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.