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.