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Published: October 1st 2013
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Sadly, I have had almost no time to sit and reflect. I've told people about Paris & Belgrade and processed the photos on to Facebook but I haven't sat and written this, and now it's October. 10 months later. So this will be a short entry, writing about Paris and about Belgrade (one after another in February) but in the spirit of the travel blog I want to record my journeys, so here goes.
We went to Paris as part of an Awesome/2 Morons deal. I don't know if you remember, waaaay back, when I went to Rome for three days with a couple of Swedes for a conference, and had an absolutely amazing time running around Rome, having loads of adventures and learning about how fantastic people can be - Cristiano, my couch surfing host and his roommate who were so kind to me, and Nils and Anders, my lovely Swedish friends who I've had many adventures with since. Paris was another such adventure. It began with a question "Do you want to fly quadrocopters at the Louvre?", obviously, the answer was yes. (Quadrocopter: a four bladed helicopter, about the size of your plate). Dzl works with quadrocopters so
it seemed like an intriguing idea. Paris Fashion Week at the Louvre. The concept was pretty straightforward and quite nice - a fashion designer, Sruli Recht, who makes intriguing futuristic clothing (I know nothing about fashion, my apologies to the fashion world if I've labelled it wrong) wanted to do a piece called "Concentrated" - about a post apocolyptic uprising of a rebel group fighting against a big brother government. The models were the rebels, the government the quadrocopters. Sruli's background is Australian/Jewish so between the Aboriginals and the Jews, he's got a lot of backstory for this one, so it was an interesting project. Long story short, Dzl pulled off miracles again, getting the project together, making a two quadrocopter system where the cameras on the quadrocopters broadcast video and images to a screen and showed the faces as portraits and the video feed of the models. The models came out on the runway, one by one and were chased and examined by the quadrocopters. After working like mad down to the last minute, Dzl and I flew the quadrocopters and did the show with only slight issues at the end where the wifi signal went crazy (with people
uploading photos as the show ended) and the copters stopped listening to our radio controlled signals and we had to emergency land them. Besides that chaos, the show was fun and interesting. You can see the video here:
But Paris... let's focus on that. Paris was excellent after we got past the crazy motel we were booked into it. A company booked a "hotel" for us and when we got there, it was not only terrifyingly gross and smelled like urine, but the person yelled at us for cancelling our booking, and there were large scary men walking around in the background and ultimately, it was just awful. We left and booked another place which was out of the way but lovely. We spent all waking moments NOT at work exploring cafes and tasting Paris. We ate everything. The first night we found a nice restaurant and Dzl got to eat his fill of steak tartare (I can not do it!) and I got some French onion soup. On the following nights we met up with some of the friends of our Swedish friends and had a great night out exploring different areas and eating at tasty places.
We also met up with our dear friend Andrei who was temporarily living in Paris and explored the area he was in (Marais I think) also. The highlight of the trip was the snow. Endless freakin' snow. It was the most snow Paris has had in many years and it just kept falling, for three days straight and we had brought only dress shoes expecting fine February weather. We were frozen (literally sometimes) and tried to explore the city, taking the hop on hop off bus just to avoid walking around, until that also shut down and we were left with a very wet metro system. It was a bit of chaos but beautiful to see the city covered in snow. I think our big take away memory from Paris was going to the small local bakeries and getting lovely food and going to a fantastic comedy show (in English!) where I ended up winning a cheese - I can't remember why now, but nonetheless, I went home with a roll of Brie. Highly entertaining.
Then a short week later, we were in Belgrade, in Serbia. This was special for two reasons, one we were there for a conference
(Resonate) and Dzl managed to go through his work and I managed to go through mine so that was a fantastic experience to go somewhere together on someone else's business for once! Secondly, my co-worker Dusan, is Serbian and so he was wonderful enough to help me every step of the way finding cool places to go. Once again, our Swedes, Anders and Nils were with us and we had a great time with them. Belgrade is a fascinating city with many nice walks and tasty restaurants. We ended up eating at an old classic restaurant where we ordered all the meat in the world and got to try all the Serbian specialities. Strangely enough, Belgrade seems to be half-endorsing anti-smoking laws, in that, the table where you're eating will have a sign saying "No Smoking!" on half of the table and smoking allowed on the other half. I think they missed the point. Either way, an otherwise perfect vacation was only tainted by smoke - everywhere. Even in the fancy hotel we stayed at, people smoked in the restaurant, it was crazy. We went on an interesting tour of the city and learned a lot about Serbia and the
wars it has been in - recently. I think their last war was just under 10 years ago and the buildings reflect that. There's some nearly falling down and some being restored, and generally the attitude of the people was intriguing, people were relaxed. We spoke to a few of them and they said it was a relief to be relaxed and unstressed. They played with their children in the streets at 11 at night, and there was an air of vacation about - people just enjoying themselves and life. It was nice to experience. The conference itself was great and useless. The building was an old youth activity hall and was really worn down, and the planning of the conference was awful. One had to run from talk to talk and there was absolutely no opportunity to talk to the other people there. It was an amazing collection of truly incredible people but we never got the chance to meet them because of the setup of the conference. There were various conference rooms and someone had thought it was a good idea to put crazy pounding techno music (note, not electronic, but actual techno) or hip hop, live djs,
blasting through the hallway. So imagine, overcrowded (waaaay overbooked) conference rooms with people literally sitting in each other's laps, trying to listen to a speaker, with the sounds of a too-loud dj just outside, and booked back to back to back, so there was no time, and no space for interaction between people. It was quite sad since he speakers were fantastic and we were all very happy to attend their talks, if only we could hear them or discuss them afterwards. So...conference fail, but we did make some new friends and learned a bit. At least being inspired by the first day, which was all workshops, was definitely a plus and we felt like we got a lot out of that. Dzl did some Raspberry Pi hacking and I learned about visualizing data. So that was good!
So Paris and Belgrade were intriguing and exciting in their own ways and we had a good time, though I think for us, Paris needs to be sunny next time and Belgrade needs to update its smoking laws. We might try Resonate again but only if it changes the way it runs things and stops trying so hard to be young
and hip and rather respects the intelligence of the crowds it gathers and gives them space to think and converse. Some highlights in Belgrade were finding a cool ice cream shop and going through the beautiful park and seeing all the sights of the river. Definitely worth a weekend visit!
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