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Still in foreign climes
Mar. 20th, 2009 02:02 pmThursday night was significantly busier than Wednesday in Sitges, perhaps because it was a public holiday in much of Spain (although not in Catalonia). It was also Father's Day. Tonight, being the weekend, is likelier to be busier still.
I went for a longer walk today past the church on the headland, which kind of splits Sitges in two. I summoned up the courage to walk into a strange restaurant on my own, something I seemed to do without difficulty when I was younger, but which appears to get harder as I get older. Oh well, some people develop a fear of flying; I develop a fear of entering strange places (shops, restaurants, etc) on my own.
The lunch was good value at E12.60 for three courses with a coke, and indifferent in quality. By "indifferent" I do not mean bad. I ate it all (well, except for the olives with the salad), and the fish in tomato sauce was quite tasty. I didn't see much evidence of "grilled" however, and there was some evidence of "overcooked". But it was enjoyable enough.
The weather seems to have developed into a pattern of warming up very quickly, getting rather hot (for me) by about 1pm, after which the wind picks up. It remains sunny, but it becomes jumper weather because of the wind. There were a few people on the beach today, including the obligatory topless beauty (female -- I should say, this being Sitges), and one or two hardy souls in the Med.
Being online, I couldn't resist a little bit of playing on Party. I couldn't get PT3 to work at all, and Hold'em Manager is not yet on this machine, so I stuck to three tables. Did okay in about 300 hands so far. At $200 buy-in, "did ok" is quite enough to pay for a few days' break in Spain and leave enough over besides for another one, (back next week then??) which once again leads to concerns about losing grip with certain areas of reality. The best thing to do is to keep with the idea of an "hourly rate", rather than with the actual amount won or lost. The danger of that idea is falling into the "I just have to turn up and put in the hours" state of mind. And that isn't true at all.
The "gay" concept of Sites is a bit misleading. I saw a few shops that obviously catered for the gay community (one of them charmingly named "Man Store" and containing stock that you really thought would be banned on the grounds of reinforcing too many stereotypes) but in the main it's a standard tourist seaside town with just those kind of shops and bars that you would expect. Last night I happened upon one raher upmarket place selling Miu Miu bags (E1100 a pop) and some rather tempting Prada trainers. However, I haven't yet lost sense of money enough to consider spending E290 on a pair of trainers, even if they did look fucking ace.
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The Fed's announcement on Wednesday that it would be joining the UK in the helicopter money option had a predictable effect on the dollar. As I wrote a couple of months ago, the strength of the dollar against the euro in recent months has been solely due to a "flight to safety" from US hedge funds ("deleveraging") and a "flight to safety" from international investors (US Treasuries are just about the only risk-free thing left). However, news that QE would be enthusiastically followed caused the long-overdue "inflation scare" and a move to gold and commodities. Curiously, because I always think of oil as a special case, it boosted the price of oil. However, I think that imagining oil as some kind of faux-gold is perverse. The boost in the oil price was more linked, I think, to its constancy against a global basket. As the dollar weakens against that basket, so the price (in dollar terms) goes up. Gold, which is priced in dollars, behaves the same way. To separate out the genuine price change in gold (i.e., one measured against a global currency basket) rather than the absolute price (which is measured in dollars) is not always the easiest calculation.
I once thought that there was an arbitrage opportunity with FinSpreads on this. It entailed shorting the price of gold and shorting the dollar. Since a fall in the dollar usually means a rise in the price of gold, you can see that in effect I could have a large bet here and that most of it would cancel itself out. Unfortunately FinSpreads didn't see it that way and wanted the full margin on both bets. Sod that for a lark, I thought, and declined. This was lucky, because my arb analysis went wrong. The dollar went up, but gold did not fall enough to compensate.
_______________
I went for a longer walk today past the church on the headland, which kind of splits Sitges in two. I summoned up the courage to walk into a strange restaurant on my own, something I seemed to do without difficulty when I was younger, but which appears to get harder as I get older. Oh well, some people develop a fear of flying; I develop a fear of entering strange places (shops, restaurants, etc) on my own.
The lunch was good value at E12.60 for three courses with a coke, and indifferent in quality. By "indifferent" I do not mean bad. I ate it all (well, except for the olives with the salad), and the fish in tomato sauce was quite tasty. I didn't see much evidence of "grilled" however, and there was some evidence of "overcooked". But it was enjoyable enough.
The weather seems to have developed into a pattern of warming up very quickly, getting rather hot (for me) by about 1pm, after which the wind picks up. It remains sunny, but it becomes jumper weather because of the wind. There were a few people on the beach today, including the obligatory topless beauty (female -- I should say, this being Sitges), and one or two hardy souls in the Med.
Being online, I couldn't resist a little bit of playing on Party. I couldn't get PT3 to work at all, and Hold'em Manager is not yet on this machine, so I stuck to three tables. Did okay in about 300 hands so far. At $200 buy-in, "did ok" is quite enough to pay for a few days' break in Spain and leave enough over besides for another one, (back next week then??) which once again leads to concerns about losing grip with certain areas of reality. The best thing to do is to keep with the idea of an "hourly rate", rather than with the actual amount won or lost. The danger of that idea is falling into the "I just have to turn up and put in the hours" state of mind. And that isn't true at all.
The "gay" concept of Sites is a bit misleading. I saw a few shops that obviously catered for the gay community (one of them charmingly named "Man Store" and containing stock that you really thought would be banned on the grounds of reinforcing too many stereotypes) but in the main it's a standard tourist seaside town with just those kind of shops and bars that you would expect. Last night I happened upon one raher upmarket place selling Miu Miu bags (E1100 a pop) and some rather tempting Prada trainers. However, I haven't yet lost sense of money enough to consider spending E290 on a pair of trainers, even if they did look fucking ace.
++++++++
The Fed's announcement on Wednesday that it would be joining the UK in the helicopter money option had a predictable effect on the dollar. As I wrote a couple of months ago, the strength of the dollar against the euro in recent months has been solely due to a "flight to safety" from US hedge funds ("deleveraging") and a "flight to safety" from international investors (US Treasuries are just about the only risk-free thing left). However, news that QE would be enthusiastically followed caused the long-overdue "inflation scare" and a move to gold and commodities. Curiously, because I always think of oil as a special case, it boosted the price of oil. However, I think that imagining oil as some kind of faux-gold is perverse. The boost in the oil price was more linked, I think, to its constancy against a global basket. As the dollar weakens against that basket, so the price (in dollar terms) goes up. Gold, which is priced in dollars, behaves the same way. To separate out the genuine price change in gold (i.e., one measured against a global currency basket) rather than the absolute price (which is measured in dollars) is not always the easiest calculation.
I once thought that there was an arbitrage opportunity with FinSpreads on this. It entailed shorting the price of gold and shorting the dollar. Since a fall in the dollar usually means a rise in the price of gold, you can see that in effect I could have a large bet here and that most of it would cancel itself out. Unfortunately FinSpreads didn't see it that way and wanted the full margin on both bets. Sod that for a lark, I thought, and declined. This was lucky, because my arb analysis went wrong. The dollar went up, but gold did not fall enough to compensate.
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