Two weeks ago I visited the North Carolina State Fair.

The fair not only has a large number of amusement rides, but also a large number of vendors and salesman in the agricultural industry. The NC State Fair is an old tradition -- the first was was over 150 years ago.

I visited the fair on Saturday 10/20, the day before the last of the season and the weather was great: pictures of the NC State Fair 2006.

Last night we saw the Borat movie, with the long title "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan".

"Borat" is a fictional character played by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British comedian who became famous with playing "Ali G.".

The audience, mainly students, loved the film, although some people did not laugh when the Cohen was mocking evangelic churchgoers. The strength of the movie is that it's harsh to many different groups in society. Yes, the movie makes fun of Kazakhstan, but it's just as well mocking the U.S.

I enjoyed the movie, and at times it was absolutely hilarious (I loved the scenes with the bear). Other times it was painfully funny -- a colleague expressed it as "you're laughing but sometimes that's because there is nothing else you can do".

This weekend when we made a road trip to Washington Sasha and Vladi went to the Bulgarian embassy on Sunday morning to vote for the run-off in the presidential elections.

The elections were won by current President Georgi Purvanov, defeating ultra-nationalist Volen Siderov easily in the 2nd round.

Last summer we went to the embassy also, when Sasha voted in the parliamentary elections. Note that then we still had our own camera which was already broken at the time -- I remember spending quite some time trying to revive as much as I could from the digital picture of the embassy.

Halloween is now over and the Christmas decorations will appear soon.

Three pictures of pumpkins -- of course, the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice latte is one of them.

This weekend we made a road trip to Washington D.C.

On Saturday morning we took care of sme household stuff and we left around 11.30 am to pick up our fellow travelers Hernan, Sergej and Vladi, classmates of Sasha.

This was the longest road trip I have ever made myself, and I was curious how it would be to drive a such a long distance. Things went very well, and I didn't get tired. I was taking it easy and we had 2 stops for gas and lunch.

We arrived in D.C. when it was getting dark, and we made a few stops at touristic places; for some of Sasha's classmates this was the first time in D.C. We saw the Tidal Basin and the monuments, and made a stop at White House.

On the road.

Back in DC.

A picture at the stairs of the monument.

In front of the White House.

Then we went to Rosa's place, where we would stay the night and parked the car. We changed and took a cab to Dupont Circle where we had dinner in that favorite place of us, Kramer's Books. The "death by chocolate" cake is amazing. We went out for drinks in Georgetown, where there were a lot of Halloween celebrations and we celebrated in a bar.

Halloween in Georgetown. We spend a nice time in this bar, singing along with a guy with a piano.

On Sunday morning Rosa made breakfast for us -- her hospitality was wonderful.

We drove to the Bulgarian embassy, where Sasha and Vladi voted, and then we walked to Starbucks for a real city experience.

We dropped Sergej, Vladi and Hernan at the Mall and Sasha and I drove to Angelique's place. After a while I left and went to Roslyn to meet Binish. I found the Key bridge easily but took a wrong exit and ended up on the I-495 and was forced to drive back into DC, then to Georgetown and again over the Key Bridge.

It was great to see Binish again and we had a drink in Cosi's in Rosslyn, near my previous company's old office. Then I picked up Sasha from Angelique's place, and we picked up the explorers and started driving back to Durham.

A road side restaurant in Virginia where we had dinner on our way back. We left D.C. around 3.00 pm and we were home around 9.30 pm. In this weekend I drove around 600 miles. It was a great, spontaneous weekend.

The day after Halloween.

A colleague brought some of the left overs of his trick-or-treat supplies.

Michel sent me this nice movie, appropriate for today. Enable your sound and enjoy!

(Content is for mature adults only).

We're leaving for Washington D.C!

I'm excited, not only because I'm looking forward to see old DC again, but also because it's the first long-distance road trip that I'll make by car.

We'll leave in an hour or so, and pick up 3 of Sasha's classmates who will join us. We're going to stay at Rosa's place tonight, and tomorrow morning Sasha and Vladi will vote in the Bulgarian elections in the embassy in D.C.

It's a 4 or 5 hour drive, and the weather looks good although we may get some heavy winds in Virginia.

Firefox 2.0 was released today.

Firefox is the web browser that I use. I'm not a big fan of running beta versions of my browser because it is so important in my daily use -- I can't afford to loose time with a potential broken browser -- so this is the first time I see the new feature that were added.

Over-all, the browser has not changed all that much but I like the new features, such as the improved search support and better RSS support. The inline spell checking will help me improve the quality of the articles for my website.

The morning Jaap and I went to the American consulate in Amsterdam, two weeks ago, we saw a this car.


Immediately we associated this with the Juf Mieke, juf being a Dutch honorific for teacher.