Paris - Christmas Week

I was tired when I posted about our first day and forgot a few things so I edited a bit the post. In the evening we ended up quite tired at Home with some nice and warm food waiting for us with two happy parents. The next day in the morning was the official ceremony for the "bapteme republicain" of the little monkey and turtle. So now I am officially their republican godfather, I can speak with my best low pitched Marlon Brando voice and say whatever I want trying to look serious. Anyways, after a couple glasses of champagne we went to visit fifille's museum (if you go there don't hesitate to ask for fifille as a private guide she even does tours in English !). The evening was time for a usual Nico party, he was back from Istanbul for a couple of days so took advantage of the opportunity to gather friends. The next day saw 2 birthday parties, the one after a Christmas dinner and the next one a Christmas-day lunch. Yes we just spent 3 days in a row eating good food, yummy.
After X-mas we established residence in temporarily deserted fifille's apartment in Chevreuse.

Chevreuse and it's castle on a sunny morning.

We spent the rest of our short time in Paris going around the city and its museums.

Main hall of "Le musee d'Orsay".


A view on the Louvre.


Champs Elysees, Blue White and Red !

More pictures on Zenfolio as usual. We then took our train for the Alps to go ski. This wasn't uneventful, first we weren't able to buy a suburban train ticket because there was no teller, and the automated machine would not accept foreign credit cards (the great thing about superior french technology, is that it obviously refuses to be compatible with the others, it would be too simple). So we took it with our heavy luggage without paying, and ended up stuck behind the barriers at the train station in Paris, hopefully a helpful SNCF employee just opened them for us without asking anything (he probably assumed we couldn't be cheating with that big bags ;).

We eat and head towards our night train, to realise that someone is occupying our compartment... After some discussion we realize that our ticket is for the next day... Yay, stupid me... We find some free beds in another wagon and depart with the train hoping the controller guy will be nice. Next morning, no one checked our tickets and we're in the freezing and snowy alps :).

Paris - First day

This year I only stayed one week in Paris for X-mas and was with someone that didn't know the place so it was a good occasion to go around the city (and take pictures obviously). The first day Izard was our guide (notice the right head tilt, character stat where the F. family tends to invest their XP. If you don't believe me I can provide more proofs). Here he is explaining the story behind the Garnier Opera, from the roof of the Galeries Lafayette where he took us. He also welcomed us early in the morning with some fresh croissants ! Welcome back home ;).



Classic view of La Madeleine and the Eiffel tower from the "Galleries Lafayette"'s roof

We then went around La Madeleine to buy chocolates in "La maison du chocolat", and after a lunch with Jyby we came back near Olivier's place on the piers of the Canal Saint Martin, waiting for the little monkey to get out of school and buying some chritmas presents at "Antoine et Lili". More pictures at the usual place, and more to come as I get through the backlog.


Ecluse Saint Martin

Akko Harbour

This afternoon I drove north to Akko to meet with Waffa and Octavio before Christmas and do some shopping. I also tested another toy, a Jupiter-8 lens (Zeiss 50mm Sonnar copy) from 1956 I bought on ebay for 25$. I already start to like it, there is some kind of mood in the pictures it captures, especially wide open. Anyway I stopped by the harbour and took some nets pictures and then went for a narguile with an arabic coffee. Nice slow day, but now I have to catch-up work tonight. The rest of the gallery is here.

Nets


Narguile Bar


Old Fount

Trip to Jerusalem

Last saturday we went to Jerusalem for a visit of the city. We left early in the hope that we could finaly end up visiting the Temple Mount Mosq. I have stopped counting how many times I have been bounced by Israeli Soldier there, telling me to come the next day early in the morning, well I got the same message this time just saying that they are open just during the week and early in the morning... So basically, even if it is true I'll never get to see it and I really start to believe that it's just BS.
Anyways, the day was beautiful, the sky had been washed by fridays rain, and the city was very enjoyable (but colder than usual). I took advantage of the opportunity to take pictures at the western wall during the Shabbat prayers. Not very smart you'd say, but I guess my camera looks old enough to be discrete, and I spent 10 minutes unnoticed despite openly taking pictures around (and I was very gently asked to bag it when I was done;).
I took these 2 pictures that I like very much:




Besides that we did my "usual" city tour, stopping at friends shops to drink tea, walking on roofs for the view, visiting the Tower of David, having lunch at the Armenian Tavern, visiting the Church of Holy Sepulchre and the Ethiopian church and buying food in the market by Damascus gate and drinking gigantic amount of pomme-grenade juice with arabic cakes. This time we also discovered a cistern hidden deep under the Ethiopian Church and entered in an Armenian covent (we got kind of booted once we were done going around the halls and the appartments, not sure we were really allowed to be there). We left the city tired, but our eyes full of great images, of which you can see some there.

Roasted Chicken with Fennel

This paste week the cold season started here: we got rain for the first time and the weather started to cool down and get below 20C. Tonight a big storm hit Haifa and besides admiring the huge lightning strikes I decided to cook myself something nice to stay warm with the cold (it's 15C!) and humid weather. I started with a recipe coming from Waffa and adapted it to my taste and the content of my fridge.
I'll start with the original recipe:
- chicken legs without the bones (but with the skin)
- lemon juice
- nutmeg
- cinnamon
- olive oil, salt and water
Dip the chicken legs in lemon and olive oil, grate some nutmeg and cinnamon on them, cover the dish with an aluminum foil after adding some water, cook for almost an hour in the oven, uncover and roast the chicken on both sides for like 10 minutes. I just added:
- fennel cut in 2 pieces because I feared it would be to big to be tender inside
- 2 cloves of garlik with the skin
- 1 green chili, uncut
- onion sliced in 2 with 1 clove sticked in each half
I cooked everything the same way as the original dish. Everything ended up very tender and not dry, and tasting wonderfully good. Here is how it looked before I ate it all:

Lightroom 1.3 export plugin for Zenfolio

Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom 1.3 a few days ago. Why is that interresting ? Well I have been using it for about 6 months and I have to admit that even if it is not the best RAW processing software, it is a very nice integrated digital photography workflow. Basically it handles everything from importing the pictures from the camera, indexing them, sorting them, setting metadata, developping the RAW, doing basic changes like color temperature, noise reduction, sharpening, curves, an excellent cropping and dust removal tool, and printing. The only thing I couldn't do with it was exporting directly my pictures to Zenfolio. This new release adds the ability for 3rd parties to develop export plugins for photo hosting websites like smugmug, flickr and my favorite one: Zenfolio. One guy developped the plugins, and you can download it from his blog : here, thank you Jeff.

I basically don't use Photoshop as I am not modifying my pictures but I would recommand Lightroom to anyone that wants to do a bit more than just viewing pictures like they are straight out of the camera, thing for which Picasa is just fine. Anyways Adobe has a 30 days demo of Lightroom there for PC or MAC, be carefull after 30 days you'll probably be paying them to keep it ;).

Galilee Ethnology Museum in Acre

Last week-end we discovered a newly opened museum in Acre. The Galilee Ethnology Museum presents various tools, furniture and typical interiors from the late 19Th century and beginning of the 20Th, with only original pieces. The place is located in the city fortified walls where the captain of the guard used to have his quarters which makes it worth visiting even just to enjoy the old stones of the walls. The museum is extremely well set up and we really enjoyed the design and lighting, and as you can guess I didn't resist the temptation to take pictures, and I was quite happy with the results:

Baskets stand


Very nice lamp


Game room

Full Gallery here.

Belvoir and Beit She'an

This Saturday I drove Jared, Michelle and her mother to south-eastern Galilee area where we visited Belvoir crusader fortress and Beit Shean roman Decapolis member city ruins.
Belvoir is a large square fortress overlooking the Jordan valley that was built by the crusaders to defend the eastern border of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. As the name states it, the view there is fantastic, you can see Mount Tabor, the sea of Galilee, Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley (farther than Beit She'an), the Jordanian mountains (you can actually see the ruins of Pella and Gadara 2 other cities from the Decapolis) and mount Gilboa and the West Bank. In Hebrew the place is called Kohav Ayarden which means the star of Jordan. It was not my first trip there but as you know I love going around and climbing old fortress walls.


Arches ruins in Belvoir


View towards mount Tabor


And towards Jordan

We then moved to Scytopolis ruins, the antique Beit She'an. I was not expecting anything impressive after Jerash and Gadara but it actually ended up being very nice. The various guides say that these are the best conserved roman ruins in Israel and they are right. The city is in a protected area, just below a Tel where you can still find ruins of Canaan era (~1500 B.C.) houses and fortress. As the rest of the Decapolis and Petra this was all deserted after the giant earthquake of 746 A.D.


Many columns like these fell during the 746 A.D. earthquake


View on Beit She'an ruins from the Tel.

Here are the galleries for Belvoir and Beit She'an.

Ahmad's wedding

Friday evening I was invited to Ahmad's pre-wedding party where we had the pleasure to meet his wife (and eat some nice Arabic food:). It was also for me a great occasion to test my new-old portrait lens, here is the happy new couple:


Ahmad and Fatima


Michelle and Fatima

More pictures including pictures of my colleagues here.

Eilat and Timna

Last weekend I drove with Evgeni, Leeor, Lilach and Michelle to Eilat to spend the weekend near the red sea and enjoy the sun. We stayed in a nice hotel and enjoyed the swimming pool quite a bit, girls shopped for tax free clothes and guys slacked and drank good wine at night :).


On Saturday Michelle and I decided to leave the swimming pool for a cultural trip in Timna park (I just realized there is not even a Wikipedia entry !).

Besides interesting rock formations in the Negev the park is the location of the oldest known copper mines in the world. They are believed to have been exploited as far back as 6000BC, and provided copper to the Egyptian kingdom. Some engravings on the walls done by the slave miners showing some Pharaoh's conquests are there as witness of the past.

I love the landscapes of the Negev, and Timna is beautiful. We were amazed at the idea that humans would survive there 8000 years ago mining in that heat (and we were there in October...).
More pics at the usual place.

Stuffed eggplants

Felt like cooking this evening so I tried out some random reciepe that did hit on my "eggplant+feta" search on Marmiton. I used ground sheep meat, onion, garlic, tomatoe, mint, feta,salt, pepper and no sugar. It was quite good but definitely not the best I had tried. The mint, feta and tomatoe bring originality to the taste but in the end I am not a big fan.

Hop in Frankfurt

On my way back from India I had a pretty bad connexion in Frankfurt (16 hours to kill), so I just grabbed my camera and went around the city by foot, tram and train stopping to take pictures and drink some pils. Pics at the usual place.

40 years

today, I am wearing his picture on my tee-shirt at work, and only one noticed.

PS: added some shots to the recent galeries also

Some pictures from Kerala

My camera was not on vacation despite what some are pretending, I am slowly going through all the pictures. The gallery is being populated on zenfolio (and some portraits added too). For the lazy ones, a few first samples here:

Wedding procession in Tamil Nadu


Tea gardens near Munnar, Kerala


Tea everywhere


Pouring my Elaichi tea

Tamil Nadu and Kerala weekend

Last weekend I went on a trip with Ashok around southern India. As my visa got delayed we didn't book transportation long enough before so it ended up being an interresting part of the trip. We left Bangalore by bus and reached Madurai 9 hours later after 450km through the countryside of Tamil Nadu. This was a bus similar to the one I took to go to Dharwad: air conditionning, reclining seats etc...

And this time as it was a day travel I had the pleasure to watch 2 whole Tamil movies ! The best part of it is that I had all the explainations from Ashok in parallel. It seems there is a common storyline between pretty much every Indian movie (don't shoot me if you're a fan, just correct me;): The hero gets introduced, time for a song, the hero meets the cute girl, time for a song, the hero meets funny guy, time for a joke, the hero falls in love with the girl, time for a song, the hero beats the crap out of a bunch of villains that are getting on his way to mary the girl, time for a song celebrating the victory (every single fight happens to be"Matrix" like... without the sci-fi explaination), after a bunch of other fights, other jokes and other songs, time for the wedding of the hero and the cute girl and a final song, YAY!

In the end the 9 hours were not that long. I also learnt a lot about Indian politics, and especialy Tamil politics (as Ashok is from Madras). More about this later. We slept in a Hotel downtown Madurai and left the next morning early for Munnar with a rented car (and a driver). The 160km took us almost 5 hours, the road wasn't too bad but the usual slalom between cows, rikshaws, trucks, buses, pedestrians, bikes does not help, and half of the travel was on a very narrow mountain road where driving faster than 40km/h would have felt like being in a rally car. The scenaries all along the mountain area were stunning, I will post pictures once I am back, but just this section of the road was worth the trip. Once we arrived In Kerala we drove through 50km of mountains covered with tea gardens. The greens that you see there are amazing, vivid, bright, and understandable as it seems rain rarely stops there.
Once in Munnar we ate in a small crowded restaurant that serves food on banana leaves instead of plates and where you eat the rice or dosa, sambar, chutneys and curries all with your hand (the right one!). I got better at tearing breads and dosas with just one hand but I still need some practice (you really don't want to use your left hand to eat!). I got a lot of surprised looks as if it was the first time they saw an occidental eating with its hands and without a plate (I was obviously smiling proudly). The hotel we had booked ended up being full and saying we never booked anything, so we stayed downtown instead of in the middle of the tea gardens.
We spent the next afternoon and next morning going around the local mountains and lakes with the car and stopping when the weather was permitting it to hike around and enjoy the scenaries. I took lots and lots of pictures that I hope will turn nice. We then drove back to Madurai stopping on the way to buy tea.

That day happened to be the day the ruling party of Tamil Nadu was having a Bandh (general strike). The whole thing started with some project of digging a canal through Rama's bridge (set of high underwater mountains between Sri Lanka and India). Because of its importance in Hindou religion Mythology some religious parties oppose the project, and tension started to raise between them and the ruling party in Tamil Nadu (atheist). That day the ruling party had declared a general strike (commuted into hunger strike because the supreme court juged the strike unconstitutional) in the state. So on the road to Madurai we saw lots of political meetings where something stroke me: the speakers were always turning their back tothe crowd... I still don't get it. anyways that was pretty fun talking about local politics on the road.

We then spent a few hours in Madurai visiting the very large Shiva temple there. Ashok gave me a detailed visit of the importance of each part of the temple and that was an interresting dive into Hindou culture.

We took a night train back to Bangalore, but because of the last minute ticket thing we ended up in relatively cheap compartments that were not designed for people my size. Probably 300 people bounced on my feet that were extending 20cm after the bed during the night... I went straight to bed once in Bangalore, before having a nice brunch at the Leela with Ashok, Aravindh and his family. That concluded a pretty nice weekend trip.

Flying again

I started to schedule a trip to India at the beginning of this month and was planning to stop by for a weekend in Paris to visit the little monkey and his growing family. For once I even had started all formalities early, that was without counting on bureaucrats creativity. The visa process for India got changed, now they request a criminal record to the French autorities, which are well known for their speed. I was supposed to fly 3 days ago and got the visa delivered today...
So I am still going to India but will have to skip on France this time, I am very sorry, especially for my dear little monkey. I'll try to hop by to visit you before Christmas still. I hope things will be fine for me also as it's not even sure I'll get seats on my return flight...

All the news aren't bad though, next weekend Ashok and Aravindh are taking me to Madurai and Munnar, I am excited just at the thought of hiking in the tea gardens :).

Old pictures

I started to go over my old digital pictures and am slowly posting them on my Zenfolio, today a pretty good batch from 2000 to 2005 (California, Japan, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey...). A lot of pictures from France and the USA are still missing though (I still have over 5000 of those to sort).

French - middle eastern cuisine equivalences

I have been eating and cooking here long enough that I gathered a few tricks or equivalences between our cuisines. Basically what I will list are ingredients in french cuisine that if swapped with their middle eastern "equivalent" will definitely give a middle eastern taste to your dish:

- lettuce -> cucumber (typical salad has finely chopped cucumber and tomatoes as the base)
- vinegar -> lemon juice
- butter/oil -> olive oil
- sour cream -> tehina (sezame sauce, goes very well with meat by ex. in sinia)
- pepper -> cinamon (can mix with some nutmeg too, generally dishes here are not hot)
- chilli -> paprika (on chicken or humus by ex.)
- beef -> lamb
- pork -> chicken
- parsley -> coriander or mint
- pasta -> rice

If you just try these swaps on simple everyday french dishes you'll discover interresting oriental tastes and it actually works for pretty much all the dishes using these ingredients. Obviously if you're coming from the middle east you can try to reverse it :).

Old russian lenses

A colleague did lend me 2 old Russian lenses that can fit on my camera through an adaptor. Those were USSR made copies of post WWII German lenses and they happen to work, and pretty well. I might post a few pics taken with these antiquities in the next few days, but it's always amazing to take pieces of engineering over 40 years old and have them working right away, without having to read a manual or fix anything, it just works. If computers could just be like that... well maybe I wouldn't have a job.

CoeXisT

Saturday I took Ashok to Akko to visit the city and buy a few of the CoeXisT T-shirts that some of you noticed on my photo gallery. They get a lot of success everywhere I wore them so I've been distributing quite a few :). For those that missed it:


We went around the city, enjoyed a nice lunch in the harbor on a sunny day:

We then stopped in a coffee shop I like, smoke narguila, drank Arabic coffee with cardamom and gossiped all afternoon. I couldn't do much more anyway my legs were so sour from restarting basket ball the previous day (OK, I was close to needing a wheelchair).

Blues concert

Last night Evgeni took a group of us to a small Russian pub downtown where a blues duo was set to perform. In the end 2 members of the assistance ended up joining our two bluesmen at various times during the night. The beer was good and the music even better, it had been a long time since last time I had that good of live music in a bar.

More pictures at the usual place.

Peace talks restarting ?

Almost 15 years later, and a coup in Gaza, it seems that serious peace talks are restarting, with more or less the same solutions. It failed last time so nobody had been really trying since, but as there is not really any other solution someone needed to restart it. Exchanging land, connecting Gaza and the West Bank, recognizing the refugee problem and doing something about it, and finally splitting the holy sites in Jerusalem, everything seems to be there, the problems always have been in the details. Haaretz article here.

More pics

Here we go, I posted a few pictures from my trip to France and in Portland on zenfolio. And Yes I am lazy and don't feel like typing lots of stuff so here comes a picture for your eyes:

Back

I just came back from Portland, OR. I developped a few pictures trying to stay awake to fight jetlag. Here is a proof that sometimes it doesn't rain there:

Flying to France

I'll spend the rest of this week in the French alps with my family, on my way to Portland OR for a week of work. See you.

Rays of light

This evening I went to have dinner on the beach with Ashok and Aravindh. We had a good plate of tabouleh and baba ganoush watching for a spectacular sunset.

Akko Soukh

Yesterday I went to visit Waffa and Octavio in Akko. while they were closing the shop I went around the soukh, camera in hand seeing if I could capture some of what I love in the old city. You can see a few samples on Zenfolio as usual. Here is one I quite liked:


As you can see I disturbed the owner of that small square :). Anyway Akko is owned by stray cats.

Beaufort

Yesterday I joined Omer and Amir and Tel Aviv for the night. The drive was longer than expected, I spent almost one hour stopped on the highway. It seems that two palestinians managed to infiltrate Israel from Gaza and the Police had set blockades on all roads and were filtering traffic all over Israel.

For once I wasn't driving too fast :/.

After chatting and grabbing beers we picked up a movie, under Omer recommendation we picked Beaufort: an Israeli war movie that got a silver bear in Berlin festival.

"Perched atop a mountain in southern Lebanon, the Beaufort Castle has passed from army to army for hundreds of years. In the year 2000, Liraz Liberti, a young Israeli commander, is in charge of defending the last outpost.
It has become his reason to live, filling him with power, fueling him with self-importance, driving him to allow perilous - and ultimately meaningless - operations... Bomb specialist Ziv loses his life when the bomb he is about to defuse explodes. 19-year-old Zitlawi dies in a missile attack. And Oshri, who can´t wait to see his girlfriend in New Jersey, is severely injured in a bombing that leaves the swaggering Liraz frozen with terror... This is their story not of war, but of retreat, a story of no enemy, but an amorphous entity that drops bombs from the skies."

I do recommand watching it, well at least not on a depressed day.

PS: the building where I took the Front 5 picture 2 weeks ago has been destroyed, It looked kind of out of place, but no more interresting grafitis guesses.

The 15th of Av

Thursday night the city of Haifa organized a special street party for the 15th of Av. They blocked all the traffic to the main Carmel street just above my place, put a small scene, loud music, and all the bars and restaurants opened stands on the street. Six of us spent the evening in the crowd, enjoying the crowd, the fun and a few drinks. Here is how it looked like (more pics here):


Dancing on the bus stop with kegs.


Concert scene

The next day Omer, Michelle and I joined a few Omer friends camping on the beaches of the Tiberias lake. No pictures for you, the weather was so hot that we ended up dipping in water all day and all night (felt great :).

Weekend in Tel Aviv

I spent this last weekend in the city that never sleeps and... well I didn't sleep much either :). Friday afternoon an excellent lunch in a good restaurant, party during the night, saturday night Tori Amos concert and in between long promenades in the nearby parks and sea front. Tori's concert was a fantastic performance and convinced me I should listen more to her :).

I took the camera along (it's becoming an habit) and some samples can be found at the usual place. I found this scene to be pretty amusing (probably not for non french though):


And if any of you can find what the following picture is refering to, I am quite curious. Google didn't give me any easy answer.


I assume it is a reference to фронт though, but why 5 ?

Montfort

This weekend I went back to Monfort (fortified mount in french), an old crusader castle in a quiet isolated valley of western Galil. There was hopefully a nice breeze and some clouds that helped us deal with the summer's heat. The place is still filled with serenity, and what once was a very important road to watch over remained isolated and unbuild for almost a millenium.

Weekend in Jordan

After a week trying to organize a trip to Petra from Haifa for 6 to 8 people the standard last minute slackers skipped again. I actually won't complain, traveling at 4 is so much more convenient than more. All organization plans failed so we travelled "my" way (Habeeb said "Inch Allah" way). We drove to the border with my car, grabbed a Taxi on the other side and made our way to Kerak castle (Le Crac des Moabites) stopping on the way for some great kebabs, and nice views on the dead sea shore.



As you can see I am having fun stitching pictures (it saves me buying and carrying a wide angle lense :). Once in the castle, a nice refreshing breeze welcomed us, the scenary and the feeling was so great that we got our driver to overwait for us.



We reached Petra just for the sunset and to hear fireworks and parties starting.



We spent the whole saturday going around Petra the Nabatean city, from the gorge to the monastery, under a hopefully not too hot July sun. As my last trip there, the sky was clear blue, the site beautiful and gigantic, full of light contrasts and colors. I advise you to look at the pictures here, here and here if you have some time.