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Villefranche

About Villefranche•September 19, 2008 •
A fantastic living environment on the French Riviera.

Villefranche sur Mer is one of the most charming — if not the most charming — authentic French and Niçoise fishing village on the French Riviera, in the heart of the Cote d’Azur. With Monaco on one side and Nice on the other, it is hard to believe that it can retain its charm and authenticity of a little village where people still know each other.
The Old Town rises steeply up from the sea to the hillsides that ring the bay of Villefranche. The whole village is pedestrian and has lovely Italian style architecture with medieval accents throughout. The old town is very beautiful, both well preserved and also very much a real living village with mostly local residents. It is always fun to explore its nooks and crannies, like the beautiful church of St. Michel, with its quiet tree-lined squares, or the rue Obscure (a famous medieval covered passage), or the Chapel St. Pierre (its interior painted by Jean Cocteau). Take a break for lunch at Place Pollonnais at one of the several Brasseries with outdoor seating (so you can soak up the sunshine and people watch!). On Sundays there is a wonderful Brocante market set up on the Place around its charming fountain (and on Saturdays there’s a farmer’s market at the top of the Old Town). And of course there’s the waterfront quai (with many fine restaurants serving great dinner fare), and sandy beach of Villefranche, with a kilometer long wall of bougainvillea.
The Citadel is a huge stone fort built 600 years ago at the edge of the Old Town along the water, where there are now 3 museums, the City Hall, beautiful gardens, and the Cinema Plien Aire (outdoor theater). It is quite a magnificent structure and a great place to explore. There is a moat that connects the Old Village to the Port de la Darse, with walls nearly 100 feet high. Don’t miss the Volti museum in the Citadel and the gardens. Nearly every night during the summer there are movies shown in the outdoor theater. You can also walk up along the citadel walls that overlook the moat and, of course, the beautiful bay.
Walk around the Citadel water side path to the Port de la Darse. This is our working port, now mostly for pleasure yachts, with a colorful history going back over 500 years! Check out the beautiful vaulted workshops, the dry dock which can’t be mechanized (since it’s an historical monument) so is still used daily — the old-fashioned way. Great yachts come from around the world to be restored in this little Port. The Darse is a great sub-culture of the village.Although it’s such an authentic village, Villefranche is also surrounded by an fascinating, international scene. It attracts a very interesting cosmopolitan group of visitors and residents, including students who attend the renowned French language school called the Institut Français.


Source: http://villefranche.wordpress.com/

Review: Madonna's Hard Candy

On Madonna's 11th album, Hard Candy, the queen of pop invites us to imagine her as a confectioner running a musical sweet shop. But, after sitting through the 12 tracks on offer here, you'll begin to wish she'd stocked more than two varieties of candy.

Those flavours come from two of America's most bankable songwriting teams: The Neptunes and Timbaland, who between them have conjured up hits for the likes of Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Missy Elliot and Justin Timberlake. Timberlake himself crops up on five of the tracks, posing a particularly pertinent question about who is running the show when he asks "Who is the master? Who is the slave?" as the album closes.

This sort of top flight production is an unusual step for Madonna, who has a reputation for seeking out relatively obscure dance producers like Mirwais, Shep Pettibone and Stuart Price to helm her albums.

This time round, however, the queen of reinvention is trying to win back the hearts of the US audience - who were largely unimpressed with her 2005 love letter to disco, Confessions On A Dancefloor.

Lyrically, the album plays it safe. Madonna may have been inspired to make a documentary about the Aids epidemic in Africa when she adopted two-year-old Malawian orphan David Banda, but you would be hard pressed to find any social commentary in her music.

The main themes are love, revenge, sex and music - subjects on which Madonna surely has very little left to say at this stage in her career. She even repeats herself, echoing Into The Groove when she sings "Don't you know, can't you see? When I dance I feel free" on Heartbeat.

Then again, Madonna has always been at her best when extolling the virtues of music as a release, and it is on Hard Candy's club-orientated tracks that she excels. She's Not Me, a Neptunes production, feels like a five-minute musical summary of her career to date.

It kicks off with Chic-esque guitars that are reminiscent of Holiday before morphing into a pulsing club groove that could have been lifted straight from her last album. Track three, Give It To Me, is already pencilled in as the album's second single. It is one of the record's few out-and-out pop moments, featuring a cute, bouncy beat and a sense of humour that has been missing from Madonna's music since her Dick Tracy days.

"If it's against the law, arrest me, if you can handle it, undress me," she chirps as the song builds to a blistering crescendo that will surely be the highlight of any future live set.

Madonna, a notoriously hard task master (she gave Justin Timberlake a vitamin shot when he appeared to be flagging during recording sessions) seems to have been unable to tame the idiosyncrasies of her omnipresent hitmakers.

As it stands, however, the album is more akin to Madonna's last attempt to harness the urban market, 1994's underwhelming Bedtime Stories.
Bah, humbug.

By Mark Savage Entertainment reporter, BBC News
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/7336448.stm
Published: 2008/04/08 11:46:13 GMT
© BBC MMVIII

DEXTER

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Watch Dexter Season 3 this Fall

Dexter is one of the best (and creepiest) shows to come out in the past several years.

A Showtime original series based on the books by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter is a show about a serial killer with a conscious. Well, Dexter doesn't quite have a conscious as much as he has a mission. His mission is to put people who hurt other people out of their misery. He is a serial killer of serial killers.

The show is really interesting, colorful, and fun to watch as Dexter cruises through his life in sun-drenched Miami, a perfect place for Dexter, who works as a blood spatter expert for the Miami police department, to carry out his mission.

Dexter is dark, funny, and always entertaining. Dexter season 3 starts this fall on Showtime. Seasons one and two will be shown on CBS this season as well (FOX in Latin America), so you can watch them for free and get caught up. Season two of Dexter will be released on DVD in August.

Voyager of the Seas

Voyager of The Seas is a revolutionary marvel of naval engineering. Enjoy first- time cruise features like a skating rink, a street fair and a rock- climbing wall, a full-size basketball court - among others. The 142,000-ton, 3,114-guest Voyager of the Seas became the world's largest cruise ship when it entered service in November 1999. Innovations on Voyager of the Seas represent the highest space-per-guest ratio in the cruise market - and include enhanced staterooms, expanded dining options and exceptional recreational facilities. On the Voyager-class ships you'll find more onboard activities, more totally unique adventures and more experiences that you'll remember for a lifetime.

Some of the ship's facilities:

Voyager Promenade
Voyager Main Dining Room
Johnny Rockets Restaurant
Voyager Pig Whistle Restaurant
Voyager Scoreboard Lounge
Voyager Library
Voyager Nightclub
Voyager Theater
Rock Climbing Wall: Royal Caribbean cruise ships are the only ones in the world to offer rock-climbing walls. Whether it's your first time on a rock wall or if you're a seasoned climber, there are challenges for all levels of experience. Royal Caribbean will provide all of the equipment, including shoes, helmets and harnesses. All you need to do is bring a pair of socks and, of course, your sense of adventure.
The Royal Promenade, cruising's first horizontal atrium, is two football fields in length and four decks high. With a wide selection of shops, restaurants and entertainment the Royal Promenade will be the place to be.
Ice Skating Rink. Take a shot at a double axle in the only ice skating rink at sea. Or, once the rink is converted to a stage, settle in for an unforgettable show in the same unique area.

Passenger Capacity: 3,114
Gross Tonnage: 138,000
Length: 1020'
Beam: 157.5'
Draft: 29'
Cruising Speed: 23.7 knots


Ship Destinations
Western Caribbean from Galveston, Texas
Mediterranean Cruises
Transatlantic Cruises

LOST Season 5 early rumours

The fourth series of Lost may have only just left our screens, but that doesn't stop us doing some spoiler-tastic rounding up of what's happening next...

Given the strength of the fourth season of Lost, even if the concluding double episode had its problems, it’s perhaps understandable that talk already has turned to the next – and penultimate – series of the show. And with things needing to slide into place – for this time next year, there’ll be less than 20 episodes of Lost left – we can expect an action-packed and eventful fifth season.

Firstly, the basics. The show won’t be returning to our screens until January 2009 (possibly even February), where the plan will be to run the episodes through without any breaks. That was also the idea this time, but the writers’ strike disrupted the plan, hence it all got a little bitty towards the end. We also know that season five of Lost is now going to run for 17 episodes, instead of the originally-planned 16 (and this will be the case with the final season, too).

There’s still a chance of an actor’s strike, incidentally, which may yet play havoc with all of this, so don’t set your recorders just yet.Now we’re onto rumour and speculation, so look away now if you don’t want anything spoilt.The current word is that a female cast member of the show who has been with the series from the start won’t be back for season five. We’d suggest that Claire is the most obvious candidate (and that’s certainly the name that’s being banded around), but don’t hold us to it. The chances are that she’ll be back for the final series anyway, as she has ties to the mystery that need to be resolved (and, to be fair, from being a fairly redundant character, she finally emerged as someone really quite intriguing by the end of season four).

We also know that of those caught in the boat blast that Michael is definitely dead, as actor Harold Perrineau has been grumbling about it in a new interview he’s given. Jin is likely to have perished, too.

We’ll be finding out more about the character of Keamy in season five, who will get, apparently, a flashback all of his own (although how the show will handle the flashback/forward dynamic is unclear, given the Oceanic 6 are now off the island, and much of series five is likely to be concerned with getting them back there. Plus, er, the fact that Keamy is dead). There are also rumours that Eko might be making a reappearance, but to be fair, there’s lots of wild speculation running round at the moment.

So now we wait. ...

www.denofgeek.com/television/63554/lost_season_5_early_rumours.html