Wally Nes’ Blog

I miss a lot of things about Japan. In an online game I play at my LARP forum I reconnected with Shibuya Crossing.

In case you forgot just how populous Tokyo could be. This one is for you

Conflicting with the Japan theme I had starting off, the Korean theme I hope this will evolve to and the European theme this blog has now that I’m sorta stuck in the middle I would like to use this blogpost to take you on a journey to a place I lived and traveled in 9 years ago. Australia

If I ever find myself with too much time on my hands (which isn’t a realistic prospect just now) I will have some of the pictures scanned, but anyone who has been at my place has seen them on the wall. The big A4-prints illustrating some feature of Australia.

In the fall of 2001 (Southern hemisphere: March) I crossed the Nullarbor plain. Nullarbor means No (Null) trees (arbor), and is a misleading name. There’s at least 5. Which I suppose is , for a 1200 km stretch, close enough to no trees after all.
The actual plain is 1200 km from east to west at its longest but the highway that travels through it doesn’t become any more interesting after exiting the highway. In reality it is more of a 3k drive between stuff. Sure, there’s the bits and pieces of skylab to see in different roadhouses to keep you distracted on the 2 day long drive but for some people this is not enough.

I was lucky enough to encounter people with car trouble underway and we were able to keep busy helping them along and snickering behind their backs. Rani got a ticket for sleeping on the backseat without a seatbelt.
It was still pretty boring.

BUT NO MORE!

Australian businessmen have banded together and are building A GOLF COURSE.

Read the article here.

This is the route it takes. And just so you know, this is what it looks like now

And this is how natural it will look

What can I say . . . . I quite like it. Can’t be much worse than it was before.

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Quote of the day:

OK, first of all. I did not come up with that name.
Just so we’re clear.

Some weeks ago it was my birthday. I blogged about that, or about the fact I’d forgotten about it. I received many great gifts including the Lonely Planet photography book, a spoon (for tunneling out of North Korea) and a chain mail dice bag

But the best gift came from some people I met on the interwebz. A meet-up had been on the planning for some time in Vienna aaaaaaaaand that’s where my interest stopped. I am quite broke at the moment and flying to Vienna doesn’t really line up with being broke. So someone offered to drive me there, no charge and a bed was offered soon enough after that. I got a long weekend in Vienna for my B-day present. WHeeeeeeee.

Wednesday night I made my way to Arnhem so we could leave the next day at 05:00.

This brought us 1100 km to Vienna. Though when the odometer went back to 60 km/h on the first hill I was a bit afraid of the fact that Vienna . . . . well, it’s in Austria. And Austria is mostly in the Alps.

Undaunted, we continued. Ronald had to drive the entire way solo as I am not a licensed driver.

Thanks again Ronald.

After a grueling drive we arrived. Our gracious host received us

Aaaaaand put us to work

There were some 20-odd people in total on the meetup, but that’s too cumbersome to navigate throughout the city so we split up by houses. This was mine

We humbly thank the officers of the Vienna police department for not having us all arrested.

When we finally did get together there was food
|
more food

more food

cake

good ol’ fashioned fun

Booze

shenanigans

sushi

and euhm . . . . .

karaoke

Go here for more pictures.

Thank you all for a wonderfull (long) weekend. And special thanks to whoever infected 10-odd people with the flu An extra week at home recovering was nice.

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“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

~Terry Pratchett

Yesterday I got on a train at 07:30  and got off at 20:30

Long day, very tiring, eventhough you spend most of it on your butt.

To compensate I’m going to the beach now.

I'm off to the beach, Bitches

I’ve been back from holiday a week now. A 32 hour work-week.
Fun!

I spent my holiday with Raph in Lille. There was a plan to go south to her grandparents but unfortunately that didn’t work out.

Due to her having to stay close to the office (as well as spending some time there) we were never able to leave Lille for very long. While in Lille we got to celebrate Delphine(Raph’s younger sister)’s high school graduation. Visit an alternative museum. Hurt ourselves in new original ways. Spend time in the kitchen and of course subsequently eating all that food. Entertain friends. Lazing and photographic in the park. Shopping for a new, more spacious appartment. Entertaining other friends. Finding the best little café in Lille. Finding the home of the elfs and spending lots and lots of time in the zoo.
Besides all I photographed there was watching the quatorze julliet fireworks from a penthouse patio overlooking the city while enjoying a few drinks and talking with friends. More grassy lazy moments. More terasses, drink and food. Spending time together inside and outside (well, more inside. The weather was kinda crappy).

There was my progression in the French language

Me: “What is this?”
French person: “It is the first right, then when that avenue ends left.”
Me: No, WHAT is it?
French person: “Follow me, if you see this you take a right here and then at the end of the avenue go left”
Me (holding up the map indicating I was well aware of where it was): Yes, thank you, is it a kind of museum?”
French person: “Yes”

This was how we found Lille’s concert hall.

Also, Iguana imperionations.

Mimes

The parental meetup.

Discovery of art in unexpected places.

And other things I’ll keep within the privacy of Raph’s bedroom.

The complete album of pictures can be found here.

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And on a small side note:
Yesterday’s B-day party of Sjors and Kim

The Wild West edition

There’s a link on that picture btw.

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Quote of the day:

If you get thrown from a horse, you have to get up and get back on, unless you landed on a cactus; then you have to roll around and scream in pain.

- anon

The name of a festival that started this last weekend in Lille.

As I understand it Lille was the cultural capital of Europe in 2004 and they liked the attention they got so now, 5 years later, they once again organised a grand festival to attract cultural . . . stuff to Lille.

Or something like that at least.

All I know was that I had to go to Lille because Raphaelle couldn’t come to Holland as she had to sing.

Perhaps I should have done some more research into the thing. I hadn’t quite grasped the scope of the festival. The thing I went to was the opening ceremony of the festival while the actual thing will last ’till summer.
Perhaps there is interesting stuff to come still.

Things went much as I had expected during the afternoon. There were some statues. Some animal activism. I took some nice pictures of Raph and the rest of her choir. Though the rhythm of the chattering teeth wasn’t quite in 7/8 things sounded quite good.

The night came and it was quite a bit more crowded than I had expected. The baby statues’ street was made blue together with this square.

But lots of people and some blue paper maché over lamp-post does not a Festival make.

A giant internally glowing . . . well Giant does. Or at least it makes a decent starting point.
The dude just sorta walked along the square squishing people that didn’t get out of the way fast enough. He was followed by a ball and another giant. There was a drum band as well but they were hanging in a black sky with some lights on them. Didn’t really make pretty pictures.
While the giant came past a wall of people came up to greet him.

Further on was a choir of 700 people singing their lungs out. Due to poor lighting conditions I have some pretty yellow smudges on my computer for the people that really want to see it. Though one of the singers put some of those up on her website.

After that the singing the Giants took their leave and I had to undertake a measure of counter-survivalist behaviour.
Going toward big flames with cannonfire is something that has been tagged as a really bad move by countless successful generations before us. Yet I made my way towards it.

I should have listened to those nagging genes in the back of my head. 10 minutes later I was in a tightly packed crowd as the wind shifter and I got all the smoke of 2 giant bonfires in my eyes.

Beyond the fire (or in my case after a 10 minute detour. There really were a lot of people about) there was the closing fireworks.

All in all I would say that it was a nice opening for a Festival.

Next post: Paris, here’s already the link to the pictures.

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Quote of the Day:

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?

- George Carlin