Category: General

I cought up with Benoit, a very old friend today. I did a french exchange with him about…. well, a long time ago, when I was around 13. Its been around 12 years since I saw him and his wife Marie, and they have a lovely baby called Zeli. It was great to see them. We get on well and slotted back in together as though it was last week since we last saw each other. Alas, the day was too short and they had to leave to drive all the way back to Lille (about 3 hours away I think). Next time we come to France, we must take the time to go to Lille.

I have a theory about Italian style. You see, they love style and there is no denying that they produce some of the most stylish designs of our century, but some times, they seem to come up woth something that is so ugly it defies words. The Fiat Multipla is one of those things. When I first saw this monster (in Paris) I felt sure it was a French car, but then, when I realised it was an Italian car, was horrified. My theory is that in style, the Italians push the limit. They walk the knife edge of stylish, and when the go that little bit too far, it all come crashing down in a heap. I saw a few examples of this while we were in Italy. They hotel we stayed in had a bathroom tiled in poo brown tiles with a 15 watt bulb lighting the room. Other examples were their clothing. Often, I was quite old people wearing outfits that only teenagers could get away with.
I guess these downfalls in style go hand in hand with the good style, you can’t have one without the other.

I don’t know what it is about Italy and coffee, but they seem to go so well together. For instance, for breakfast, we would have a little pastry and a machiato standing up at the bar. It’s quick and tasty and gets you going in the morning. There was a huge queue of people waiting for their coffee’s like this. And there was a lot of Barista’s behind the bar, making the coffees as quick as they could. We loved the coffee in Italy. The thick black drop of liquid at the bottom of the cup that explodes in your mouth with the first sip.
On our last day in Bologna, for some reason Maissa and I decided to have a latte and a cappuccino respectively for breakfast, but shortly after breakfast, we both found ourselves craving the espresso taste, like the milky coffee’s hadn’t quite satisfied us. There was nothing for it but to go to another bar and get an espresso, which we did.

We have been spending the last few days in Italy at a trade show called SANA. The show has been good, but the best part has been hanging out with Andreas and Michaela from African Pacific. They have been taking us to these real Italian restaurants to experience some of the wonderful Italian food.
Last night we went to this place called “Cantina Bentivoglio, con cucina” which basicaly means Wine vendor with kitchen attached. This is the place to go to experience wine and have a bit of food while your there. The restaurant was simple inside, but with a wide picture rail going around the rooms, and the rail was filled with hundreds of empty bottles of wine, all different shapes and sizes, makes and models. You could tell this place specialises in wine just from that. We sat down and we ordered some simple dishes of mozerella, cold meats, olive oil and bread, and bruscetta. The taste of these dishes alone was enough to blow you away, but Andreas and Michela ordered this amazing sparkling red wine. Slightly sweet and full bodied, it was the perfect thing to wash down the entree. Then for main course, I had this sort of bean and pasta soup that was delicious. Real home cooking kind of thing. By this stage we were onto our second bottle of wine and beginning to feel very jolly. I think it was the wine that was affecting us, as we were starting to talk louder and lounder with more and more hand movements, just like the Italians. We felt right at home there.

Yesterday we went to the Rodin museum. I as a little reluctant to go at first because I had been before, but when we got there, I have to admit, I was yet again impressed by his sculptures.
We decided to take a guide thing. It was one of those electronic self guide things where you type the number in and it tells you abou the exhibit. The first thing we saw was The Gate to Hell. I was really impressed by it, again. I had forgotten how evocative his sculptures are. I guess thats why he is a master. The detail of The Gate gives a very strong impression of turmoil and violence while it still has a kind of rhythm to the work.
The next thing I found fantastic was The Kiss. To me, it really gives the impression of the two lovers about to kiss. I can really feel the tension between them, its quite amazing. I have heard others who consider it over rated, but I have to disagree.
Rodin was really prolific. The meuseum is full of his work, and I’m sure there must be lots of works outside of the meuseum too.

Yesterday we came across a high speed moving walkway linking two platforms that are far appart in Montparnasse Bienvenue. The cool thing is that it goes at 9.9 km/h. and to get onto it there is this short ramp that accelerates you up to speed. The way the accelerating ramp works is really cool. its a sereis of small rollers, each going slightly faster, so you just stand there and get accelerated by these rollers, towards the moving walkway proper. The rollers felt a bit weird, like we were losing our balance, but I’m sure once you do it a few times you’d get used to it.

In the end, we decided to go to the Dali museum at Monmatre. Monmatre is a really beautiful part of paris with its cobled streets and winding roads that lead up the hill. We took the fernicula as we had travel passes and wandered around to the museam. It’t not really a huge museum, but there was some interesting pieces of his, a lot of the ones with melting clocks and the like. He was an excentric kind of guy and loved to play with ideas of how we percieve time and space. We spend the rest of the day wandering around and we wandered down the Champs Elysees looking in all the shop windows (or window licking as they say in french).

We arrived in Paris nearly a week ago. Time is flying now. Paris is beautiful as usual. And I must admit that it feels good to be here after Lebanon. The weather is much more tolerable here. Lovely cool evenings with nice sunny days.
Last night I went for a bike ride with Patrick and his friend (who were jogging). We went along all these paths which follow little streams and rivers around Le Vesinet. It was really quite beautiful, with the dim light of the street lights reflecting off the water.
Were off to the Louvre today. I’m going to try to do an in depth tour of a small section rather than try and see everything in one hit, I’ll let you know how I go…..

On Saturday we went on a trip to the islands off Tripoli. I was a little aprehensive of being stuck on an island but I have to say, it was great. We were supposed to head off early in the morning, but 10 o’clock turned into 11, which turned into 12 and we finaly left the house at about 12:30. On the way though, Said (Maissa’s brother) decided to get a trim and assured us it would only take 5 minutes. Just as he was getting out of the car, he asked me if I wanted a trim too and I thought “why the hell not?” so we both jumped out and ran into the barbers shop.
Little did I know that Said was getting the full works haircut and he ordered the same for me. Also, the chief hair cutter was a perfectionist and wanted to measure the length of each hair with his verneer calipers, and compare the length to a chart, and make sure it met the ISO standard. I mean, it was an OK haircut, but he took so long on Said, and then, once Said was done, he took probably longer on my hair.
We finaly left, once Maissa and everyone was thoroughly pissed off, with our shiny new haircuts (which I was hiding under my hat for fear of being lynched by the rest of the gang once we got to the boat) and headed off to the boat.
The boat turned out to be a simple wooden boat, with a tiller and a crude sort of long screw thread as a throttle control. the guy in charge of the boat would have been about 20, tanned till he was almost black, and just wearing his shorts. By this time everyone had assembled and there was about 12 adults and 10 kids. We all piled into the boat with all our stuff and we were off. The sun was beating down on us but the cool breeze off the sea was delicious.
I was amazed by the colour of the water. The deepest blue I have ever seen in parts, followed by the most beatiful aqua green in the shallower parts, there was virtually no waves and it very pleasant cruising over the water to the islands. There is about 5 islands off the coast of Tripoli, we were heading to the 4th, Palm island. I’m not quite sure why its called Palm island as there are no palms on it, but it has a nice beach where we moored the boat and unloaded. The water was so warm, I didn’t know the Mediterranian was so warm but it was so nice just to sit in the water and chat with the other guys. The kids by this stage were just about at boiling point and were running and jumping all over the place, particularly off the boat that brought us out to the island.
We had lunch and then some of us headed off on the boat to explore the fifth island. That island is called Rankin or Shark Island because apparantly there are lots of little sharks around there. This island was very rocky and looks as though it would be a great place to go snorkelling. We headed around the island on the boat and came accross a grotto where people were diving off a rock into the water. Mustafa (the guy in charge of the boat) dropped anchor at a point that I thought was too close to the rocks and sure enough within a few minutes he decided to move the anchor. When he tried to pull the anchor up, it became stuck on something, and all the while, were getting washed closer and closer to the rocks. He quickly put his snorkeling gear on and dived into the water to free the anchor, shot back on deck and we were free within about 60 seconds. He was so at home on the boat and in the water, I felt like he must have been born on the boat and had never set foot on land.
After that we headed back to the island, picked up the others and headed home. It was a really spectacular day and I’m hoping to get out there again to do some snorkelling.
He took his role of managing all these crazy people jumping in and out of the boat very seriously… [rest of post was truncated due to crap net access in Lebanon]

Well, it turns out internet access is a lot more difficult in Lebanon (or at least Tripoli) than we thought. And of course, things went wrong at the office, so I had to have access to fix things, but nothing seemed to work. We tried a few times, from net cafe’s and from Maissa’s sisters house but the connections kept dropping out.
Actually, the guy at the first net cafe was trying to be helpful, but he was obviously quite clueless. What made things worse was that he was quite happy to crap on as though he knew what he was talking about. He said that all the ports were closed except 80 and we couldn’t do anything except surf the web. I tried ssh and thankfully it was open as I needed to move some files around on then cocolo website. When he saw me using ssh, he was like “oh… so do you have a linux server or something?” and I said “yes” and then he asked me if I had studied computing and I said I had done computer engineering. He was like “Oh… me too! I have MCSE 1 and 2” I wonder if he could see the distain on my face. I tried very hard to hide it. At a later stage in my conversation, he told me that his ISP blocks mozilla because it downloads and uploads too much, and they do it by blocking port 5332 or something…. again, I was trying not to let the horror show on my face.
Yesterday, Maissa’s brother inlaw took us up the mountains in a four wheel drive. It was beautiful I have to say. We went up about 3500 meters, above the cloud layer, above the plants even. and there was even some snow up there. His 4×4 is a very old range rover, but he was telling us that it gets such a beating going up the mountains that its crazy to have a new one, and i have to say, it really did take a beating, and he really likes to drive it hard over the bumps. He goes up there once a week with his kids, and he has to change the shock absorbers every 2 months, and after each 2 trips, he has to adjust all the nuts and bolts that hold the car together because they all shift and loosen!
One of the things thats a little depressing about Lebanon is the peoples apparant disregard for the environment. The whole way up the mountain, there were plastic bottles and rubbish here and there, but worse of all was there seemed to be loads of shot gun shells everywhere. Why don’t people pick things up after themselves *sigh*?
By the time we were comming down the mountain, the sun was setting and the view across the hills and valleys, with the evening mist and the rosy pink sun was really stunning. I didn’t take any photos of it though as I couldn’t be bothered, so you’ll just have to imagine it.