I had set my mind on the so-called Google Phone, aka HTC G1, ever since I’d heard of it. However, I’ve also been a happy Palm user since November 2000, first an m100, then since 2005 a Tungsten-C.
Yesterday, Palm presented their new Palm Pre, and now I’m so tempted to get one of those instead… Hope my – sometimes temperamental – Nokia will still last until the Pre hits the stores here.
Today we still went to a mass at the nearby St. Sauveur church, which was also a bit interesting. THe priest approached us when we came in, and welcomed us, asked where we were from etc. And at the start of mass we were asked to introduce ourselves to our neighbors. Nice! After the mass we headed for Roncq, probably the closest village to the Belgian border, and did some more shopping at Auchan. Lunch at Flunch concluded the trip, and we headed back to Holland again.
In the morning we did some shopping at the Tanneurs “passage” mall. At C&A I got a leather belt, and at Fnac, I got a CD of Carmina Burana. Actually there were two, one with the famous Carl Off version, one with the original medieval songs (which I think is pretty rare!). After that we had lunch at the Flunch on Rue du Béthune. The “saumon sauvage de Alaska” wasn’t nearly as good as last night’s salmon.
In the afternoon, we first took a look at the Christmas market at Place Rihour; due to the cold we didn’t stay that long. While my parents did some grocery shopping, I went to the Palais des Beaux Arts, which has a temporary exhibition on Nordic painters visting in France. A few very well known names: Munch, Larsson, Zorn, and a few slightly less famous names, but still very nice paintings. What more could a Sweden fan ask for?
(Georg Nicolaj Achen: Intérieur)
Dinner was had at the Flunch near the hotel. The food was okay, but a noisy and badly behaving teenage gang (of North-African / Arab origin), made the other people at the restaurant a lot less pleasant. While there was a (very alert) bouncer, they didn’t go far that he had to intervene, but unpleasant nonetheless.
From the Hotel Ibis Gares in Lille, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!
Although the hotel rooms are still the same as in 2004, a great improvement is that Wifi by orange is now free! Back then, you got a scratch card valid between 18:00 and 9:00; now you get a 24 hours pass valid from the moment you first use it. Each day you need a new code, but you can just get one from the reception.
At 18:30 we went to the evening Christmas mass at the big St. Maurice church, which was within walking distance. A few interesting things of that mass happened:
- During the last half hour off the mass we had to come forward to the altar.
- When it was time for the “Our Father” prayer, we had to “connect” by putting our left hand on our left neighbor’s shoulder, while holding the right hand horizontally opened.
- For communion, we did not have to line up in 2 or 3 orderly queues, but it was distributed by many people, at different points in the church.
- After the mass, most people did not return to their seats, but maybe went somewehere else. A few even left before receiving the blessing…!
After that (a bit after 
we had dinner at the hotel restaurant (Estaminet), which had awesome menus: for a mere €10, you got a main course + a dessert. I had a delicious warm smoked salmon, and for dessert a fantastic apple tart, with lots of apple on it.
So after a whole week, I’m finally online again, but not for long, because I’m sitting in a cubicle at a cybercafe. Officially, they are a Business Service Center, but sending normal postcards seems to be very difficult for them 
Finding it required an odyssey in the catacombs of the Ciputra mall (passing the “Gojim” = Gold’s Gym first), but it is worth it, because at the hotel they ask RP 50000 (EUR 3,50) per hour: almost as expensive as Schiphol, and you have to use it up in one go. Booh to Hotel Ciputra Jakarta. In Semarang it was free.
Anyway, as expected, I had a nice week full of fantastic meetings with many relatives: many old, many new. Not going somewhere for 20 years definitely improves your popularity, and my cellphone is hardly silent for more than an hour.
Great fun, great food, lots of laughs, lots of interesting sights. 3 weeks have passed, but it felt just I could easily add another 3 weeks. Even though its’ true what they said about Jakarta: it’s hot, has bad traffic, and not much entertainment except food and shopping (i.e. no parks and geocaches). Luckily all the great people make it worthwhile.
Well, more details later, since I’m running up a huge bill of 3000 Rp already, which is about EUR 0,21
Unfortunately, we’re flying back tonight already. Oh well, just savouring the last few hours here…
On Monday we arrived in the capital Jakarta. The flight from Semarang scheduled for 60 minutes, only took 40 minutes. In Jakarta, described by everyone as hot, dusty, polluted and congested, we were lucky that we traffic was not too bad. The heat and humidity were as described, though.
My aunt’s house resembles a small palace, withmarble floors,lots of wood, and a huge garage with several cars including a Mercedes. Since I was awake between 3 and 4, and then woken up at 5:45, I badly needed a siesta in the afternoon. And a shower every 2 hours…
In the evening, more than a dozen people (cousins and their families) dropped by my aunt’s house. Needless to say that it was lots of fun, especially not having seen them for 20 years.
Dear blog friends,
I’ve missed you, and hopefully you’ve also been wondering a bit what happened to the Noodlefan. Well, he was in China (Shanghai and Xiamen) for a week, had a great time, and lots of stories to tell. Unfortunately, all international blogging sites, like LiveJournal and WordPress, are filtered there, as in: totally unreachable.
So now that we’ve left China again and got to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) this evening, I can finally write here again.
To summarize it very briefly: China is nice, we’ve found the village where my greatgrandfather most probably came from, but the language barrier is really an obstacle. Even though the people are very friendly, and you can get the most essential things with very basic chinese and lots of gestures and some drawings.
Still, it’s so much easier here in malaysia, where they speak both English and Malay / Indonesian…
Anyway, it’s great to be able to post here again. We will stay here for 2 nights, and then head for Indonesia, where I have no idea if i will have net access.
Woohoo, thanks to my little friend EEE, and XS4ALL’s roaming, I am online at gate E07 of Amsterdam’s airport Schiphol.
So far everything went really smoothly. We got here 4 hours in advance, checked in our bags, changed our seats 20 rows more to the front (finally this automatic self service check in does what I want) and did some shopping both outside and inside customs. Then we made our way to the gate (yay,only the E-pier, not that far away), to find only 4 people in the waiting room.
Only drawback of Schiphol is: since the luggage scanning machine is right at the gate (not when you go through customs), you really have to either finish or throw away all your drinks before you enter the plane. Oh well.
Woohoo, I just found two great bargains at BOL.com, and ordered the following items.
1) the Ang Lee 4 DVD collectors box I’ve wanted for a long time. It contains 2 Chinese movies: Eat, Drink, Man, Woman “(that was one) and The Wedding Banquet, and 2 American ones: Brokeback Mountain and Pushing hands. In the stores I once saw them for €40, but couldn’t find them anymore. At BOL they were only €25
2) a ridiculously cheap edition (slightly abbreviated, but it’s okay), of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for only €7,50. I’m also listening to the Swedish audiobook version of the second volume of this series, but it can’t hurt to have an English printed version as well.
As an experiment, I’m going to have it delivered to my office, to prevent annoying trips to news agent replacing the post office which has just been closed down. This has the potential risk that it might get lost, if the company name is not clearly marked on the address label, but we’ll see…
So last weekend I spent quite a lot of time fiddling with software for my mobile devices: my Palm Tungsten C, and my Nokia 6131 phone.
1. I tried to transcode movies (actually, episodes of the Heroes show) first for my Palm, then for my phone. The challenges were: how to correctly transcode an AVI in HD-format (16:9) to the 320×320 screen of my Palm, and then to the QVGA (240 x 320) of my Nokia.
I succeeded at the first quite acceptably; the drawback of my Palm is that I don’t have a very good player app. (MMMedia, which) and that the earphone jack is a bit broken (1-channel sound and a 2.5mm jack)
With the Nokia conversion, I didn’t succeed in finding the correct settings for the right program to convert it to the required 3GP container.
I tried both the free MediaCoder program and a trial version of Xilisoft’s 3GP Video Converter.
2. The other piece of software I tried, was Mobile Master. My problem was: I have appointments on both my Palm and my phone, and I want to synchronize them. Also, I am used to synchronizing my Palm with the Palm Desktop software, which I prefer over crappy M$ Outlook. Using Mobile Master, I’m now able to synchronize Palm Desktop with my Nokia phone, so I can (through the PC) keep my 2 mobile devices synchronized. Yay!
