A guide for the modern gent who likes good living. You'll find tech, travel, cars, TV, music and everything else all us guys are interested in. Whether it's watches, the best TV and films or tech, if it's to do with life and it's popular, it's here.
We started off the morning at a place called Level for a drink. Since we walked for miles on the first day and wanted to get a good look around the city, we went on an open top bus tour. Barcelona It was €26, and you could hop on and off at loads of different points. There are 2 routes, and we took the best one I think, which went around loads of the sights including: Plaça d’Espanya, The Spanish Village, World Trade Center, Font màgica de Montjuïc, The Olympic Stadium and of course the Barcelona stadium, Camp Nou. It goes up to the cable cars and there is an amazing view of the entire city, however we stayed on the bus.
The whole city tour bus is a great idea, if you’re in Barcelona you should definitely try it.
In the 2nd part of the day we went from the Cathedral down to Plaça de Catalunya which you could say is the main square of Barcelona, think of Trafalguar Square combined with a bit of Oxford Street. There is the big square with lots of shops around, El Triangle is there and El Corte Inglés, a huge department store.
The Hard Rock Café is also there, so I had to go in and get myself a t-shirt to add to my collection which I will blog about later. We went to Plaça de Catalunya a fair bit, since it’s in the middle of most things.
We only spent a bit of time in Plaça de Catalunya on the first day, just for a little look around to get our bearings.
Day 1 of Barcelona. Arriving at the amazing, cool and posh like hotel, I love it! 😀 We stayed in L’Eixample and our hotel was just off Passeig de Gràcia, which is home to luxury brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Louis Vuitton etc. and lots of high end jewelers.
We had a city view, which was cool, and could look out on to the street. The hotel had a Triumph bike in it, if you like bikes that may mean something :p
On the first day we went to Sagrada Familia, aka the famous Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona. I have been here before, but when I was just a kid, it is a must have place to go if you’re going to Barcelona. We seen a couple of other buildings, cathedrals and churches too.
I was amazed by the streets, the roads are so big! That is why you’ll see many photos of streets and roads, which were incredibly big! :p
So I am now back from Barcelona, here are some of my pics. Newcastle airport was the first port of call, and then on the flight and on to Barcelona aiport, El Prat.
The flight was delayed because there was an unidentified bag in the hold so they had to check each one…Not the greatest thing to hear or a great start! :p But the flight time was just under 2 hours which was really quick.
The new champagne bar in Newcastle airport.
The now standard “shot of the wing” which everyone seems to do on Instagram when they fly It does look pretty cool up in the air tho.
So as you may know I got the rare Smirnoff Root Beer Float Vodka the other day, and it smells pretty nice! But how does it taste? What can you make with it? Well if you are a kid you will know that a float is usually means one thing…Ice cream!
I remember as a kid having ice-cream floaters which consisted of Coke or Lemonade with a scoop of ice cream.
This is the same thing, but an adult-alcohol version of a childhood favourite. I saw a recipe which included this vodka with Baileys, I have added Ice Cream into the mix too.
You Need:
Smirnoff Root Beer Float
Baileys
Coke
Ice Cream
Your Favourite Glass Tumbler
Pour a shot of Baileys into the glass, then a shot of Smirnoff. Pour the Coke over them both slowly, that will cause the Baileys to foam up so do it slowly. Then add a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Serve with a straw.
The first time I made it I think I used a bit too much of the alcohol (I used almost 2 shots of each) so I would recommend using only 1 shot of each. If you don’t want the foamy top you can shake the cocktail up and get a more consistent texture. Remember when you are shaking up Coke it is already fizzy so be careful!
The taste? Really nice!
You can check out my other Smirnoff vodka bottles, which includes:
Yes, I got another flavour of Smirnoff, this time it’s Root Beer Float. It’s the forth of the hard to find flavours which I have, I previously got Fluffed Marshmallow, Kissed Caramel and Whipped Cream. This one sounded so nice I had to get it to try.
I have not tried it yet, but I can’t wait to. Root Beer is an American drink, I got a can of some once before, it tastes like Dandelion And Burdock if I remember correctly which I like so this could be great.
I have seen that many people mix this with Coke and Baileys, that sounds really good. I might do that, and maybe add in some vanilla ice cream too, to make it a proper float
So yesterday we were out in Durham and ended up back in Newcastle. We went to a few places in Durham like the Slug & Lettuce, Osbournes, The Boathouse and others, and went to a few bars in Newcastle. It was a good night, apart from trying to get a Taxi in the pouring rain when I was only wearing a t-shirt…Not good!!!
We also had to wait for the train back to Newcastle which was delayed by 45 minutes! 🙁
One of the bars in Durham had this sign on their jukebox…
Not my type of bar 😉
Inside the Slug and Lettuce…Why is it that people look up when I am taking a photo?!
You have heard me talking about this for a little bit, but yes, I finally got my Sony SRS-BTX500, and could not be happier 😀
First of all the look; It looks fashionable, trendy, premium, high end, and it’s all of these. The brushed aluminium on the sides, the lovely front grill and glowing blue light on the front to the rubber feet on the base to ensure it doesn’t slip around, everything about it is really nice and well put together.
Sound
Well it sounds like you may expect, it’s great 😀 Obviously far better than the Beats Pill I had. It is loud, crisp, plenty of bass, and works well quiet or loud. I have tried this in my bedroom and living room, and the sound more than fills the room. Outside in the garden it’s plenty loud enough for a usual situation.
Connectivity
It does have NFC, but since I have no NFC devices I can’t talk about that. It has a USB port on the back which you can use to charge your phone, no need to hunt around for the adapter just plug your phone in here and it will charge.
The biggest draw is obviously the Bluetooth. I connected my iPhone effortlessly, and I love this idea of having my phone control all the music or volume without being anywhere near the speaker.
I wanted something to connect to my PC too. I have lots of music and videos on my computer so I wanted to play from there as well as having the choice of using my iPhone. So I bought a Bluetooth dongle for it to connect. In all honesty, I thought it would be a pain to set up, so much so that I bought a wired AUX in cable, just in case I could not get the Bluetooth setup.
Once again it was easy! Connect the Bluetooth dongle to my PC, install the software/drivers and then discover the BTX500; Start playing music through my PC and it comes out the speaker 😀
As mentioned above there is an AUX in port (3.5mm) so you can connect through that if you have something which does not have Bluetooth.
Portability & Battery Life
It actually seems smaller than when I first saw it online. It comes with a softcase to take it places, and it is not so hard to transport around. It’s probably too big and heavy if you want to take this abroad or if you plan on travelling around, but it’s perfectly capable of being taken to a friends house or party, or some other place.
Since I have just got it I have not had a chance to test the battery life, it’s only quoted at 6 hours which is not so good.
The downsides
If you want to hunt around for downsides to this speaker I can come up with a couple, but it’s being really picky.
No supplied 3.5mm cable – You don’t get much in the way of accessories; Only the speaker, power adapter and softcase as a matter of fact.
Power adapter is big and bulky – In the age of small plugs with USB connectors this has quite a big adapter/plug to go in the wall. It can be impractical if you are using a 2-way adapter socker for example.
Battery life not the best – Even though I have not had a chance to use the battery fully, the quoted 6 hours is not very long, there are other speakers such as the Bose which quote a much better battery life, in fact the little brother of this (The BTX300) quotes 8 hours.
Conclusion
The downsides are really quite small, and really don’t make much difference if any for me. This is a great speaker, it does everything I want it to do, sounds great and looks the part.
I have been on Pinterest for a while now, which has been really successful in the U.S. and is one of the most favoured social media sites for fashion bloggers, because of the ease of sharing pictures. Recently it has launched in the UK, and I am proud to say that Michael 84 is part of the launch! 🙂 But what exactly is it and why should you use it?
It differs from Facebook and Twitter, the other two big social media and sharing sites because this is more aimed at sharing images, pictures or other types of art. The idea is you can create collections of things you love, called boards (think mood board or more appropriately, pin board) and share them with the world. You can be creative and share your own photos or images, or share what you have found on the world wide web. Follow your friends and favourite boards you find, and re-pin cool things you find on others pin boards on your own.
You can create as many boards as you want, so you can organise your favourite things really easily; Add a fashion board for all your fashion related photos, add a gadgets board for cool gadgets, and whatever else takes your fancy.
Pin your amazing finds on the go!
There is of course an iPhone app, which means you can save your pictures and pin them on your Pinterest board on the go, so if you are on a holiday it’s the perfect way to share your holiday snaps with your friends.
If you are looking for some inspiration and want to know some other boards to follow on Pinterest then you could try looking at Jenny’s bake board here. You will find over 200 pins with some mouth watering cakes, biscuits and other baked goodness.
So I saw that the Renford Rejects was on TV again 😀 Not a new series, but the old ones. It got me to thinking it would be fun to edit Football Manager 2013 and put them in the game, just for fun.
It was actually quite a bit of work. I tried to make it as “real” as possible, for example using the real DOB of the actors when I could find them (not the year because the show is 13 years old! 😛 ), where they were born etc.
