Archive for June, 2010

I Took a Cash Advance Loan to Buy a Ticket to Singapore

June 27th, 2010

This was the event of the century
I am talking about the grand opening of the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore, another grand launch by billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Too bad you missed it. I took a cash advance loan with extra easy repayment terms and flew East so I could be there.

Launching
Last week, the world’s most expensive hotel was given a launch party befitting it. Singing legend Diana Ross performed for 2,500 VIPs in the resort’s Grand Ballroom and pop singer Kelly Rowland headlined an outdoor concert.

The relay
The opening celebrations featured a death-defying relay. Seven teams of three participants each scaled the three towers before sprinting across the 340-meter long Sands SkyPark, where the infinity pool is located, to the finish line.

The hotel
The hotel, which has 2,560 rooms costing from $500 a night, was officially opened last week with a lavish concert. The Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi , estimated to have cost $3 billion when it opened in 2004, was previously the world’s most expensive hotel. But with its indoor canal, opulent art, casino, outdoor plaza, convention centre, theatre, crystal pavilion and museum shaped like a lotus flower, the Marina Bay Sands has taken its crown.

The staff
The resort will employ 10,000 people directly and generate up to $70 million each year. Entrance to the casino alone is nearly $75 a day – but an average of 25,000 people have visited the casino daily since its initial phased opening two months ago.

Guests and visitors
Thomas Arasi, president and chief executive officer of the resort, said he expects to attract an astonishing 70,000 visitors a day once it is fully open. It was due to open in 2009, but was delayed thanks to labor and material shortages, and funding problems due to the global financial crisis.

Architecture
Marina Sands resort was designed by architect Moshe Safdie who based it on a deck of cards. Inside shoppers can ride along an indoor canal in Sampan boats styled on traditional Chinese vessels from the 17th century.

Art
The owners have also commissioned five well-known artists to create works of art to ‘integrate’ with the buildings. Among these is a 40m-long Antony Gormley sculpture made from 16,100 steel rods. The whole thing weighs 14.8 tons and it took 60 people to assemble it in the hotel. Artist Chongbin Zheng created Rising Forest which is 83 three meter high pots with trees in them. The pots were so big the artist had to build a customized kiln the size of a small building to make them in.

The pool
The infinity pool on the roof is in the ‘SkyPark’ which spans the three towers of the hotel. The platform itself is longer than the Eiffel tower laid down and is one of the largest of its kind in the world.

Entry
Entry to the hotel is nearly $75 to get in and is attracting 25,000 visitors each day. Don’t forget to include for this and a couple of nights in your Cash Advance Loan!

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Put Your Hand in Your Pocket and Fork out For a Ticket to Athens

June 26th, 2010

Go and visit Metamorphisville
The noisy, polluted sprawl of the 2004 Olympics has been transformed into a vivacious and sophisticated urban centre. The locals are convinced their city is the new Barcelona for short-breakers. Airlines and hotels have plenty of space for those wishing to visit the Greek capital – Athenians are bewildered by the hostile press that portrays their country as a basket case. There are no signs of civil war and no boarded-up shops or deserted café terraces. Indeed, now is an excellent time to discover the city many credit with the birth of civilization and which still flourishes.

Get your bearings
As you get to grips with the modern city, you make the acquaintance of the ancient one. The core of the city encompasses the Ancient Agora and Roman Agora, lying between the two unmistakable hills of the Acropolis and the conical Lykavittos, which despite its daunting appearance, takes less than half-an-hour to climb.

Take a hike
The partial banishment of cars makes it both pleasurable and fascinating to cover the mile on foot from Hadrian’s Arch to the intact Temple of Hephaistos, skirting the southern slopes of the Acropolis. This broad, cobbled pedestrian boulevard, known as the Unification of the Archaeological Sites, is especially enjoyable in the cool of the evening, when Greeks and foreigners share the evening promenade.

Lunch on the run
The Central Market is a very lively place to eat, with plenty of fast, fresh food on offer.

Window shopping
You can enjoy a fairly raucous shopping experience at the Central Market: butchers bustle around with shopping trolleys filled with sides of lamb, and skinned sheep’s heads are displayed on marble slabs. A more practical gift for your loved ones would be a bag of tasty pistachios. The shop at the Museum of Cycladic Art stocks beautifully crafted reproductions of the Aegean’s most ancient art objects, jewelry, pots and figurines that are so stylized they are nearly abstract.

Take a view
The elegant Roof Garden restaurant of the historic Grande Bretagne Hotel offers an unparalleled night-time view of the Acropolis. The beautifully lit spectacle appears so close you feel you can reach out and touch it, and so magical that you must remind yourself that it is not a Hollywood set but buildings constructed nearly 2,500 years ago.

An aperitif
The pedestrianized Iraklidon street – in hip and hopping Thissio – is lined with cafés and restaurants. Bohemians drawn to the idea of absinthe will make for the Apsenti Café at number 19. A leafy courtyard is the best place to dare yourself to order the 70 percent aquamarine poison. You could opt for a less-testing cocktail or try a more appropriately local aperitif such as raki with honey.

Dine with the locals
In the moderately upmarket neighborhood of Pagrati the restaurants are populated exclusively by locals. Traditional Greek dishes are served with a modern twist: the chunky fava are topped with capers, the slow-cooked lamb baked in paper is flavored subtly with garlic and mint.

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Your Life Is All You’ve Got – Back It Up!

June 25th, 2010

Taking steps to ensure you don’t lose anything valuable
You’re sitting right in front of it right now. You may call it your PC or home computer, but in fact it’s your filing system and it may be worth a fortune! What do you use it for? Probably everything from playing games, solving the crossword, personal banking, correspondence, financial records and maybe your three-quarter written memoirs which you plan on publishing in 3 years time. In addition you may have a host of info on your bank accounts, stocks and shares, savings accounts, insurance plans, pensions, Premium Bond numbers and so on.

Family pictures
And what about all the family pictures you’ve been taking since you bought that digital camera? Not to mention your collection of downloaded music and videos.

All it takes is a micro-second
If you are like me, you never switch the computer off except when it complains that it’s going into overload. But at the first rumble of thunder on the horizon I do a quick save and then exit from every program that’s open, switch off and pull the plug out of the back of the computer. Apart from lightning which zaps your computer and destroys the hard disk in a microsecond, a simple computer crash or more serious hazards such as fire, flood and burglary could put you out of business in seconds.

The computer is cheap
A computer or laptop for home use costs less than $1,000 these days, but the information contained on it could be worth a fortune and cost you plenty to replace.
Photos and other items of sentimental value can never be replaced. And of course, if you have scanned things like medical data, share certificates and insurance policy documents onto your hard disk, it’s bye-bye forever.

It’s easy
It’s easy these days. You can simply copy ‘my documents’ and ‘my pictures’ onto a flash memory drive and you’re all backed up. There are also web-based back-up services for which you pay a small fee depending on how much disk space you use.

Thieves!
Protect yourself against thieves. By backing up your data you now offer thieves two tempting targets, the computer and the back-up flash drive memory unit. They could use the data for crooked purposes such as making a fraudulent credit application in your name or even blackmail. And if you have stored your online passwords somewhere on your computer or back-up disk, they could help themselves to the contents of your bank account.

Back to paper
I keep a small notebook in which I record all my passwords and other computer related data. I also have the policy numbers and contact details for my bank account, investment, pension plan and insurance policy, plus my tax reference number, my accountant’s and solicitor’s phone numbers in a separate box file on a shelf in my study. It’s worth taking an hour or two to back up your life – if something goes wrong, it could take days, weeks or even months to reassemble everything.

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