Flying Home

Since Budapest, quite a lot has been going on. Early December we had the visit of Ralf and Kellie that we had met in Ethiopia in the Simien mountains and convinced to stop in Israel to visit us on their way from South Africa to Jordan. We visited Akko and Nazareth with them, and finished the nice weekend by a great "gigot d'agneau" baked in the oven.
The following week Lilach and Leeor were finally back from their honeymoon around the americas. Last week, M's mom arrived from the US and we took L&L and Mom for a little hike in the Golan heights in Gamla. The weather was good enough for mid december, and the Golan winter was mostly looking like fall as you can see here:



Tonight we're flying to France for the Christmas holidays. More news next year !
Merry X-mas and Happy new year all.

Budapest

We spent the last weekend in Budapest, Hungary. In a weekend we experienced sunshine and blue sky, overcast, rain, snow and blizzard so we saw the city in pretty every weather possible. We spent the first day mostly on Buda side, visiting the royal palace, churches and other monuments on the hill. We started the day by pastries at Gerbeaud (the oldest pastry shop in town), and finished it with delicious goose delights in traditional Hungarian fashion. The next day we spent the first half relaxing at the city's oldest Turkish baths. Hot and cold pools, massage, natural hot springs... it felt great. The afternoon we went all around Pest and its ancient monuments and finished by a Christmas market under the snow, perfect ! Pictures here as usual.

Pest Parliament

Buda Royal castle and chain bridge over the Danube

Farewell Supratik

Last night we had a barbecue party at my place for Supratik's farewell. His relocation ends this week and he's flying back to India. He enjoyed the beer and entrecote quite a bit:


Omer was relaxed as he didn't have to drive (temporary loss of license that we were kind of celebrating as well):


And Anton was having fun:


The rest of the pictures here.

Apollonia - Arsuf

Last weekend we ended up being a little bit late for our plan to visit the Tel Aviv museum of modern art, after our stop at a book shop. We ended up picking the map and loking for any nearby national park and ended up in Apollonia. We really enjoyed the visit of this costal park situated just north of Herzelia. You can read a bit more about the place here in english, or in french.

The weather was at its best, warm but not too much thanks to some clouds and a fall breeze that sailboats coming from Herzelia's marina were clearly enjoying. We liked the fortress but I mostly ended up taking pictures of the seascape as you can see:




And this has to be my first sunset picture that looks the best in B&W


After the visit of the park we headed to Herzelia's marina to finish the day, had a beer, visited the mall and had an early sushi dinner with a view on the port.

More pics at the usual place.

Danse shows

For M's birthday I took her to Tel Aviv's Opera to see a dance show featuring the Cedar Lake contemporary ballet. We both liked it very much, me for my first experience with a dance show and M because she used to go see these a lot and it had been a while.

This weekend we did it again, the Bat Sheva company was giving a show at the Suzanne Dellal center for dance and theater (in Neve Tzedek, the old city of Tel-Aviv). Before going there we spent the end of the afternoon having a nice walk around the old city of Jaffa, and finished by a fantastic dinner in a wine bar (Yo'ezer wine bar). We had delicious french style food with fine by-the-glass wines which allowed us to taste quite some variety. I found this place the best restaurant we have eaten at in Israel to date (and we've tried quite a lot of fine places), and some other seem to agree with me (D.R. put it on top of his casual dining experience). We had a great day, but no pictures for you yet because I need to finish the slides roll and develop it...

Regate in Haifa ?

Last weekend I spotted strange white spots all over the sea, I still don't know where all these boats were sailing to but It made for a nice picture :).

Ethiopia pictures online

Finally I got through and sorted my 3 weeks of frenetical shooting. I tried to keep a reasonably small selection for Zenfolio so if you want more you'll have to wait for the photobook :).
You can find a directory with portraits of priests like this one:

They were pretty good at not crossing the photographer's eyes but many actually seem to enjoy having their portrait taken. Most of them are holding some kind of ancient artifacts, an old codex, some precious cross...
The rest of the trip is there, and I tried to cover all the sites we went to.

Back

We've been back from Ethiopia for a few days and no pictures posted yet ! I know I am behind, too many pictures blabla, and the latest excuse is that a nasty flu virus decided to play with us for a few days as soon as we've been back. As I am nice you'll get 1 picture, and you'll be waiting like our scout in the Simien mountains did... a little bit more.

Ethiopia

Tonight we're leaving for 18 days vacations in Ethiopia. I'll try to post updates if I can find a cyber cafe there. We're planning to go from Addis Ababa to Bahir Dar, Gonder, the Simien mountains, Axum and Lalibella with another potential side trip to the Tigray area or Harare before going back to Addis.

See you.

Leeor and Lilach's wedding

Yesterday was the big day for L&L. The wedding took place on the Mediterranean sea shore in Caesarea in a place with a nice view, in parallel with a Deep Purple concert in the nearby roman amphitheatre. Everybody had a good time :).

Lilach

Leeor

Under the Hupa

The rest of the pictures is here, and no there are no Deep Puprple pictures...

10 years old roll of film ?

Some time ago, I pulled my old SLR camera from its bag and noticed it was loaded with some film. Half of the roll was used, and I had no idea what was on it, only thing I knew was that it was from before I switched to digital in 1999. I decided to finish the roll, and got it developped and scanned (poorly btw, I'll need to find a way to get better scans) at a nearby photo store. I was surprised the film was still in decent shape.
Once developped I realized that most pictures were from my vacations to the alps and Cantal 10 years ago with David, plus some pictures from Fleming dorm. The quality is definitely far from the files I get with my current digital camera, but there is a kind of old fashioned mood in these pictures that I like. Maybe I'll get an old film body that can take my new rangefinder lenses and go through a few rolls (it's not really worth it with my gigantic old/not so good optics SLR). We'll see if I get the courage to get the films developped and scanned or if I'll give up because of the hassle.

Anyways, here are a few examples:

My old tent

Some old church

a pass in Cantal

10 years later, my home in Haifa

and a rose in my living room.

The rest of the film is there.

Stella Maris

After discovering that neighborhood of Haifa last week, we went to enjoy a sunset from the fantastic viewpoint of Stella Maris. It offers a 270 degres panorama from Lebanese border cliffs, to Haifa bay and southern coast beaches. There is also an old church and a radar station that had a tumultuous past during Israel independance war.
We enjoyed a colourfull sunset:

And I discovered a small French "monument aux morts". This is not so surprising as the neighborhood is called the "French Carmel" and features street names like "Emile Zola" or "Dreyfus", but what was surprising is that it was actually in remembrance of the French soldiers that died during the Napoleonian wars here, during the siege of Acre:

Rest of the gallery here as usual.

Dragons

It had been quite some time since last time I dragged friends to the beach for a fire blowing party. Last night a few collegues and friends joined us at the student's beach for a few beers and some flame throwing. You can read an old post on this blog explaining all the details on how to do it. As I was pretty busy Michelle took all the pictures and was very successful at it: those are definitely the best fire blowing pictures I ever got from any session.

Up

Horizontal

As you can see here, I also dragged Yuval and Avinash to try it ;)

Romeo and Juliette

Are so close from each other for so long, but have never been able to touch each other. They are so sad that one always has a tear ready to fall, but still their love is eternal and they are forever together:

More pictures of the beautiful stalactite cave near Bet Shemesh here.

Some long due news

It's been a while... We've been quite busy all weekends of July learning scuba diving in the ancient Roman harbor of Caesarea. After about 7 days of diving we completed our PADI open water and advanced open water diver courses. We can now go dive down to 30m by ourselves and we intend to take advantage of it :). We unfortunately had mostly low visibility and agitated waters but we were still able to enjoy some of the remains of Herod's sunken harbor.

Last weekend we drove north to Yehiam fortress and enjoyed a quiet afternoon there overlooking Western Galilee. For once the sky was quite covered and it wasn't too hot. The fortress is located in a Kibbutz, and was used by the kibbutzim as a stronghold during the independence war, and some of their additional fortifications are still up. The rest of the castle was build by the ottomans on top of the ruins of a crusader castle.

On saturday we went for a hike in the Carmel national park, but as we got up late it was a bit too hot and we were too low on water to hike for long so we just climbed on top of a small hill and cliff, enjoyed the view and drove back to Haifa to finish the day playing with waves on the beach.


I also started to take advantage of a new macro lens to take closeup of flowers or lizards as you can see here:

Random pics

Saturday, I did pretty much nothing besides sleeping, having a nap or two and cooking. Well I also spent some time on M's balcony taking random IR pictures. As I like some of them quite a bit I am going to share them with you.

The Dwarf says Hello.


Towards the sea

You can see a few more here: Zenfolio Elfefe - IR

And once I was done with IR I took a few pictures of a roaring tiger and this one of an interresting lensing effect:

Charlotte

So yesterday I was working from home and I grew incredibly frustrated with work stuff until I reached a breaking point and decided to do something else to change my mind. I then went to the supermarket and bought food when I spotted a nice pack of "boudoirs". It reminded me that it was probably 20 years since my last bite of a Charlotte cake and decided I would just prepare one.
I did peel and cut 2 ripe mangoes, 2 white peaches, pitted a handful of cherries, brought 3 egg whites into a "snow", opened 1 pack of 15cl of sour cream, prepared a large bowl of sirup, adding fresh vanilla sticks to it and half a glass of white rhum.
I mixed the egg whites with the sour cream and sugar into a nice soft mousse, soaked 1 by 1 the boudoirs in the sirup for like 1 second each and put them covering a deep dish. Then layed on it alternatively fruits, mousse and boudoirs until reaching the top covered with a final layer of boudoirs. I did keep this cold in the fridge for a few hours.
Then I used the 3 egg yokes to make a "creme patissiere" that ended up more like a custard. Mix the 3 egg yokes with 50g of sugar and 25g of flour (I didn't measure though), put 1/4 of a liter of milk to boil with some more vanilla sticks, then when it is boiling mix the eggs in and let it cook until proper texture is reached.

I used this vanilla custard to put on top of the charlotte once cooled and reversed on a plate, among with the cherries.

M and I were really happy as the cake turned out delicious ! As you can see it went down fast:

White Night

To celebrate the anniversary of Tel Aviv becoming a world heritage city, the municipality organizes a white night where you can visit art museums, see shows, etc all night long. It also matches the color of the city, and the fact that lights are on everywhere all the night. M. wanted to see it so we headed there late night. I have to say that we missed all the "artistic" activities as they seemed all mostly done when we made it to the busy areas of Tel Aviv way past midnight. However restaurants and bars were all very busy and open, people drinking and dancing everywhere; we ended up having a late supper by like 3 AM there:

and went back home tired.

Eilat and Jaffa

For working a year on a project now long finished and judged very successful by my employer, I have been offered a 4 days trip to Eilat's "Club Med" for 2. L&L joined us on the trip so we enjoyed the blazing sun, the beach activities and hotel facilities together.
We had some fun snorkeling around the coral beach there, but it left me all sad to see that despite the conservation efforts by the National parks authority, the reef was not very populated anymore and not as nice as what we had experienced in Hawaii or Colombia. It was still nice but a bitter sunburn on my back reminded me that even with cream I'd better not play too much under the sun...

We spent some time at the local aquarium which was kind of showing what we should have been seeing under water by ourselves. It was a great occasion to try "underwater" photography and you can check some of the samples here.


The next weekend H&R had invited us to join them in Jaffa, so we had a very nice guided tour of the city with historical and socio-economical perspective. The afternoon was very nice and we enjoyed the trip a lot.

We finished in a local restaurant called Dr Shukshuka where we had a gargantuesque Tunisian style dinner (including shukshuka, couscous, etc...).
I need to put a recipe here as it seems I can't find any good one online, the short version is that it's eggs poached in tomato sauce with bell peppers onions and chilies.

Playing with explosives leads to ...

a cease fire !!! Yes I was not that far from reality last week ;). As you can read pretty much anywhere on the medias (like here) Israel and the Hamas signed a cease fire deal to start tomorrow morning, with gradual improvements which if everything happens well will end up ... well forget about that, we'll see tomorrow how it starts.
Anyways Israel is talking to Syria about peace and giving the Golan back, makes truce deals with Hamas in Gaza, and since today seems also to open the door to talks with Lebanon, all at once! Something's definitely happening, it seems that with the US presidential elections coming the stupid "we don't talk to the Axis of Evil" is finally gone and diplomacy is restarting.

Playing with explosives

Can be dangerous...

Ref: Le Monde, Photo : REUTERS/IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA

As said in the article (but in french) a group of Hamas activists was playing in their basement with firecrackers they were planning to use to protest peacefully the Israeli aggression. Unfortunately they had smoked way too much and someone dropped a match on the magic box and blew the whole place up. They obviously first blamed Israel for the explosion, but then reverted to declare them as martyrs in an almost finished heroic operation. OK the article doesn't say that and I am being slightly sarcastic but the meaning is preserved.

At the same time the same Hamas is negotiating a truce with Israel, which is clearly not being enthusiastic about it but had postponed yesterday military operations to try to "give the truce a chance". With a little bit of chance if they keep postponing it, all Hamas military wing members will self detonate in an act of martyrdom with more results than the past 8 years of peace talks and military operations combined ?

All this to say that things aren't looking great with the neighbors and that escalation keeps going... Maybe one day someone will realize that having the biggest one is not that important.

Istanbul

Yeah, still on the move... Last weekend we hopped to Istanbul to visit Nico for the weekend. We had a fantastic weather and great company. We did the usual Istanbul tour of churches, mosqs, palaces, cisterns, bazaars, kebabs and pubs.

Karye Church

Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosq surrounded by Marmara sea and the Golden Horn

Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern

Niko and Didem at one of the food'n drinks place we visited in the French street of Beyoglu

More pics here.

Concert in Caesarea

Last night we went to a Israeli-Spanish music and dance show in Caesarea. Our company had booked the roman amphitheater for the occasion and the show was great. It was a fusion of traditional spanish guitar music with a lot of heteroclyte percussions, all in a very "ethnic" style. It's quite hard to describe but we had a great time.



Additionaly to the pictures from yesterday I also (finaly) posted Bangkok and Sri-Lanka pictures on Zenfolio.

Bangkok

I left Bangalore Friday night through the new airport. My flight happened to be only the second leaving from this airport ever. I was kind of anxious things would go bad with the airport opening but I made it only 2 hours late to Bangkok.
The new airport is far north from the city but it took us only 75 minutes to get there ( we had planned for 2 hours). It seemed all cops of Karnataka had decided they wanted to be there, and obviously too many of them can only create traffic jams which they were successful at. Once arrived at the airport it was like a full battalion of 2000 cops with bellies and wooden sticks roaming around a bit lost with that "Idunowhatamdoinherebutamhere" look in the eyes.

The building itself is gigantic, ultra modern, and looking great, nice duty free shops and cafes in the international area so once the workers will be trained it will be fine. Sree even succeeded at getting me interviewed about what I though about the new airport ! ;)

Once in Bangkok, I checked in my hotel by the river, and as I arrived early my room wasn't ready so I got upgraded to the before last floor, with complimentary business lounge, great view unlimited booze etc... Ok I took advantage of the deal quite a bit ! And I love The View:


During the 3 last days, I took a lot the shuttle boats cruising on the river to go sightseeing around the city. The main temples and the royal palace are really very nice and I was pleasantly surprised. The rest of my time I've been walking in markets and narrow streets enjoying the city and its great spicy food.

What Pho Temple

Who said HOT! ?

Obviously I didn't find enough time to sort out all the pictures from Sri Lanka and here, plus the laptop screen is giving artificially warm color tones and I don't like developing the pictures on it so I'll do all this when I am back home (maybe tomorrow :).