Bamia

Yesterday while in Akko, I made a stop in the souk and baught some food. While buying vegetables I spotted some nice fresh okras (gonbos in french), called bamia or bamié around here. I ate those a few times in restaurants and loved it so I baught a pound to give a try by myself. Wafa gave me a reciepe which happens to be close to the one for "Bamia" found on the web in various places like here or here or on Marmiton.
Wafa's way is slightly different as she deep fries them in oil until almost brown (after cutting the pedoncule and cleaning), and then puts them to cook in a pot with some lamb meat, garlic, comino, husbara (coriander), chopped tomato, oignon, green filfel (chili), tomato concentrate, salt and water. I'll let you figure your proportions from the other reciepes as mine were very rough. She recommanded rice with it as well, I'll tell you how it was tomorrow.

Montfort

Today, after a long night I decided to go in the North near the Lebanon border to the ruins of an old crusader castle called Montfort. It was a small adventure :). Let me tell you about it.

After spending some time staring at my Israel map (all in Hebrew), I finally deciphered were Montfort was. I picked up a way that was using small mountain roads so I enjoy the trip. At about 10km from my destination the road crosses a little Jewish village (easy to know, there is a fence around), but I can't seem to find the road going out of the village, as usual the Israeli "no road signs" strikes again. As there is only one road drawn on my map I keep searching and end up on a dirt road for like 5km. When I get close to the next village I search signs pointing to Montfort, obviously none till the next big road which is pointing from where I come from :).

A few U-turns later I spot a nice little rock spike in the village with something that looks like ruins of a castle on top of it. I head there, beautiful place (I'll upload a few pics to flickr soon), especially a nice church with some sounds of hard work inside. I enter, exit, and 2 minutes later a priest runs after me asking me why I left. I didn't want to disturb him in his work but he was pretty happy to have some company. We chatted a bit and he explained me that this little castle was called "Le chateau du Roy", I was pretty happy because I never found any sign of it in any guide.

We keep talking, he explains me that the village is mostly Christian, Greek Catholics. I answered Greek Orthodox ? He said No ! Greek Catholics, they used to belong to the orient church till sometimes in the 1700 if I understood well, then splitted and joined back the Roman church. We exchanged phone numbers and he asked a friend to guide me with his car to Montfort.

We're heading back and he points me at ... the dirt road !!! I was just there but missed an intersection. The road towards Montfort was quite bad, hopefully the car isn't mine so I didn't care touching rocks all the way. Once down there I realized that I was the only non 4x4 to have made it :). After 15 more mins of hike, I discover this nice little castle ruin in the middle of the nature, build on a 20m rock spike, isolated. One thing you can't miss inside is the wine press, those crusaders knew what was important, but it didn't prevent the Mamelouks to beat them in the second part of the 13th century.

My way back was much faster, I stopped in Akko to salute Wafa and Octavio, and I ended up eating taboule and stuffing myself with Easter cakes (Orthodox Easter is right now). I love Easter, whether it is chocolate eggs or semoul cakes stuffed with tamar (gateaux de semoule fourrés aux dates).

Turkish taxi drivers, Europe and France

I spent quite some time inside taxis in Istanbul last week and I had the occasion to talk with their drivers as the trafic is pretty bad there. We generally talked to each other in english, and as soon as they knew I was french the conversation about Europe immediately started.

As you know they want to apply to enter Europe and the main country unhappy about it seems to be France. So knowing that they explained all the good reasons why they thought we should be open to them, they didn't have to convince me as I already was, but the argumentation was interresting. They were as well thinking that next month's vote in France is about their entrance in Europe. You'll tell me that many french also think so, but I educated them explaining it was about the constitution and that we might actually be stupid enough to say NO.

Here are their arguments:

• we're muslim yes, but we're not arabs, we are very close to the european culture and we have a laic state for a while, we deserve to be in europe.
  
• we are working hard to improve our economy and human rights daily, you accept countries that don't do any effort.
• we have a very healthy economy and our growth rate is very fast, the turkish market is going to be one of the biggest in the area very soon.
  
• you are ready to accept Romania and Bulgaria that are much more poor than us, they don't do nearly as much effort as we do and because they're christians you're going to say yes to them.
• how can France pretend to be a laic country and say no to us just because we are muslims.

These were the core ones around which they were building a pretty solid argument, and from the things I have seen there in 4 days they are pretty right. Anyway it was interresting to see that the average Istanbul taxi driver was able to express that coherent ideas with so few english words, so much more than the average french (let's hope less than 50%) that doesn't understand what this is about even after being told in his own language.

Grand Bazar

We spent quite a bit of time in Istanbul "Grand Bazar" as it seemed to be Clotilde favourite activity there. I must admit that spending time bargaining on nice stuff while drinking tea or coffee is pretty fun, even if I wasn't that much into silverware :).

Sainte Sophie

Back from Istanbul, the best picture I have to show is the one from Sainte Sophie church-mosq. I had a great long weekend with Clement and his evergrowing family ;).

Weekend in Istanbul

I'm leaving tomorrow for Istanbul, I gonna pack sometime tonight or probably tomorrow morning at the last second as usual. Anyway what can I forget ? I saw that I gonna get some rain and around 15 degres, brrrrr ! It was 33 today in Haifa ! I'm bringing my ski clothes ;).

I'll be back next week on wednesday, I hope the earth will still be there, french still complain about working for Pentecôte, Israeli eating matza for Pessah and that by then Tristan will have stopped playing with electric plugs (I know he reads me!).

Cyal8r all - a+

Hutzpa

hutzpa n : aggressive boldness or unmitigated effrontery; "he had the audacity to question my decision" [syn: audacity, audaciousness, chutzpah]

C'est un mot hébreux que j'ai découvert ici. Le mot n'existant pas en anglais ils l'ont intégré directement. C'est quelque chose entre le culot, l'effronterie, l'audace et l'impolitesse pour lequel nous n'avons pas de mot bien que cette pratique soit assez développée. Bien entendu le mot prend tout son sens en Israel ou cela fait partie intégrante de la culture.

Un excellent exemple de hutzpa (je dois dire que j'admire la force de son geste) peut se trouver sur orthodoxanarchist. Mobius prouve une fois de plus que l'on peut être juif, sioniste, religieux et être pacifiste (à sérieuse tendance anarchiste comme vous l'aurez compris).

PS : Pour ceux qui auront raté la référence il est dans la position et l'habit même des juifs orthodoxes qui vont prier au mur des lamentations (lieu le plus saint du judaïsme où ils peuvent prier), et il fait une analogie directe entre la barrière de sécurité avec la palestine et un mur de lamentations. Je vous laisse imaginer à quel point c'est provocateur et mal vu ici.

Asterix is back !

Here is a map of the EU (Europe of the 24) after the constitution referendum vote (starting of in june). Remember Asterix, us french love to be different and isolated (and in this case stupid) ! Thanks Chirac for asking us to vote instead of just making the assembly vote like in many other European countries. Remember Maitre Collard is voting No!

And No this is not even propaganda for the Yes... just realism (there is no such thing as pessimism, just realism).

Tristan

Je te fais plein de bisous !
Sponsored by Spell with flickr

Habent papam

As reported by most of the world press, the catholics have a new Pope. The announce brought a double bad surprise for me... First one, he's a hardline conservator, so hopes to see a progress in the dogme to help Africa fight Aids (encourage usage of condoms) are just gone and I'm not hoping much on the pro-choice subject (abortion, and euthanasia). Second one he's 78, I was hoping they elect a youg reformator, they elected an old conservator, well maybe it's better than a young conservator as he probably won't last too long...

News en vrac

After a long night in bars and smoking narguile with friends on my balcony, I finally went back to my article about branch prediction for Onversity and finished it. JF is probably going to publish this week unless the remains of alcool in my blood did a bad job.

I read today in Haaretz that they had a Kerosen quality issue in Tel-Aviv (basically watered down) and that the aerial trafic was perturbated. I hope this will be finished friday, as I'm supposed to join Clement and his family in Istambul. It's been so long I didn't see them that I can't remember when was the last time :(.

Doing my usual press review I found out that the inquiry about the 3 boys shooting in Rafah was progresing, Israel admitted they weren't weapons smugglers and that the soldiers didn't aim at their legs despite knowing that they were unarmed... At least IDF is admitting its mistakes, but isn't claiming it loud enough so everybody hears, and we still ignore if anyone will be declared as guilty and be condemned.

Subzeroblue pointed out at onther Blip by a European politician about Islam. Hopefully for them, there are some PR guys that are working behind on explaining that they didn't say what they meant or the reverse.

Ezabel says hello !

For all of you that never came with me to Akko (well all
of you besides Jyby) here is the famous Ezabel saying hello !

Saint Jean d'Acre

Today, as many saturdays, I went to Akko to visit Wafa and Octavio at their shop and then have dinner with them. It was the perfect weather to enjoy walking in the old streets of Akko, sunny with a fresh wind. There was a few foreign tourists which is a good sign, as there hasn't been many for the past 4 years. Everybody is preparing for a hopefully good tourism season starting with Passover.
Ezabel was very excited, they're all going to the dead sea tomorrow, and she was dreaming of swimming and sunbathing there, probably for the first time. 

Where I sit

For those that never came here, here is how the place where I sit most of my time at home looks like. Note on the table the cocktail, the bowl of olives, the bowl of pistaches, unlimited supply of narguile, carpet for the feet, EQ2 Queynos map, and teddy bear watching me 

Tension raising (part II)

I spent a lot of time discussing politics with a co-worker yesterday evening. I talked about the French social protection and education systems and we ended up discussing about the situation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, point where almost any political conversation ends. He was actually surprised that I felt so well the current tension inside Israeli society, and he wasn't really optimistic about it. "Israel is on the verge of civil war" was something he agreed with. He also said sadly that most of the Israelis had left wing Ideas but that unfortunately the only politician that ended up being able to make a real move forward towards peace (evacuating Gaza settlements) was a corrupted right wing one (Sharon)...

This morning I started my usual press/blogs review, I actually ended up skipping the coffee seeing the news.
Recently an Israeli was jailed over planning to assassinate Sharon and the defense minister, The Rabin shadow is close... A man also infiltrated from Syria into Israel and shot at the IDF before being taken into custody.

Officers of the IDF complains that the tougher rules of engagement since the truce were putting Israelis in danger, well from what I read they aren't suppose to shoot unless it's an answer to a shot, or at least that's what the Haaretz article seems to say. That makes me wonder again how they ended up killing 3 unarmed young boys in Rafah this week...

Today the IDF killed a Palestinian while arresting him in Nablus, he was allegedly preparing terror actions against Israel and was involved in several previous ones but didn't seem to have blood on his hands. This will clearly not remained unanswered as the Palestinians see it as a break of the truce. Let's just hope no more blood gets spilled.

House destructions seem to continue under different reasons (after retaliation for hosting a suicide bomber, or being a potential threat to Israel security by being to close to a secured area), this time they realize after 20 years that some houses were build without a permit, so they gave 30 min to the families to evacuate them and Caterpilared them. I just wonder if all those "Illegal outpost" in the west bank have a construction permit, and what would happen if they undergo such kind of destruction. I heard that some were actually bulldozed but I have a doubt it has been systematic or I wonder how it ended up looking like on that map.

Finally, Israel seems to be building a pretty fortified border along the Philadelphi road. I'm not sure the Egyptians will be super happy, after they made deals with Israel so they would have more responsibilities in securing the border.

Usually I try to look at news in a balanced way, that's why I browse so many sources, but today things look pretty bad for Israel... Let's hope the fire doesn't restart too quickly while Israel is starting to discuss with leaders of the Arab world, and Abbas is reorganizing his security apparatus in order to make Palestine a state of law.

Désolé

Je n'ai pas pu m'empècher, mais je suis tombé là-dessus en lisant libé :). Bonne lecture.

Sharav

Today was the first day of sharav (foehn) of the year. The wind was strong, dry, hot, and carrying a lot of sand. That was a perfect day to enjoy the beach during the lunch break so Raphael, Avi and myself headed there and enjoyed the warm sea (even if everybody here still thinks that 20 degres celcius is freakin'cold) and the beach. Tonight there are storms over Mount Carmel and lightning is starting to strike. I love that weather, the rain is going to refresh the atmosphere. 

Tension raising (part I)

That feeling has been growing in me for the past few weeks, the fragile truce between Israel and Palestine suffers. Several persons told me that this was not felt from the medias reports in France so I'll try to explain why I think the tension level is raising.

Last month there was an Israeli plan to hand over the security of the most calm cities of the west bank to the PA. The plan stopped after 2 cities Jericho and Tulkram instead of the 5. Israeli police accuses the PA police to not crack down on militants. Were they sincerely hoping for it to happen when they hand over the cities ? I've read several reports saying they weren't doing too bad to promote Israel security by preventing attacks.

The most extremist settlers in the west bank have starting acting instead of just shouting, fortunately most of their actions have been jugulated by the IDF, culminating at the Temple Mount aborted provocation gathering. Israel is continuing to grow the settlements in the West bank. About those, many people imagine settlements as small outposts lost in the mountain, while Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim are real cities. Sharon is trying to build enough houses to link Ma'ale Adumim to east Jerusalem so it would be definitively connected to Israeli land. Obviously Palestinians do not like that, especially that they still have a hope to have East Jerusalem as their capital.

More and more militants in Palestin start to rebel physically against Abbas's authority, it culminated when a few members from the armed wing of his own Fatah shot in the air in the middle of his presidential palace in Ramallah, and then rampaged on the nearby shops and restaurants. What they seem to want is armed conflict, period. They want the negociations to go faster and have better results faster, which is definitely a reasonable thing to want, but not that fast. And that's not by weakening Abbas power that they gonna help.
Palestinian Police is also struggling to maintain a state of law without getting the armed militants to overreact, a good example of what can happen when you got lots of young violent people armed during a truce can be found here, it seems they have to shoot something, fortunately all are not like that and hopefully it won't happen too often.

Finally, I kept the biggest one for the end, last weekend 3 young unarmed from Rafah in Gaza died under Israeli fire in controversial circumstances. Palestinians claim they were playing soccer near a forbidden area and that they ran for the ball and got shot down without warning by IDF for penetrating the forbidden area. 3 persons to grab a soccer ball in an area they obviously knew was forbidden ? Seems not right.
On the other side IDF claims they were trying to enter Egypt to do weapons smuggling. Some press reports say they were paid a few hundred bucks to cross the border. IDF obviously says there was warning shots and they didn't obey. I thought they were building sophisticated tunnels to do so, and even if most are getting uncovered I seriously doubt none remains. And by day? So they can surely get shot, what were they thinking ?
Well, I doubt anyone will say the truce anytime soon. But as one could expect, it triggered a massive retaliation on Gush Katiff and Sderot who received their first Qassams and mortar shells for a few months. Hamas has probably been making stocks these past months... just in case.

Souvenirs shop

Not much to say about this picture, it is the front of a souvenirs shop in Jerusalem old city, probably one of the nicest ones besides it is closed. 

Busy

Recently I've been pretty busy debugging some microprocessor performance simulator at work as well as writing an article on branch prediction for Onversity instead of taking nice pictures around.

Je lis aussi de plus en plus de blogs, et pour survivre au jargon en pleine évolution associé je vous conseille d'aller jeter un oeil ici. Je me demande combien de temps ca me prendra avant de trouver par hasard des blogs de personnes que je connais.

The Muchraka

Today I did a little trip on the Carmel to the Muchraka and Daliat El Carmel. You won't see any pictures because -dumb me- I left the memory card in my laptop... Anyway you're not missing much, the mountain were covered in a light haze and the light wasn't great, which means I'll go back there -well I'll go back there for other reasons as you'll understand soon.
Daliat is a Druze city, which means that everything was open today on Sabbath (that was the initial reason I headed that way).

I stopped to do some shopping and filled up myself with their delicious pita bread spread with labane, za'atar and olive oil. Druze pita is somewhere between a French crêpe and a regular pita as seen on the picture above. It is 1 mm thick, 50-70cm of diameter, is cooked on big metal domes and often prepared right in front of you by an old druze woman. I am totally addicted, for a few months I have been eating a lot of those, even preparing those sandwiches at home (buying the pita already done). Unfortunately the only use of Za'atar I found that tastes good is with some form of bread (I have provisions at home:).
The Muchraka is a carmelite monastery sitting on top of the Carmel with a potential for a beautiful view towards the east (Mont Tabor and Nazareth). It is at the supposed site of the battle between Elijah the prophet and the emissaries of Baal (the Canaaite deity). There is not much to visit, the most interesting part being the discussion with the monk that lives there, who talks to everybody in their native language... He was very nice and impressive :). The area is in the Carmel national park and there are definitively nice hikes to be done.
As you noticed I felt lazy, I put a lot of links instead of telling you about everything.

Political compass

This morning, I was doing my usual browsing of news and blogs through RSS when I stopped on this story at Rafah Pundits (daily news and views about Rafah refugee camp in Gaza). I found it that idea of political compass pretty interesting and I decided to go through the 6 pages of questions to verify where I was (I usually consider myself as a social democrat).
My test:

Surprisingly enough I ended up exactly at the same spot that the author of the Rafah blog. Well I actually ended up more libertarian than I originally thought. To get a better picture, they publish a reference graph with a few well known politicians. They supposedly did this ranking after talking with experts on those politicians, but there's no real surprise here.

Reference:

In the end I'm happy to share the corner with Gandhi, Mandela and the Dalai Lama and not really surprised to be exactly on the opposite side of G.W. Bush.

Haifa by night

Baha'i Shrine and Gardens on Mount Carmel in Haifa by night.

Jerusalem Temple Mount

Yesterday I spent the afternoon taking Fernando (member of our group in Barcelona) around Jerusalem. I took him to David's tower, Holy Scepulcre, arab soukh, entrance of the temple mount, Wailing Wall, and we finished on the roof tops of the bazaar. So it was a somewhat classical tour, where we got stopped by israeli soldiers while trying to enter the temple mount (as usual I would say unfortunately). We then stopped for the rest of the afternoon in a souvenir shop I know and smoked narguile, drunk arab coffee and tea and ate the chorba while chatting.
It seems that next sunday, a group of radical right wing jews have called for a gathering on the temple mount and everybody's talking about it with fear. Last time it happened, Sharon was among them and it started a 4 years Intifada that is still not really finished. So everybody in east Jerusalem was hoping that the army would do as promised, block those militants from reaching the mosq.
I am hoping to go to Cairo with Jeremy in june, but the assassination of tourists that took place there yesterday is not very encouraging... I hope it calms down in the mean time.

Sunday in the Gaza strip

Yesterday I went in a tour with a group of Israeli-french inside the various Gaza settlements. I was probably the only non-jew of the bus, and my political views were probably isolated too. It was a fantastically instructive tour for me, I chatted a lot, learnt a lot of history, culture and got a better understanding of the situation there through my own eyes which is something I value a lot.
The picture above is the first thing I saw on our way to Nezarim, a very isolated settlement in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The road to there is surrounded by electronic fences, a strip of around 300m has been bulldozed on each side, cameras, bunkers all over the place, and you can drive there only with a military escort (happens only at fixed hours) in armored vehicles. Along our way to the various settlements we are told stories about the people that died on their way home which is the reason for all this crazy security (I never ever had that feeling, even near the fortified presidential palace in Bogota).
Then we talk with the guide and various people living there, the main thing that came back was the feeling of having been betrayed by Sharon who sent them there to live under the Qassams, build their houses, and now evicts them without a thank after they elected him. The religious aspect was also very present, the guide explaining why Gaza should be considered historically (from the Torah) as a part of Israel, but I heard also contradicting stories about this same subject so I will not discuss it much, my knowledge in this area being very limited.
If for one second you forget those issues you just see a heavily cultivated land by a very small population (8300) in the middle of a very dense and poor Arab population (1.3Million). The amount of military protection this population needs to survive seems dereasonable, as well as the danger they are living in daily. The repartition of land seems absurd even if it is easy to understand the military needs that were behind: cutting the Gaza strips in several independent parts to better control the movement of its inhabitants, agriculture needs large areas for a very small amount (and very few are those ready to live there) leading to a population density gradient of over 50x.

Inside Gush Katif

I took a lot of pictures inside the various Israeli villages in Gaza (Nezarim, Kfar Darom, Gush Katiff). I could post a lot of them but it just looks like every other Israeli village in the southern part of the country if you can make abstraction of the fences. What differenciates these villages is the important focus on ultra-modern agriculture techniques (most of the activity there). The cherry-tomatoes, no-insects salads and flowers all grow in the sand, cows wear an electronic ID that tells the milking machine this cow's settings :)... Most of the production there is exported, and most of the workers are imported from Thailand and China.

Media presence

Israeli channel2 journalist filming a (newly settled ?) family puting their name in front of their house in Gush Katiff. This is at the 10 house settlement, right on the beach, in 10 houses that were originaly build as a vacation resort for egyptian officers before the 1967 war.

April fool's

I don't know about you, but I have never seen as many April fool's on the web than I did yesterday. I used to like this but yesterday was just too much, everybody had to do his good or bad, and often balancing by the quantity. Don't get me wrong I like jokes, even the worst, but could we keep a few of them for the rest of the year. Anyway 1st of April looks definitely like Internet's day. I didn't do any yesterday as I was too busy finding the worst one (yeah my post isn't a joke). Sadly the picture I link was far from the worst. I almost see him wearing an AC/DC shirt ;).

Acharnement thérapeutique

Terri Schiavo est finalement morte, apres 15 ans dans le coma, des procès à n'en plus finir et une énorme polémique aux USA entre les "Pro Life" et les "Pro choice". Bien entendu cela m'effraye de voir que l'on peut s'acharner aussi longtemps à maintenir en vie un légume, mais ce qui m'a le plus choqué dans toute cette histoire c'est d'avoir vu Bush revenir de weekend et faire faire des heures sup. à tout le monde au congrès pour essayer de continuer à prolonger sa vie artificiellement alors qu'il ne le fait pas pour des sujets à mon sens bien plus graves. Bref je ne vais pas m'acharner sur le fils Bush et sa clique de religieux radicaux, j'ai juste du mal à comprendre leurs opinions et encore plus de mal à les accepter comme représentants de ce qui était sensé être la plus grande démocratie du monde.
En tout cas, si à force de pratiquer des activités à risque, j'en venais un jour à me retrouver à l'état de légume vivant (coma prolongé, activité cérébrale nulle ou proche) je ne désire surtout pas vivre, ni 15 ans ni 1... Voila, il semblerait que faire ce genre de déclarations de "living will" devient à la mode aux Etats-Unis, où le bon sens n'est plus la manière d'agire par défault.

De son côte le pape JP2 est aussi nourri par un tube, mais lui est conscient et lucide il semblerait. De toute façons je doute qu'ils réusissent à le garder 15 ans dans cet état, à moins que... peut-être dans le formol.