Watch Superbowl 2007 live February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Sports & Games.comments closed
Fans of American football living in Athens will have a chance to watch Superbowl 2007 on February 4.
The well-known Hard Rock Cafe Athens, located in the heart of the capital (18 Filellinon Street, Plaka), will offer its customers a live coverage of the Big Game on their plasma TVs and giant screens. The show starts at 1am local Greek time.
Hard Rock Cafe Athens has announced an offer to the viewers: “Order any appetiser and get yourself a free drink of your choice”. Superbowl fans are invited to book their seats.
For more information call +30 210 3252758 or +30 210 3252751.
Greece to host unique Bunker Summit February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Shows & Conferences.comments closed
Bunkerworld and Petrospot (publisher of Bunkerspot) are delighted to announce they will coordinate their efforts to deliver a unique four-day Bunker Summit in Athens on May 8-11.
Held at the Athenaeum InterContinental Hotel, Athens, the Bunker Summit: Greece 2007 is a ground breaking four-day event, which offers a strong mix of conferencing, networking, training and workshops.
Bunkerworld has gained a reputation for providing timely, topic-led events with noted successes with events in Copenhagen and New York in 2006; Marine Fuel Sustainability and Squeezing the Bunker Barrel respectively. Petrospot has gained a strong reputation for providing high-level training courses, such as the well-known Oxford Bunker Course.
The Bunkerworld Forum: Mediterranean and Black Sea (May 10-11) will once again aim to combine a fresh blend of expert speakers and real issues; this time focusing on the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.
Preceding the forum, Petrospot is offering two advanced-level one-day workshops: The Practical, Technical & Legal Aspects of Bunkering, led by Chris Fisher, co-author of the best-selling book Bunkers; and Emissions from Ships: Dealing with a New Environment, led by independent consultant, Robin Meech.
Petrospot is also offering its one-day Bunker Arbitration Experience, a sophisticated training tool for bunker buyers, suppliers and maritime lawyers that has been performed to great acclaim in New York, Panama and Hamburg.
Realising the need for user-specific training and conferencing, Bunkerworld and Petrospot have come together to create a single, more effective single event.
Both companies see this as a perfect opportunity to work together to meet the needs of the local bunkering and shipping community, both in Greece and further afield.
According to Petrospot’s Managing Director, Llewellyn Bankes-Hughes: “The feedback from the Greek bunkering community has so far been extremely positive, particularly among the local universities and maritime business schools which welcome the high level training on offer.”
Alisdair Pettigrew, Director of Petromedia Ltd., owners of Bunkerworld, commented: “Combining the conferencing reputation that Bunkerworld has built-up over the past two years with Petrospot’s expertise in training sets the Bunker Summit apart from other events in the marine fuels sector.
“The summit will provide all aspects of knowledge tools required to perform in the modern bunker market.”
For more information please visit >
Remembering Manos Hadjidakis February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Music Life Greek.comments closed
In response to a question concerning the organization of an upcoming Manos Hadjidakis tribute by a non-profit sociopolitical institute that Ioannis Varvitsiotis, a member of the European Parliament for the conservative New Democracy Party, heads, the Greek politician remarked, “The field of politics must draw from culture so that it does not to lose its inspiration, power and, above all, humanitarian character.“
Work by the late composer will be performed by the Manos Hadjidakis Music Ensemble, conducted by Loukas Karytinos, at the Athens Concert Hall on February 6. The singers Giorgos Marinos, Elli Paspala and Mario Frangoulis will lead the ensemble for the composer’s classic “Roman Agora.”
The performance is being organized by the Constantine Karamanlis Institute for Democracy, which was founded in 1998 to examine social, political and economic issues, and named after the late political leader (late Prime Minister and President of the Republic) who shared a friendship with Hadjidakis.
Public interventions made by the composer were usually prompted by political concerns, or, more specifically, the abuse of power by political figures.
Hadjidakis formed amicable ties with Karamanlis. “He was the only Greek politician who offered me confidence and ease about my Greek descent. I consider him a close friend. He taught me the technique of pride,” the late composer had said about Karamanlis, whose political maneuvering is widely credited for having led Greece into the European Union, or the EEC, as the common market was known in 1981 when the Nation was offered full membership.
The friendship between Karamanlis and Hadjidakis began back in 1959 and lasted their lifetimes, noted Giorgos Hadjidakis, the late composer’s son, at a news conference ahead of next week’s concert. They were linked by mutual respect, he added. “This made it possible for them to disagree. They disagreed frequently, mostly on a political level,” said Hadjidakis.
Karytinos, the conductor, focused more on Hadjidakis’s artistic side at the press briefing. “He always functioned like a pure, absolute musician. He knew he had to deduct, to throw away and keep only what was really necessary,” said Karytinos. “He didn’t allow his talent and passion to carry him away.”
Greek authors enter the UK books market February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Books Life, Books Life Greek.comments closed
Hatziyiannidis made The Independent’s long list.
The English-language book market is notoriously hard to crack, with works in translation representing less than 3 percent of total output, but that hasn’t stopped some young Greek authors from making their presence felt, daily Kathimerini reports.
On January 19, British daily The Independent announced the long list for its prestigious Foreign Fiction Prize. There, among the 20 titles by well-known writers including Ismail Kadare, Jose Saramago and Elif Shafak, was “Four Walls” by Vangelis Hatziyiannidis. “I tesseris toichoi” (The Four Walls) was published by To Rodakio in 2001, and the English translation by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife was published last year in English by Marion Boyars.
The 10,000-pound award is divided equally between author and translator. The short list will be announced in early March. The long list, selected from 86 titles submitted, “has never looked broader or richer,” wrote Independent literary editor Boyd Tonkin. The book has already had international success, winning the 2004 Laure Bataille Award for the best foreign book and best translation of the year. It has also received good reviews in Britain, Catheryn Kilgarriff of Marion Boyars said.
Also in the news is Alexis Stamatis, whose novel “Bar Flaubert,” originally published by Kedros in 2000, has just come out, translated into English by David Connolly, from Arcadia Press, which also published his book “The Seventh Elephant” in 2000. “Bar Flaubert” has also been translated into Italian, French, and Spanish and is due out soon in Serbian and Russian. Stamatis has been invited to present his novel at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. Stamatis’s ‘Bar Flaubert’ is also available in English.
“It’s a strong novel and we are confident of good review coverage,” Gary Pulsifer of Arcadia said. “It’s of today and set not only in Greece, in Athens and Arcadia, but also in Florence and Berlin. I think ‘Bar Flaubert’ will have wide appeal to an international, cosmopolitan readership.”
Meditative play between original and reproduction February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Arts Events Greece, Arts Exhibitions Greece.comments closed
Nees Morfes Gallery exhibition on Lizzie Calliga
Fragments of mosaic tiles are grouped together to create the effect of a curtain.
One of the fundamental techniques in meditation is to concentrate on a specific object or thought and to observe it in all its detail. The technique improves concentration and enhances awareness but is also an effective way to clear the mind and attain inner peace.
In Lizzie Calliga’s “Finds 2000-2006: Original Replicas” her solo exhibition open for a few more days at the Nees Morfes Gallery, one will sense a kindred sense of awareness and soothing calmness. Calliga draws her subjects after lengthy observation and, somehow, this feeling of realization and the repose that ensues becomes imprinted in her work.
Calliga collects fragments of the mosaic tiles that have washed up on the shores of Spetses and studies them closely, then draws them with photographic exactitude in watercolors. She also takes photographs of the original “found objects” or makes prints of them. The original items are then grouped together with the photographs, prints or drawings of them in ensembles that address the relationship between the original and its copy. In effect, her work also contemplates how the past continues to live in the present, how it is remembered and reproduced.
By repeatedly copying the mosaics, it is as if Calliga wants to make them part of the present, imagining where they came from, reviving something of their history and turning that history into something tactile. In the end, which is more real? The actual fragment or its copy? Something that happened but belongs to the past or the way our imagination brings it into the present?
At times, the resemblance between the original and the copy is striking. In one part of the exhibition, a piece of textile, the part of an awning, is placed next to a print that replicates the image and, right next to it, a watercolor of it. The textures and colors in the printed image are so vivid that one cannot believe that it is a print instead of an actual fabric unless one touches the paper. The image is a so-called Girclee print, made using the latest technology in printing, a technique which involves digital scanning and printing with archival inks.
Another part of the exhibition shows an ensemble of paired watercolors. Each pair depicts the same mosaic painted on differently colored paper and is the outcome of Calliga’s efforts to reproduce the original. In a different work, the actual mosaics are positioned against the wall in an orderly, geometrical structure. On a separate wall, panels with glued-on fragments of objects are juxtaposed next to their painted image.
Throughout the exhibition, the play between the real and its copy, past and present is constant. As long as we observe that reality and experience it to the fullest, both sides are equally vivid and meaningful.
At Nees Morfes Gallery, 9a Valaoritou Street, Athens, tel 210 3616165, to Saturday.
Cypriot dog paddle February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Cyprus, Cyprus News, Living.comments closed
Dogs are to get a beach of their own on the sun-kissed Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Dogs are strictly prohibited from the holiday island’s shoreline to keep the beaches clean for bathers, but Cypriot authorities have decided enough of the dog’s life. They are looking for suitable beaches where people and their pets can enjoy the sun and sea without falling foul of other beach-goers.
The Ombudsman, a commissioner usually tasked with upholding human rights, recommended to authorities last year that dogs get their own bathing space, the daily Phileleftheros reported.
Greeks and holidays February 1, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Living.comments closed
Greeks prefer to spend their holiday time at local getaway spots and are cautious about taking part in organized travel groups, according to EU data presented yesterday.
In line with trends shown by residents in other Mediterranean countries, about 10 percent of Greeks spend more than four days of their holiday time abroad.
Just over half of Greeks traveling abroad prefer to visit non-EU states.
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