EasyGroup founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou has brought the first 24-7 Internet café to Antwerp, Belgium, and will soon open a second one in Brussels in November. There are 390 PCs in Antwerp and even more planned for ‘the Capital of Europe’. You can email, scan documents and even do some budgeting with the ubiquitous Excel. You won’t need to save up for the experience, as charges are around 12 BEF per hour. Coffee, bagels and muffins are (quite a bit) extra.
Phantasm is one of the best Indie nights around town and has found a new regular home at Whelan’s. The brainchild of the now off-the-air pirate radio station, Phantom FM, this is a club which attracts fans again and again. Of course, that could just be the cut price beer… Phantom DJs Jack Hyland, John Jetson and Tom E Brown pick the playlists and if you need a fix but can’t get to the club, the station is live streaming at http://www.phantomfm.com.
It’s derby time in the Eternal City as Roma battles it out with Lazio. Despite Lazio’s Seria A championship win last year, Roma have been playing consistently better than their arch-rivals. The combined scoring talents of Totti, Delvecchio and Batistuta (one of the year’s most on-the-ball signings) have kept the team at the top of the league this season, though some pundits put Lazio doldrums down to Sven Eriksson’s mind being on other things. Like managing the England squad, for instance…
This traditional Pisan festival is low-key but visually stunning. Celebrating Pisa’s patron saint, San Ranieri, tens of thousands of candles are placed along the banks of the Arno and along the buildings lining the Lungarno. As dusk falls, they are lit with spectacular results as the outlines of the buildings are picked out in dots of candlelight. On the second day, there is a boat race along the river between the city’s four ‘quartieri’.
The trick to leisurely outdoor breakfasting during the winter months in Barcelona is knowing where to find the sun-trap terraces – harder than it sounds in this built-out city. The Rambla’s best hot-spot is at the extreme seaward end on the left, La Cava Universal, ideal for a mid-morning café amb llet in the sun. Alternatively, trendy Bar Ra behind the Boqueria market offers creative and healthy breakfasts and a lunchtime menù del dia, both accompanied by free UV rays, in a post-modern terrace-in-a-carpark.
After a 15-year prison sentence, a reformed student radical is shocked to discover that millennial London is completely unrecognisable. Baffled by phonecards, Playstations and political apathy, this ageing former activist must forge ahead into a strange, new world. Mark Ravenhill, author of ‘Shopping and Fucking’, ‘Faust (Faust is Dead)’ and ‘Handbag’, threads a comic and shocking tale about the thrills and fears of embracing the future. Presented by Roadworks Productions in association with Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
Flair is a new flower, plant and garden shop which opened in mid-April. Located in a vast, vaulted room on the south bank of the river, it is full of extraordinary, exotic plant life. It’s hard to believe that some of the plants and flowers – all very beautifully colour co-ordinated in whites, creams, greens with the odd splash of vibrant orange or red – are real. Many of them are tropical and nearly all are imported from Holland. Flair also stocks stylish garden furniture, fabulous vases, candles and sea shells.
A small exhibition of 30 photographs reveals the many moods of Sydney’s largest park. The black and white images were taken by Wendy McDougall and Brendan Read over three years and document the magnetic attraction Centennial Park has for Sydney’s citizens. A rider hits the Horse Track at dawn, Buddhist monks stroll, an old couple rest in the shade of a paperbark tree. Part of the exhibition explores its transformation from a resource-rich swampland that sustained the early inhabitants to the later inappropriate landscaping inspired by British Romanticism.
The Maggio Musicale festival continues this week with the opening of Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’. The setting for this short chamber opera, composed in 1689 for the girls’ boarding school where Purcell was teaching, is the exquisite and tiny Teatro Goldoni. The tragic story of the Queen of Carthage and her Trojan prince ends with Dido’s lament, one of opera’s most beautiful and poignant arias. Alessandro De Marchi, a Baroque expert, conducts a cast of fine Italian singers.
Peek in on bird-eating spiders as large as dinner plates and a green anaconda that can reach 30 feet in length. See the ‘water monkey’ fish leap three feet out of the water to capture insects on tree branches. At Shedd’s newest permanent exhibition you’ll immerse yourself in a journey on the most mysterious and diverse habitat on earth. In one visit you’ll witness the changing seasons of the floodplain forest and meet more than 250 species that live there – piranhas, birds, sloths, insects, snakes, catfish, stingrays and caiman lizards.
