Dali

We arrived early in the morning in Dali and took a cab
to the old town. Unfortunately the weather wasn't still
at its best and the suposedly stunning scenary was
remaining under cover.
We rented bikes and went around to watch the 3
pagodas, climb to a boudhist temple and go down near
the lake. The city is nearly at 2000m and the
surrounding mountains at 4000m. The sun showed himself
enough so we can enjoy a bit of the scenary and get
nicely sunburnt :).



We wandered all around the nice old city, took a lot
of pictures, had once again great food, and came back
to our hostel to prepare the next day trip to Lijiang.

On the way to Yunan

We had a last round of shopping :) in Yangshuo (baught
some warm cloth as it seems it'll be cold for all our
trip and some flash for the camera). We got a ride
back to Guilin airport where our plane to Kunming was
delayed (they were fixing one engine:).
We managed to get a bed in the night train to Dali and
killed time in a small restaurant not far from the
train station. It took us 45 min to order as noone
was speaking a single word of english but we ended up
with really good food.
The neighbourhood of the train station was like most
trainstation end up in most of the places... quite
unfriendly, Evgeni was almst running despite his 30kg
load to try to avoid kids and beggars.
In the train we chatted for a few hours with an old
painter from Beijing that was on a trip around the
country to find inspiration. He showed us the thousand
of pictures he took already of which some will become
very nice oil paintings.The man had been around the
world and was a very interresting character.

Yangshuo

We did a bike ride to the next town, then took a bamboo boat ride from a nearby village back. The scenary was fantastic and the ride nice but the weather was freezing cold (windy and 10 ish), we were almost happy to have to ride the bike again just to get warm. We got a bit scared the first time our boat went down one of these one meter wall (the bamboo raft was barely above water with the two of us two bikes and the girl steering it).








On the way back home we tasted a few fruits at the local market and went for some shopping before dinner. I couldn't resist and finally tryed dog meat (not much to be said about it though, not great not bad).
Tomorrow afternoon we're leaving for Kunming then Dali.

Arriving in Yangshuo

Long long day,we took the plane to Guilin from Beijing at 7:30 and arriving 2:30 before the flight wasn't really needed :) but we wanted to be on the safe side. Then a long car ride to Yangshou where we learn that the moonsoon started ... yesterday :(, the temperature dropped from 28 to 9... Well despite the gray and rainy weather I admit that the scenaries here are some of the most incredible I have ever been given to see. I'll flood you with pictures of limestone spikes covered by forest and just above peaceful rivers and ricefields.


I start to like it here :), unlike Madras on the beach where I attracted swarms of young boys that want to be on a picture with me, here it's swarm of young girls !!! We'll see if they send me the pictures :).


We met some Israelis downtown that recognized us as israelis (still have to figure it out how, guess is that our backpacks gave us) and invited us this evening for Pessah's Seder. We joined in and the dinner was quite enjoyable.

Forbidden City

Evgeni's birthday :) 26.
We went all around the forbidden city, Tienanmen square, we missed Mao's corpse as it's closed sundays though ;), then we visited the summer palace and finished by an evening at a chinese opera. Pretty busy day as you see, it's easier to describe how we were tired than how we were amazed by everything we saw. The chinese emperors definitely had taste (and not only for young girls).

The Forbidden city


Tienanmen under not that heavy surveillance :/.


The duck


The summer garden


The opera

One of the hard task of this trip is to dodge all the tourist traps that you attract like a magnet. From fake watches, to fake paintings, through scenic taxi rides and guides with an accent while speaking english that would make Jacques Delors cry.
We also had a birthday lunch at a fancy Pekin duck restaurant, yummee.

Great Wall

En route for the great wall ! We picked up the tour that looked like the least crowded one and we were right. We hiked for around 4 hours on the wall joining one touristic site to another. The weather was great, a bit cold and windy but very clear. It was beautifull, mostly empty outside of our group and a few Mongol girls that hiked all day with us to sell us postcards. We're dead tired, I am not accustomed anymore to hiking for kilometers on stairs in the wind.




We finished the day at the food market in Beijing. There you can find skewers of pretty much anything, raning from lamb to scorpions, including snakes, lizards, larvas, strawberries, etc... We stared at those stands in awe and were pretty much conservative (besides my snake skewer I admit).

Arrival in Beijing

Made it to Beijing, after a long line at the immigration I jumped in a cab and met Evgeni at the door of the hostel (quite lucky). I was surprised coming from India how ultra modern and western most of Beijing was looking. My cab driver had a small medallion hanging from his rear view mirror with Mao's face on it, and 20 cm away his steering wheel cover was full of dancing Mickeys. I wonder what the old Mao would think of this association.
Our hostel is situated at about 5 minutes walking from the forbidden city, in a quite old area, right by the 5 stars but at a chinese price. We're pretty happy about the choice (thanks Dana). As soon as I arrived we left for a short walk which ended up lasting close to 3 hours, as we were always spotting something that was driving us further away. We hiked all around the forbidden city and Tienanmen and ended up so late that the restaurant we wanted to have dinner at was closed.

We had dinner at a small wonton place, ordered for like 4 people and payed the price of a falafel, beer included. Evgeni is not yet very accustomed to the local food so ends up eating vegetarian. Good thing I am with him so I order plenty of stuff and he can try and stick with what he can eat :).

Leaving Bangalore

I have been self mailing blog entries every few days because blogger is blocked in China.

Flight decided to leave late from Bangalore, I caught my Beijing plane in Singapore by -15 min (yes it waited for me). I love Singapore Airline I have to admit: lots of leg room, very tweakable seats, and the cutest flight assistants ever in a gorgeous dress. Now I understand where the reputation of fligh assistants came from :).

Dharwad

I spent last weekend in and near Dharwad, Northern Karnataka, thanks to Rajani that took me to her hometown for the weekend. She definitely saved me from a boring weekend in Bangalore, instead this has been a weekend of discoveries. Among them many fruits (and other foods) discoveries. I had 3 premieres between chiku, djam (this was the fruit to guess), and acerola. Why speaking so much about food beside my big tendency to like everything associated to it, Rajani's mother tried to make me explode with lots of great discoveries (I am hoping to get the reciepes :).

We went around Dharwad, a quiet "little" city (little according to Rajani, 750000 population according wikipedia) and visited the very nice university. I was amazed by the way Indian administration "works" when Rajani went to get her international driving license (keywords here are middle-man and bakshish).

On sunday we went to a jungle resort on the way and not too far from Goa. We hiked in the middle of plantation and in the forest, swam in the river, napped in a hamac, went on a boat tour and spotted a few kingfisher flying around.


Just before leaving some official came in the resort with his personal escort and friends, and we piggybacked on their bamboo raft tour.


This weekend was not about visiting some known place of India but it was definitively the best weekend I ever had in India.

Another guess

Before I tell you stories about last weekend you'll have to guess what this is:
(and yes this is edible, remember who is posting).

Gone for a month

I am leaving for India for 2 weeks of work and then taking 2 weeks vacation in China. I'll try to post some news here.
/wave

Bonjour c'est pour un retrait !

Je suis tombe sur cet article sur Libe:

Un homme d'une soixantaine d'années qui fréquente son agence bancaire une à deux fois par jour depuis un an, ça met en confiance. Jusqu'au jour où il s'évapore avec 20 kilos de diamants d'une valeur estimée à environ 28 millions de dollars.

Chapeau ! Ca me rappelle des parties de jeux de roles tout ca :). Arsene Lupin est donc sextagenaire :).

Yehiam Fort and Zfad

This week I was still a bit jet-lagged so I ended up waking early and falling asleep early every day. This morning it didn't fail, I was up at 8... on a weekend day. So for once I had a whole weekend day in front of me I decided to go on a tour to Safed (Zfad). I looked up quickly where I could stop on my way and saw that in my previous trips I failed to visit Yehiam fort. The place was very nice as you can see on these pictures so no regrets.




In the end I arrived in Zfad, I guess a little too close to shabat as everything was mostly deserted. I was surprised by the amount of construction and roadwork going on and was wondering if it was resulting from last summer rocket fire (but I was expecting work to be done so I don't know). Anyway I wandered for some time in the quiet streets of the old city from an artist gallery to another.





Later on I stopped on my way back in En Kamounim to buy some cheese, I guess it's my french roots, I can't skip on good cheese. En Kamounim has a farm producing lots of goat and sheep cheese and has a restaurant where you can try all of their cheeses, it is located north west of the sea of Galil on the road to Karmiel.

Hot stuff

She told me hot stuff, I couldn't resist... and invited her home.

I messed up my blog's template

I tryed to fix it and couldn't get back the old template working, so I put this instead. And it's not that ugly !

Pigeons !

Today I was browsing the news and found that news on Slashdot:

Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."

This reminded me of the numerous usages invented using remote controled animals:

• Google pigeon rank technology
• State University of New York remote controled rats
• WWII US army bat bombs

Well after all this I discovered that we got one step closer to all these cyborgs stories in the SF litterature, and I am actually really impressed by the state of these research (and preparing plans to take over the world using 2 crazy remote controled mouses).

Ok, I am working too much, I am taking a break.

Flying

One week in the US to present some of my late work at a conference and meeting friends on the way. Hardest part will to not get sick as temperature is about 25-30 degres celcius lower there than here.

Cya.

New pics posted !

on my Flickr, last ones were like 6 months old.

When will it be ?

I haven't written much about politics here for quite a while. I probably was just too depressed about it or something like that, but something really changed with last summer's war. By then I was more hearing questions about how to make peace happen, last, or at least manage to live a reasonably safe life.

Last year there were still people believing that Israel disengaging from Gaza was one step towards peace with Palestine, Israel's foreign ennemy were not very vocal and the only obstacle towards peace in here was finger pointed as the Hamas by most of the western world. So what happened?
I still remember showing lots of hope when the "prisoners plan" (full text here) was getting signed by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah (representing most of the parties then). You know that plan that everybody forgot about, that was prepared by Palestinians from various factions in Israeli prisons, and where most factions were agreeing among things to cease arm struggles outside of the 1967 green line (point 3), forming a unity government (point 6), and that was speaking of Israel as a state and not as "Zionist entity" as usual, and finally talking about negotiations and diplomacy to solve the problems.

So what about this? It ages back to may 2006 and in the past week (9 months later then) Fatah and Hamas agreed in Mecca to form a unity government to try to stop the civilian war that is raging between them in Gaza for almost 2 months. Well, when this plan was getting agreed upon by political wings, Hamas military wing abducted an Israeli soldier within Israel which triggered a (unfortunately usual) large military operation by Israel in Gaza. The plan was dropped and forgotten almost immediately as peace was not an immediate objective anymore. Some blame the Hamas military wing to have done this because they do not want to cease armed struggle versus Israel inside Israel, some say that Israel made sure the answer was big enough so the plan would be dropped and they could stay the ones imposing unilateral moves. Anyways, it was just the start.

Two weeks later the Hezbollah abducted 2 more soldiers in Israel and triggered the second Lebanon war between Israel and Lebanon. Many believe it was in an attempt to divert Israel’s focus on Gaza, many other believe it was taken as an opportunity by Israel to start a long planned war against Hezbollah, but now the reason why it happened don’t really matter anymore. The war happened (and you can find a few entries of this blog about it), civilians were murdered, soldiers died, and it ended under a very strong international pressure.

It ended up in a state that Israel disliked badly, and despite having tactically won the war, it ended up being considered as a defeat (and claimed as a victory by Hezbollah which anyways doesn't know the word for defeat :). Why a defeat ? Because Israel didn't succeed in protecting its civilians from rocket fire despite saying it should take only a few weeks, defeat because a few well trained Hezbollah fighters resisted them for weeks while in previous wars Israel was winning within days, defeat because the abducted soldiers were not returned despite all the UN resolutions signed, and defeat because most of the people stopped believing in peace.

This year was also the one where Iran grew as the number 1 bad guy (western world perspective), and their president started to be more vocal than usual, promising destruction to Israel, promoting holocaust denial and developping nuclear technology. This was one more year of civilian war in a US occupied Iraq without any sign of progress towards peace.

I could continue to point at the multiple political assassinations and bombings that keep going on in an unstable Lebanon, the civil war in Gaza for the past 2 months and in general the various signs of a rising tension between the western (christian) world and the middle eastern (muslim) world.

Israel is at the confluent of all these tensions, and the question in most minds is "When will it be ?", the next war...

The roof, the roof is on fire...

A few days ago there was a huge fire in a nearby house:

Tornado

Last week we had a pretty impressive Tornado moving just in front of our offices. It is supposed to be a first occurence in Haifa.

Across the new continent

After 2 days I finally received my lugages from the airport, which was really needed with the temperatures going down in OR and the huge storm that was starting (winds passed over 100 mph and left the area quite desolated). I had a long week at work, but was happy meeting all my old colleagues.

Per took me Saturday for paragliding in eastern Oregon, past the Dalles on the shore of the Columbia river (off the hill in the center of the map, near the houses). We took off just below the snow altitude and flew along the cliffs of the canyon for quite some time (until we froze actually :). I never expected to paraglide on day in the winter below freezing temperature and under a pretty solid cover of clouds. That was definitively fun ! Actually that was so fun that I forgot to pull my camera out (other excuse is that my fingers might have stayed stuck on the metal box of the camera).

Per dropped me back at the hotel where I had to give back the keys I forgot to leave when I checked out in the morning (yep that's so me). There I met a guy that was looking for a nearby bar. I offered him to drive him there as it was near the theater I was planning to go to kill the time I had left before my flight. I ended up hanging with him and having a pretty good time, Mark was a very colorful character. It was his first time out of Alaska and he was down here in Portland to visit his son. He talked a lot about Alaska and I was listening, avid :). Keyring with polar bear claws, a bullet scar right near the left eye, square pale Irish style face, light eye and hair color, and a black cap deep on the ears, a tough guy. He explains me how he goes halibut fishing with his little boat and ends up shooting them with big calibers when they're too big (over hundred pounds) to be dragged on the boat alive. He offered me to come fish with him next summer :). We ended up the evening in the dark as the local power station was on fire, as a consequence of the really bad storm that hit Oregon the previous day I would assume.

I spent the rest of the night in the plane that took me to Toronto where Le Jyby was expecting me. Despite being both tired we ended up spending the rest of the day in front of a white board writing cool and fast algorithms... Yeah I know, but we can't help it we always end up doing it whether it's in a cafe on the Nile riverside or in a dorm in Orsay.

Stay tuned !

Answer

There was really nothing special behind I just liked the picture :). But anyway here what was behind :


Besides that I arrived today in Portland Oregon after a day of travel, but my luggage wasn't as lucky as me and didn't made it. I guess some redhat gnome is trying to steal little monkey christmas presents :). Well anyway I hope I'll get my bags back as I kinda need clothes.

What's behind

Maybe you'll know soon :).

Speciale dedicace

He will know it's for him !

I'm still around

Hey, I know this place is dead for a long while but I am still around. Work has been stealing most of my free time and motivation to post stuff here. I am in India right now and am just coming back from a weekend in Delhi. Enjoy Delhi by night...

Inside the red fort (I know lights are pink :):

Or at the Taj Mahal in Agra:

Peace now ?

So the few questions going around me are : is this peace now? and who did win that war ?
To the first one, it is a cease fire, not peace. Countries like Lebanon consider themselves at war with Israel despite an armistice in 1949 and various cease fires since. Now the question is how long will this cease fire last ? The previous one lasted around 6 years with monthly violations mostly located arount the Sheba farms. I can only hope that this one will last longer but the first days of cease fire are not very promising.

France which is supposed to lead the UN interposition force in south Lebanon already said it would not participate to the implementation of some parts of the cease fire, by not working on disarming Hezbollah. The Lebanese government agreed with Hezbollah that they would keep their weapons, just not show them in public (which itself is a violation of the cease fire conditions which say that the only weaponry in south Lebanon has to be the army's). On the other side Israeli army is still in south Lebanon, with less soldiers but still there.
Annan is supposed to start a taskforce to figure out according UN who do belong the Sheba farms to (currently it's supposed to be Syrian territory occupied by Israel, but Lebanese say it's theirs). This is a very good initiative, but there has already been words by the US that whatever the decision would be, Israel would not have to remove their troops from there. So we can assume that whatever the answer is Hezbollah will also stand on their positions. My personal opinion on this issue is that neither Hezbollah nor Israel really care who it does belong to, it is just a convenient excuse.

So is it all that bad ? Well, the only change compared to last month is that now the Lebanese army is in south Lebanon, and will assume responsability over the border with Israel. In the long term this could lead to more responsible behaviour in the area.

Now the question who did win ? Each time there is a war there has to be a winner right ? Reading the medias it seems to be the case... I find it sad that this is even a matter of discussion but well it is. Modern wars seem to have mostly loosers and no winners. Some say that Israel by weakening Hezbollah, destroying all Lebanese infrastructure, killing a larger number of ennemies than their loss won (US claim it 's a victory in the "war over terror"). Some say Israel lost because a small organisation caused it more harm than anyone ever did before, negated their high tech weaponry, sent rockets farther in Israel than anyone ever did in the past 50 years. I am leaning towards the second option.

Now does that make Hezbollah a winner like they and Iran have been claiming everywhere ? Definitely not, they resisted well, but killing 2 dozen of civillians by sending over 3000 rockets towards them looks pretty sad to me. A good exemple of katyusha accuracy:


Their role is to protect Lebanon, have I heard. What did they protect that is still standing undamaged ? If it wasn't for the international community pressure, what would be the state of Lebanon 1 month from now ?

Finaly everybody is in such a hurry to claim victory that it really is obvious that everybody did loose.

Cease fire

Sirens woke me up this morning minutes before the cease fire took place. There were no alerts since, and activities are resuming. Let's hope it lasts and the conditions for a lasting peace with Lebanon settle.

Rockets season not over

So I am back in Israel, Haggai gets me at the airport, I drop him at home and make my way to Haifa on the highway. 10Km before Haifa the police is diverting all traffic to smaller roads, I guess that some rocket hit the highway and am not very far. The rocket hit near one of my company buildings and shattered a few windows without casualties.

The building I usually work is the closest one on the left, a closer look to the glass building (the one along the highway), some collegue windows got hit but hopefully noone was working during the weekend:

The damages are light, let's hope it stays this way.
In the past 24h I heard a few serious hits to the Matam side of Haifa. It seems they are targetting the high-tech industrial zone now. I am going to keep working from home and hope things calm down soon.

Back

I am back from a week spent in southern France with my parents, fifille, the little monkey and his parents. It was nice to get back home, and be in quieter and cooler areas.
Here is a picture of the Barcelonette Area where I spent a few days hiking and enjoying the sun with fifille and the parents:

Here is the picture of Ste Lucie Island near Narbonne where we relaxed an afternoon and the little monkey tracked all the trains he could hear:

Mail

Some of you have been complaining that mail takes a while to reach me, so here is a visual explaination (that was a seasons greatings card):

Note the stapples on the top.

1st day without sirens

Just as the title says, there has been no sirens over Haifa today. I suspect this is not going to last much as there is no sign of a cease fire in the coming weeks despite the frenetic diplomatic activity by France (ok I didn't choose this article randomly).

Some friends told me that "charlie Hebdo"'s editorial from the 28th was a nice reading. I can't buy it, but if any of you could have a look for me I'd love it.

Besides that I read an interresting opinion from a Lebanese journalist (from the reading he's probably a christian close to Aoun's side). I can't post it as it isn't (yet ?) public domain but I'll forward it to the ones that spam my mailbox and want to have a look.

Leiffe

Look ! I didn't dream, there is an "i":

Chocolates

Today I recieved a phone call asking me when I would be home for a delivery of candies. A few hours later here is what I recieved :

Those were sent by my company to thank me for staying and keeping on working. They must have thought I had 10 hungry kids when I see the size of the basket, but I was pretty happy as it is a nice surprise.

Images of war

Here are a few pictures of Haifa under the katyushas. I didn't take them myself as I do not go much out, they are just among the large number I recieve in my mailbox.

As you can see schrapnel is not enough, Hezbollah adds metal balls to make their rockets more efficient at injuring a maximum of people.

This one shoked me when I saw it, I am not sure this is the way to educate your kids, but well it's there and I still prefer bad words to metal balls.

Elfefe blog V3.0

It's been 7 month since last time I changed the template of the blog. I did it then because I wanted to improve the readability and simplify the original blogger template I first used. I picked another blogger template and customized it, and actually never really liked the way it ended up, despite spending a lot of time on it.
Finaly I decided to remove it and put something simple. Don't hesitate to comment as I will update the styles and details that need to.

[Edit] A lot of bugs remain under IE: bold font on the left, banner border, banner height. I'll figure how to fix it, but at least now it displays correctly.

Haifa under the rockets

Things haven't really changed here, after 24 hours of no shooting on Haifa, the fire restarted, sunday was by far the worse day since the rocket fire started. The day opened in the beginning of the afternoon if I remember well, with 10 impacts in 20 seconds (I counted 12 but might have gotten echo echo). The rest of the day was on the same tempo.

The good thing about this situation is the people that stayed go to each other's houses to have company. So thursday I was in Atlit, saturday in Akko and Sunday night in Atlit. No pictures as I don't want to compromise the drunks I shared the evening with :).

A good tip, when you are at home bored as hell, unable to work because of lack of concentration, buy lots of fresh vegetables, meat, etc... and cook ! Cook difficult, complicated and long stuff. And in the evening share with your friends. Is has the double effect of keeping you busy and focused for hours and makes your friends happy.

PS: for those that might wonder Atlit is 10km south of Haifa and has remained unreached for now.

The dictionary of war clichés

While reading Haaretz journalist Shmuel Rosner's blog I found this interresting dictionnary. Cynical, realist, unfair, bad joke ? I'll let you make your own opinion, anyway it's worth reading: part 1 and part 2.
Sirens are still sounding today on Haifa, but I haven't heard any explosion and there is no report of rockets. It might be quieting down on this side of the border.

Why ?

am I staying in Haifa ? Many of you have been pressing me in the past days to leave the country for a safer place, so I'll try to explain you why I am still here and am not planning to leave unless the situation worsens significantly.
The geographical position of my house combined with my current lifestyle makes it very safe for me to stay here for now. I am in a non targetted area, a pretty hard to target area, spending most of my time in a safe room so I just cannot reasonably get hurt.
Still, life isn't fantastic in these conditions with the sirens the explosions, the deads in the news, the situation getting worse hourly on the other side of the border :(...
But I am solidar with all my friends and collegues that live here, I believe that me staying there is doing something to comfort and strengthen them. Add to that the fact that I would hate fleeing under Hezbollah fire, it would just give me the feeling that they are winning something while they are actually just unable to harm me.
I am not suicidal, and I do not want to have people concerned about my security, that is why I seriously thought about it before taking this decision and balancing various options like going to work abroad for some time. Believe me if the situation were to worsen and put my life at risk, I would leave the area by the minute. I do not intend to risk my health for Israel, and noone around me would expect me to do that to support them.

Maybe I am just behaving to proud, but I would have serious self confidence issues if I weren't doing that.

I had planned a trip to France for vacations somewhere by the beginning of August and I still intend to do it around that period and visit my family in the alps and the Narbonne-Plage little monkey.

WFAP

Today I am headed to work in another place, situated in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv, so I'll be safe.
To get informations on the situation you can look at http://www.haaretz.com , http://www.ynetnews.com , http://www.jpost.com . Most of them give news by the minute.

Stayin' alive

Hey, I am still here. The past 2 days have been regularly cut by sirens and explosions. I am currently discussing with my boss the various options for the coming days and weeks, and will decide pretty soon on what to do exactly. In the mean time I stay either in my shelter room or by friends. The Matam area (where I usually work) has been targetted for the first time. Here is a picture taken from there.

Sand sculptures II

The sand sculpture festival made it back to Haifa for the second year. I was there yesterday afternoon to take some sun, but the beach was mostly deserted as one would expect. This year there was much bigger and nicer sculptures but the access to these wasn't free anymore.

Besides that the situation in the area seems to worsen pretty fast but Haifa didn't got targetted afain and they deployed patriot anti-missiles batteries.

Hezbollah - Israel

Well, as some you might have noticed the northern border of Israel has been subject to violent military operation from both the Hezbollah and Israeli army. As usual each party is claiming that they are just answering to the other's actions, and obviously they try to make the answer big so it frightens the other.

From here it looked like Lebanese milicia came into Israel, killed a few soldiers and captured 2 others at a time where "Israel deterrence power" was already being question after a similar problem near Gaza. The answer has been extremly violent, basically Israel has set an air-sea blocus on whole Lebanon, mass-bombed Hezbollah areas, roads and other civilian service providing facilities (I suppose power plants...).
Hezbollah has been sending rockets towards northern israeli cities for the past 24h and has sent one as far as Haifa (where I live). There are civilians death and injuries on both sides, as usual in this area there are significantly less israelis.
The northern Israeli population is living in their shelters, and currently there are not many (even the most moderate) that are ready to keep taking hits without answering very strongly. Outside of strong external pressure either on Lebanon so they put their army at the border instead of Hezbollah or on Israel so they stop the fire (I don't see them recieving rockets and not shoot back though), I seriously doubt that the situation is not going to worsen fast.

Where I am I don't risk much, and the security services of my company are taking care of me so I'll be fine. I'll let you know how things evolve.

Mysterious picture

Guess what it is, and for who it is :).

Kerala

This weekend I decided to get away from noisy and hyperactive Bangalore for a trip to Cochin in Kerala. The trip was pretty quick this time as I flew, 1 thing you'll notice quickly with India domestic flights is that the service quality is extremly nice (cute and smily flight assistants included :).Second thing is that I took an airline operated by the biggest beer manufacturer of India, but hopefully the ATR was flown by a sober pilot.
I am waiting this from a cyber, waiting for my plane back to Bangalore, so you'll be waiting for pictures a little more ! Yesterday I had a trip around Fort Cochin, successively ruled by the portugeses, the dutchs and the brits, followed by a boat cruise around the backwaters. No engine noise to trouble the quiteness of the ride in the middle of coconut "fields", here they use bamboo sticks to push the boats around. Don't expect to go far but the ride is still great.

Today I went to visit an elephant training place and some waterfalls. I wasn't as lucky as yesterday as it did rain heavily almost all day (yes I know, it's monsoon period, but I still had hopes). So I got soaked and muddy but the tour was still enjoyable.
The little "annecdote" of the day happened after the driver told me about what they called "arak" here. In the middle east that is a strong anis alcool, so I wanted to see what it was exactly here. When I asked him to get some I didn't realize exactly what I was asking for :). Alcool production is illegal in this state, mainly to fight rampant alcoolism. So we ended up roaming in the villages asking around if we could fill our bottle of water with arak for a few roupies. Obviously my driver being well dressed, hair cut, and nice shoes got mistaken for a policeman by most of the persons he asked to, but eventualy we found a group of men that were ready to help, probably drunk enough to not care much :). So I got this precious arak ! This is obviously a sugar cane distillate (tastewise it looks like it s above 40%), but the interresting part is that it is mixed with cashew nut tree fruits (the part that is not the nut) giving it a pretty sweet taste. In 2 monthes I've been able to get illegal "puro de cana" in Puyo equador and Arak from Cochin vincinity to be added to my collection of rhums, Yummeeeee!
So I got some indian "hot" water in my bag, as well as a huge pack of various spices and coconut oil grabbed directly at the exit of the mill, as well as lots of tastes and reciepes in mind and on paper.

PS: still no moon pictures, but moonsoon pictures soon (ok jeu de mots a 2 balles). Anyway the rain has eaten the moon here.
PPS: et pour les mauvaises langues, je suis sorti du trou noir !

Looking for the moon ?

Well, I have some nice moon shots but they are on my computer at home (sad excuse I know...) so Mr Little Orange Monkey will have to wait a little bit more before seeing the moon here.
To fifille: I will not publish such compromising pictures ! Imagine, people that do know me might get on this page :)...
And Jyby, the weather was so hot that I could barely carry myself around, so I don't see myself carrying a giant bunny around :). I was emptying coconuts every other block, and the rest of the time that was sugar cane juice with lemon (and it was non distillated sugar cane, for those that would pretend otherwise :).
In the mean time, one more shot from Pondichery to enjoy.

Pondichery

I took advantage of the weekend to go to Pondichery (ex french "comptoir" in India) and Chennai (Madras). I spent quite some time on the road as the traffic always ends up being pretty slow here. That was a pretty nice trip but I got cooked by the heat :).
I didnt meet anyone fluent in french in Pondichery, however everybody was pretty proud to make me hear their few french words. Finally, I didn't met any non indian for 2 days despite going to places I thought were touristic.

On Chennai beach, being the only tourist in the middle of thousands of indians led to pretty funny situations. I basically got stopped every 100m by groups of youg indian boys trying to get pictures of me with them (holding my hands or hugging me). The first time I thought that I met the gay indian community (they were also commenting on how cute i was... etc, it was pretty odd), but after the 5th or 6th group of youg men, asking for my email adress or those pictures, I think that they just don't have the same social codes than us on that subject, and that it was their way of being nice and chatting a bit with the only foreigner around. But well, I had a few good laugh, especially when I was changing my pants and a group of them came to shake my hand and hug me while I had only one leg on :). Done for the laughing part for today, and sorry no moon pictures, they were too blurry.

Bang alors !

Yeah, I am back in Bangalore India for a while (for work). I am enjoying the trip, meeting new people, making new discoveries, eating new stuff... 2 days ago returning to my room the sunset was fantastic, enjoy the natural colors of Airport road in Bangalore around 6:30.

Is this blog dead ?

No, well not really. I have been pretty busy with work and travels and also I started to get pessimistic about politics in the middle east and didn't really felt like making long posts to try to express these feelings, hoping secretly I would be wrong (despite hating being proved wrong as those who know me would tell you).
So what's been going on ? A few monthes back new governments were elected on both the Palestinian side and the Israeli side.
In Palestine Hamas was elected partially because of it's agenda, partially as a protest against the corruption of the ruling Fatah and the never-improving situation. I was expressing some hopes that this new government would lead to positive changes but until now, a combination of international and Israeli pressure and refusal to act for change ended up in a serious degradation of the situation. Palestine is on the edge of a civil war, the strong disagrements between 2 heavily armed factions that do not manage to converge their opinions are a serious risk. And on the other side the western world by indirectly stopping the salaries of the security forces knew they were going to increase the instability. What are unpayed policemen ending up doing to feed their families ? Begging or shutting up ? No way...
In Israel, Olmert was elected with Sharon's aura and program, but not with the expected majority. He ended up building a government that seem to work for now at least. His agenda is to leave some settlements in the west bank and keep some others without negotiating with the palestinians, because supposedly of the Hamas presence at the government. Gaza withdrawal was unilateral and could be so because it was a withdrawal to the green line, the internationnaly "recognized" border for gaza. So it was kind of OK to not negotiate the conditions of the withdrawal. The story for the west bank is very different (the problem is very different also). They have to negociate at some point, just because they will fondamentally disagree on the withdrawal line. You can see this plan in at least 2 ways: by removing the most frictional outposts Olmert will only improve the situation in the area. At least he is giving back some things. Or, he is doing that to keep the rest of the west bank forever, which is what he claims (he would not get wide support in his country if he was saying otherwise).

In the end evacuating the 400000 israelis living in the west bank is not going to happen that easily, whatever the palestinian militant groups (like Hamas) want. I do believe that by negociation they could manage to get progressive and further disengagement from the west bank by steps, instead of refusing to deal with Israel and getting Olmert to remove a few hard to defend outposts and fortify massively the rest and define it as "permanently" in Israel.

So, Palestine is getting worse, and is also loosing more and more support from the international community and public opinion. I am convinced that if they don't get ready to drop a few things from their requests, they will end up even worse than today, but courage and pride will probably keep blocking many peace efforts there, and I do not expect Israel to be the one that will have to make concessions seeing how the situation evolves.

Ecuador

Hello,
I am back from vacations in Ecuador. We shared our times between the Andes mountains, the amazonia forest rivers and the coastal area. Pictures will follow, but in the mean time here is how it felt like :

Asafoetida

So tonight i discovered the taste of asafoetida, well actually i was able to put a name on the taste of one dish I tried in Mysore last week. I brought it back with a giant bag of indian spices.
I cooked one curry with it, seeing the size of the box (which is mostly full of layers of plastic bags) i guessed that i should put a small amount into my food. I did put about 3mm^3 in a triple portion of food, then tried to get the strong smell out of my hands. Now that I am eating it i can tell you one thing: this is the strongest (not hot though) spice I have ever found, I did probably put 5 to 10x too much. I tried to mask the too strong taste with chilli but it is just impossible :). The taste is interresting and very surprising though so I suggest you try (in tiny quantities).

Bangalore city of trees

One of the things that impressed me the most in Bangalore is that all the streets of the city are surrounded by beautyfull giant trees. Those streets are also one crazy place to drive on, a third of motorbike, a third of 3-wheels, and a third of cars, all of those not really following any kind of rule besides that they tend to drive on the left side and relatively slowly. The main safety feature available is the horn, that most people use pretty widely to signal their presence and their intentions. So widely used that many trucks have huge signs on their back saying "please horn", "sound horn ok"...

Bangalore first impressions

I am pretty tired and I didn't do anything else than going to work but lots of things, details or not have already striked me.
First thing last night, here you cannot rent a car without a driver, so waiting for me in the middle of 200 other drivers was mine, with a sign stating Mrs ... yeah he was expecting a girl :), what disappointment :). It is still quite exciting to sit on the front left of the car and seeing no wheel, especially in India style traffic. But I have to say that driving is not as wild as Cairo.
Second this morning, a few signs in the bathroom explaining how many litters of water various things like cleaning a towel were using, and that huge plastic basket in the shower so you can reuse water and consume less.
The view from my appartment is really nice, towards the countryside, I ended up in a very high end apartment complex because all the hotels were full (nothing special, just the fact that high tech industry is growing here faster than they can build hotels).
At work I noticed lots of efforts about hygien, lots of signs in the bathroom explaining in what order to do things and so, at the cafeteria, the fact there are lavatories on the way to get out so you can not avoid to wash your hands, you directly sort your trash between plastic, paper, food, and cleanable. In the US they tend to try to do the same kind of things to promote a better work enviroment, but here it is done far better and much further.
Tonite, coming back to the hotel I chatted with my driver and we ended up talking about living standards. I have rarely felt so guilty of earning my life well, probably because in other poor countries people I talked with were too shy to ask (and obviously I do not tend to start the subject). So to summarize, my driver makes 100$ a month if he works the default hours which is 12h/day. Yes you can eat for less than a dollar, and you can get a small 1 room appartment for 40$/month, but in the end he has to work overtime (over the basic 12h/day) to make ends meet.
Outside of that, the contrast between the people living in tents on the side of the road, right next to high tech buildings that are pretty similar to the silicon valley ones is strange and shocking.

Flying tonite

Tomorrow i'll be in Bangalore for a week. I'll try to post pictures and news once there.

[edit] I finally arrived after a pretty long trip, appartment is nice, tea is good, I feel like in another world, weather is beautyfull (33 degres forcast today), and I still don't understand Indian accent.

Dick Cheney tire sur ses amis

Dick a loge un plomb dans le coeur de l'un de ses amis de 78 ans pendant une partie de chasse a son ranch au Texas. Cela a bien entendu declenche une vague de blagues sur le sujet dont certaines pas mauvaises du tout.

Pourquoi, alors, a-t-il tiré? «Dans le monde de l'après-11 septembre, les Américains s'attendent à ce que leurs leaders soient décidés. Ne pas avoir tiré dans le visage de son ami aurait envoyé aux cailles le message que l'Amérique est faible!»

Merci Dick pour tonaction militante pour le "Gun control" ;)

Lebanon - 1 year

There was half a million persons in the streets of Beyrouth yesterday, for the 1 year anniversary of Rafic Hariri's assassination. 1 year after the Syrian influence they were protesting against is still there despite the disengagement of the Syrian army. The 3 main leaders of the opposition were in the middle of the crowd and among other requests were asking the pro-syrian president Emile Lahoud to leave and the Hezbollah to disarm.
The U.N. probe on the assassination is currently stalled as the main witnesses retracted their testimony against Syrian security officers. Now they are looking at an Al-Qaeda driven assassination which looks to me like a decoy to lower the tension between Syria and the west.

Tension

In the past weeks the tensions have been raising all over the middle east. The Hamas that won the Palestinians elections is still not governing it and the Fatah armed wings are preparing their future political failure by resuming terrorist activities.

A few bad drawings published 4 months ago were used to start unrest versus western europeans interrests. Most of the manifestants burning embassies never even saw those drawings, and destroying humanitary infrastructure over those was not the most clever thing to do either. In western countries there are legal ways of protesting versus diffamation and insults and you do not ask governments to excuse about private newspapers, you just ask the justice to force the newspaper to do so if it is justifyed. The sad thing about all this is not the embassies burnt is that there has been over 10 deaths already.

Iran-Europe talks about nuclear activities have reached a dead-end and despite not being against the development of civil nuclear energy in Iran like the NPT allows them to, I start to fear what the US and Israel have been repeating for years, which is that the reason why they want to do Uranium enrichment themselve is because it will allow them to build nuclear bombs.

And in Israel the government and the army are struggling between a massive restart of terrorist activities which they answered to by a massive number of targeted assassinations, and evactuation of extreme right illegal outposts that turned violent (in Amona). Obviously all this results in the closure of the territories.

So currently in Palestine:
-humanitary workers leave because of cartoons violence
-taxes money is not coming in because Israel didn't want to give it to Hamas
-territories are closed so no export and no jobs out
-airstrikes and raids almost daily to capture militants with common collateral damages
-humanitary help money decreasing because of Hamas fear.

All this does not let me see a bright near future...