The Barcelona appartment hunt continues. Almost rented a place today by the lady of luck decided that I was inflicting a wrong upon myself and intervened to make sure I didn’t get the appartment. The hunt continues. This evening we are all going to a big nightclub with 5 different floors/rooms with different music in each. Will be cool.
Another day goes by in Sunny Barcelona. Last evening as I and Wim where walking back to the appartment we came across a street fair just one block from his appartment. The whole street where closed of to make room for a stage where they where doing what I would describe as a Moulin Rouge style show . It was definetly enjoyable to watch and it struck me that I really had moved to a new place, since for instance a public striptease in Norway is only performed by drunk students :)
Got my social security number also today which means I can actually get some salary, which never hurts :). Still more paperwork to get sorted out and I am still not having a appartment. Very optimistic about the two flats I am about to see tommorow though.
So I am back after spending three days in Stuttgart attending the aKademy KDE conference. It was really great to meet Scott and Mark in real life and I kinda got to meet Rob Buis of KSVG fame (for 3 minutes at least :). It was of course also great to see and talk to Evangelia again, seems she will be visiting us here in Barcelona early next year. Scott made similar threats about visiting so it will be lots of guests I guess :)
The talk Scott and I did went pretty well the only thing I was a bit sorry about was not doing some fancy smancy demoes; their always popular and we did get a bit upstaged by the NMM guys :). On the other hand while cool demoes are fun; hackers do see through them so it wasn’t like it was a crisis that we didn’t have some. I am feeling very optimistic about the chances of KDE adopting GStreamer after this weekend, but of course the final decision lies in the hand of the KDE hackers. At least I think being their and being able to talk to a lot of people did help clear up some misconceptions about GStreamer and of course people where very happy about Fluendo streaming the conference. We have gotten some requests from other conferences now about doing streaming so we have to see how to solve that, because as big supporters of free software we do want to help out whereever we can, but on the other side it takes a lot of time and resources for us.
Seems I am still not 100% attuned to Barcelona, after 3 trips I have still not done a really correct walk from work to Wim’s place yet :)
Sitting at the office currently and polishing my GStreamer slides in preparation for doing my talk at the KDE conference Akademy in Stuttgart on Sunday (leaving for Stuttgart this evening :).
Ok, so to complete my recount of my Namibian adventures.
The second day in Opuwo we traveled north towards the Angolan border river. As I mentioned there is a mobile school system for the Himba’s which is funded partially by a Norwegian NGO. We had three of the teachers coming with us in the car and we stopped and various schools on the way to deliver exam papers and similar. We where a bit unfortunate about the timing as the where few students attending at the time we where at the schools, but it felt good helping them out. When we reached the river we stopped for lunch and it happened that there was a Himba village just next to the river so we managed to get a few pictures taken while there. The border river was quite fierce and there was a small waterfall where we stopped so we managed to get some nice scenery shots too. At the very end of the drive we stopped at a local center where I managed to bumble right into the middle of a poolio vacination project. Unfortunatly the presence of my white self caused quite a stir and all atention shifted from the poor guy trying to explain to the local why they should let their children to be vacinated to the strange white guy walking around.
Warning this will be a long entry as I try to summarize the last 16 days of my vacation; this entry covering almost all of my African stay.
Ok, what a fantastic last 3 weeks of my vacation! While I loved Borneo too, South Africa and Namibia where the absolutly best part of my vacation. The Kruger park safari in South Africa was wonderfull and I got to see vast variety of local wildlife up close. We even ended up being chased away by a huge angry old male who didn’t like have his little romantic encounter with a female elephant in heat interupted.
Ok, so I have now arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Drifters Inn is pretty nice and the two australian guys I share a room with doesn’t snore to badly. For the first time in my life I am having some language problems talking to australians, the two guys are from a small mining town around a 1000 km north of Brisbane and talk english like crocodille dundee multiplied by ten :) The local sheilas do seem to find it charming though :)
Me and my newfound friends thought we should rent a car and drive around the city to look around, but after talking to one of the guys at the hotel who tended to say ‘no, you don’t want to take the chance of going there by yourself’ we decided that caution should take precedence. Instead I went for a 25 minute walk to a local shopping mall as recommended. The guys warning about not going most places on our own struck me as being in accord with local customs as I noticed on my way to the mall that every house had a high wall with either iron spikes or an electric fence on top of it and signs from local security companies promising an armed response if anyone should trepass.
Had some nice days in Sydney starting with Jan and Jamie talking me to Jeff and Pia’s place for a barbeque. Even got to try some barbequed kangaroo. I am really curious to see what Jeff and co. will cook up to revolutionize the Linux world, could be really interesting.
Jan and Jamie took me the next day to see some wildlife at the Australian Reptile park. Although the name says reptile they do also have a collection of Australian non reptiles so I got to see and touch both live kangaroos and koalas in addition to seeing a nice sample of the Australian reptile population. In the evening we went to Jan’s parents for a nice dinner.
After my last entry we went to an island resort run as part of a giant sea turtle conservation effort. They had a large sea turtle hatchery on the site and in the night we could see the huge turtles come in to lay their eggs (under ranger supervision of course). I think I managed to get a sun stroke cause I got quite sick in the evening and the days after. Luckily the rest of the trip we just flew back to Kota Kinabalu and rejuvated at a nice holiday resort kinda hotel. Had big problems eating anything, but even my stomach seemed to make a comback the last day so I had a plesant flight (as pleasant as they can get flying economy class) to Sydney today. With a little effort and some help from Chantal (one of the girls who had been on the trip with me) I managed to get hold of Jan (thaytan) and he came and picked me up at the airport which was very kind of him. The little I have seen of Sydney so far looks nice, but it is friggin cold here :)
My adventures on Borneo continues. After leaving the hot springs of Porig we travelled on to stay a night out in the jungle. They had built a small wodden platou where we slept under a mosquito net. Was quietly lulled to sleep by the sounds of the jungle around me. The jungle was nice, but due to a forest fire some 60 years ago it was relativly young. Jungle cats came into our camp in the evening just before we fell asleep which was very cool. The night after we spent living together with the villagers in their houses. We where splitt into groups of two people and placed at various families. It was an interesting experience as you got very close on the daily life of the people of Borneo. The shower beeing a bucket of water and a smaller bucket to use for pouring the water onto yourself is quite a bit removed from the life I am accustomed to, but definetly an interesting experience.
Travelled onwards to the Sepilok Orangutang sanctuary. It was fun seeing all the young Orangutang’s come running in for the scheduled feeding. There was even a young mother with a child. No large males though as the older Orangutangs tend to stop comming to the sanctuary’s feeding sessions. On the afternoon feeding there was also a large host of smaller monkeys swarming around trying to steal bananas from the Orangutangs. I hope some of my photos turned out well.