-3 years for the 'Halcyon Hills' project on the island of Samos:

".....It's rare to find a developer who has taken so much research and consideration into account before embarking on a project. .....
.... The complex is scheduled for completion two years from the commencement of building works. Completion is estimated to be in the first quarter of 2011.
....Construction will start in early 2009, and completion is scheduled for 2011."

Well, alright, lots of announcements and really nice virtual reality videos and pictures ....
Since I didn't have the time in 2009 to visit the area on the south-east coast of Samos, I called several people o Samos and asked them: "did they start the building activities there?" Answer: we didn't hear or read anything, so most probably they didn't start.

So what about a reality check visiting the area? In spring, summer and autumn 2010 I went to the area in the south-east of Samos on a motor scooter to see what was the status of the project on the site planned for the 'Halcyon Hills" resort, between Klima Bay and Akra Merziki.
I couldn't detect any building activities on the planned site!

What I already knew from visits there many years ago and what I found again on these several visits in 2010 was a beautiful and calm, almost silent natural area between Klima bay and Akra Merziki/Mertziki, where normally almost no tourist will go to because only really bad dirt roads lead there. The place looks like a big lake with the high mountains rising above the coast of Asia Minor giving it a perfect frame.

On the narrow shores (large pebbles) in this area you will find the remainders of boats, inflatable dinghies and life jackets of illegal migrants who crossed the strait between Turkey and Samos trying to enter the European Union.



Here are some video sequences I took over there:



So, if you like Samos, the beautiful natural landscapes of this island and the sounds of nature, e.g. waves rolling on the shores of remote small pebbly beaches, you better go there before the british consortium will start the project. Because when they will start, the building activities will change irreversibly and forever this peaceful and calm area, the silence will be gone for sure! The size of the project is like implanting a completely new village in the remote south-east of Samos!

If you don't know about the 'Halcyon Hills' project, look for the site of Barrasford and Bird, e.g. this one. They think and are convinced:
"Samos has a blossoming tourism market but is in need of a truly luxurious five star development to satisfy the demand of the high-end traveller."

Reality check: due to several factors, tourism steadily - and in total significantly - declined on Samos island over recent years. While there is no doubt that almost nobody likes this situation and everybody wants tourism to rise again, so far, I haven't met anyone on the island who would agree or is convinced, that Samos needs a "truly luxurious five star development" for "high-end travellers".

Btw., thinking of a building project at all over there, why not build a much smaller "5 star" (lol!) monastery there, without a marina, where (rich) people can spend some time contemplating in silence trying to get rid of their circling thoughts on how to increase profit and what others (or they themselves?) really need? ;-) ;-)