Picture Galleries

Well, it's way too slow when I include Zenfolio galleries on the blog, so I'll keep linking with the old method.
Two weeks ago we celebrated Leeor and Lilach's engagement at the local Irish pub and you can see some of the drunkards here.


The next day we went to visit Ein Afek, a local swamp that clearly reminded us that spring was already started. The pictures look pretty unoriginal I know but remember they were taken in the middle east, not somewhere in Europe.

Jerusalem shooting

Fifille arrived tuesday night this week and we've been quite busy sightseeing rather than paying attention to the news. Last friday we were over at Waffa's place and she told us about a shooting at a jewish religious school (Yeshiva) in Jerusalem the day before. We quickly checked the news, and answered one of Waffa's main concerns. Was the shooter, that killed 8 adolescent, an Israeli arab ? It seems that yes he was, and therefore it increased Waffa's fears... She knows that something like that will increase even further the pressure on them, and from what it seems that's the current concern of a large number of Israeli arabs: becoming victims for retaliation, or getting their rights severed.

Anyways, the slaughter was terrible and shoked the whole country. There is a lot of anger going around and I really can't see things getting any better from there especially that the current situation was already quite tense...

Will it blend ?

That has to be the best advertising campaign I've seen to date. They take their blender, and blend stuff with it, by example here we have a piece of Apple-geek-tech.

Everything goes through it, from a can of coke to canned spam, baseball, golf balls, handles, lightbulbs, bic lighters, lightsticks, videocamera, you name it they tried.

And the best part of it, is Michelle actually owns one, I now just have to convince her to let me play a bit with it !!!!!

Embedding slideshows - Ein Hod

Saturday we went again to Ein Hod, but this time before everything was closed and we didn't miss the village entrance. We had a very nice afternoon, visiting art galleries, and enjoying local brews eating home made pizzas with live blues. Life is good over here :).

Trying to embed directly Zenfolio slideshows into the blog, for the lazy ones that don't feel like going to visit the galleries :). Edit: I removed the gallery it was slowing down the blog wayyyy too much.


It doesn't work that well for now, but Zenfolio doesn't expect its users to embed their slideshows in other pages so for now I doubt I'll be able to do any better. Let me know if you prefer the slideshows that way, or the old fashioned way.

Valentines

I recieved beautifull roses for Valentines this year, here is a picture of them... in Infra-Red light:

Panoramas

As I don't have a wide angle (I resisted the urge to buy one until now), when I face a nice scenary I end up taking multiple shots hoping that one day I won't be too lazy and will stitch it together. Well, sometimes it happens, and here are 2 panoramas. The first one is taken from "La Grande Motte" In Tignes, France, looking towards the "Mont Blanc":

The second one is the river and Charles bridge in Prague (In both case I suggest to look at the large version to see something).

Patriots

As I was saying a couple of days ago, the tension is raising on the northern side of Israel. A battery of Patriots (those relatively inefficient anti-aircraft anti-missile US defense systems) got deployed in Haifa according to Haaretz. I suppose it's meant to comfort the locals more than really meant to provide any real protection. Anyway, since I've been here bad stuff always came from where I expected the least so I suppose nothing's gonna happen.

Car bombings

Imad Mughniyah died yesterday night in the explosion of his car in Damascus, he

headed Hezbollah's operations branch serving in a role similar to chief of staff, and had been wanted by Israel and the United States for years due to his role in numerous bombings, hijackings and abductions in which hundreds of people were killed.

Israel denied involvment but got fingerpointed immediately (probably rightfully). It is quite interresting to read the comments on Haaretz article to realize how many people this death made happy, and how much vengeance is prefered over justice. Obviously justice was impossible as he was a clandestine and kind of protected by Syrian state, but does it render the use of the same low methods as the "terrorists" acceptable ? Unfortunately many seem to think so.

Why am I posting this rant ? Well Hezbollah has said they would avenge, and the last time there was an escalation with them I spent a "Katyusha" summer. Just a few weeks after an incident at the Lebanese border that saw one death and the political tension raising to terrible levels between the Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, I just hope ther won't be any escalation (they seem to use Israel as a common ennemy to unite each others when things go really wrong)...
Anyway, the situation around here is sad, the "peace talks" are going at the speed of an arthritic snail, Gaza is locked and boiling, suicide bombings are restarting in Israel, Iran is as radical as ever, and Mossad still assassinating.
Hopefully the sun is shining and spring is starting, so I can forget all this as soon as I look through the window.

Prague

We had originally planned to travel to Istanbul that weekend, but Nico decided to go to Australia so we picked our second choice (that was really not too hard) and traveled to Prague. This was a weekend optimized trip, so we spent thursday and sunday night in the airplane and two days in Prague.
We got a really nice weather, cool and shun shine. Friday was not too busy, which let us enjoy a slightly less crowded town. I don't really know how to describe the city, goth-geous or gor-thic, but we both enjoyed it. We walked so much that our legs were hurting at the end of the trip :).
I took countless pictures in this photographer's dream place, met photographers all over the place, chatted with a few, and spent time watching all these stands selling old black and white postcards (so I converted a lot of pictures to B&W).


When we were not lurkking around we were listening to the jazz groups playing in the street and stopping either for fast-Czek-food or slow fancy food: we needed the energy.

Vladimir Pinta, we even bought one of his albums, I don't think he can look bad on a picture.


Bratwurste in the streets


At Kampa park, finest dining in town

We had some bad luck with our visit of the castle, it was closed over the weekend for some election, but we still enjoyed the view from morning till after dawn.

The restaurant we planned to go at Nebozizek was also closed that day, this was the day...

This will be enough for pictures on the blog, you can go to my zenfolio for more, and I'll probably keep posting more during this week as I still have like 100 to process..

The lost artist village

We decided to go visit a nearby artist village called Ein Hod. We stopped on top of the Carmel in Dalyat for some excellent Druze food (okras, dolmas, mjadara) on the way there. We ended up arriving in Ein Hod neighborhood around 3:30pm (yeah that's late but we had a lazy saturday). Once there, I don't know how it happened but we just could not find the village, we had a strawl around 2 tiny villages that were nowhere close to an artist place, more like a dead ultra-religious area but with an original synagogue.


Once the sun started to set we took the car back home and... we spotted Ein Hod right by the road, we were probably absorbed in some very important debate or something like that. Anyway we went around the place in half an hour and kept repeating ourselves "We have to come back here". The place is really cute, and the few artis workshops that were still open were worth it, so next time we'll go early enough!

Weekend in the desert

Friday morning we drove south to Ein Advat, a national park located in the middle of the Negev desert, between Ber Sheva and Mitzpe Ramon (by Sde Boker kibbutz). We were lucky to have a sunny Friday and we enjoyed the almost empty park throughout the afternoon. It is located in a deep canyon where a small stream flows.


It feels like an island of life in the middle of a hostile desertic environment. It reminded me all the post apocalyptic movies like Mad Max where you always find a settlement of survivors hidden in a green canyon in the middle of the desert. Well it could be there. We were the last out of the park, which let us meet a few not so wild ibex (some kind of local mountain goats).


We then drove through the large crater and stopped a few times before sunset to enjoy the scenery. We were stunned by the size of the petrified trees laying down by the gravel road, somewhere lost in the crater in the middle of coloured sands.


We spent the night over at kibbutz En Gedi, by the dead sea. On Saturday we hiked in the En Gedi park, following streams of water this time in the deep valleys of the Judean desert. The weather was not as nice as Friday but we enjoyed the fresh atmosphere. We also had the company of a rock climber ibex that did a skill demonstration just for us, while we were playing with marmots.
The pictures are on Zenfolio as usual, but for now the En Gedi ones are missing (I've been slacking I know).

Winter sun in Akko

We spent this saturday in Akko with Alex, visiting from Oregon. It was a nice sunny and windy day. We enjoyed the view from the walls and in the harbour before relaxing with a narguila playing sheshbesh. The light was really great, I took most shots in the market, but my favorite for the day is this one:

Rust and Blue

Rosh Hanikra

On a sunny Friday afternoon we drove north to the Lebanese border to visit Rosh Hanikra caves. There is not much to say besides the site is beautiful, and that I did lots of pictures of which you can find a sample on Zenfolio.

Ski in Tignes

This is pretty representative of our first week into 2008. Ski, Snow and Sun.

Happy New Year 2008

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.