Joune

Friday, February 17, 2006

Visa for Russia

http://www.visatorussia.com : 50USD for invitation + fake trip plan
http://www.homevisas.com/Dossier/russie.html : 75€ for invitation + fake trip plan
http://studyrussian.com/MGU/visa_application.html: 70USD for invitation + fake trip plan
http://www.gotorussia.net/visasupport/russian_visa_support.htm: 29USD for invitation and i'm not sure what else
http://www.realrussia.co.uk/visa/tourist_visas2.asp : £75 VISA included ?
http://www.waytorussia.net/Travel/VisaSupport.html : 30USD for invitation valid for 30 days stay
... i even had a guy on the phone who was ready to sell me the invitation only for 190€!! (and the VISA for 220€ on top of that!)

There are so many of these agencies out there and the prices are so different it gets really confusing..
Has anyone out there already -successfully or not so successfully- used any of these services? you may even make the list longer if you whish.. but please share valuable experience.. Am i cool with a 30 bucks invitation? if not, why?

Thanks people!

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Coming soon..

Hey, i made a little intro for my Shanghai pictures.. check it out and tell me what you think!

http://joune.free.fr
(Don't forget to allow popups in your browser)

And no Flash by the way! All Javascript, thanks to DynAPI rocking APIs.. really cool project from SourceForge, so check that out too!
http://dynapi.sourceforge.net

Monday, January 30, 2006

Flight AF117 Shanghai-Paris

A few more airplane landscapes.. and back home!
And that's it for this trip, folks!

Maglev..

well, you don't ride a train at 431km/h every other day.. at least i don't!
..quite a change from indian trains i must say!

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Happy New Year!

Wow! this new year thing is no joke down here! As my Virginia friend Dustin would put it "That was some MAD fire cracking i'm tellin'yall!!"
Streets filled up with smoke banging and flashing solid for hours.. 'thought we'd be deaf by dawn! (i just wanted to throw in "deaf by dawn" cause i thought it sounded cool! maybe for a movie title or something! ..any producer out there??)

So here's how it looked up in the sky..

.. but down in the streets it was straight up Bagdad!!

.. but it didn't prevent Richard, Tao and i to do our little new year celebration in my hotel room!

Due to technical difficulties related to pictures upload and other timeout issues, you may please be so kind to wait a little longer for the last few posts from Shanghai..

In the meantime you may want to go outside and exercise a little, for sitting in front of your computer may not be the healthiest thing to do. But do not forget to come back!

Happy new year to all!

Saturday, January 28, 2006

The Jinmao tower

As one of the landmarks of Shanghai and amongst the highest buildings in the world -with an observation deck at 340 meters- i thought it would be worth throwing in a few pics!

.. from the outside..

.. from inside out..

.. and inside.. this giant spiral is the column of balconies of the 30 floors of the Grant Hyatt hotel!

.. oh, and by the way, if you were wondering where she was hiding, Cheng Yue Hui, the most beautiful girl in China works as an elevator operator in the Jinmao tower!..

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

I hate it when they do that!

You know, the hotel maids..
..cause the first time you go to wash your hands, and only when they're wet you realise you forgot to open the tiny soap bar in that plastic wrapper that's just impossible to open with wet hands.. so finally you open it and wash your hands and leave your brand new soap bar by the sink so you can use it next time..
but then you come the next day to wash your hands, and there you are with your wet hands and damn! the soap bar has gone! your brand new soap bar that you barely used once, they threw it away and gave you a brand new neatly wrapped soap bar that you can just open again so they can throw it away the next day!

Help us saving the environment!
Join the movement at http://www.swtthsba.org
The Stop-Wasting-Them-Tiny-Hotel-Soap-Bars Association

Shanghai facades

Just a little compilation of building facades i shot this morning.. thought it looked funny.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Chinese characters

One intruder has slipped into this series of chinese caracters.. will you be able to recognize it?

Monday, January 23, 2006

..and so i woke up at 4am on saturday to catch the train to Hangzhou, with a terrible hangover!

Once upon a time, in the peaceful county of Zhejiang, lived Bei Suzhen the beautiful fairy..
And Bei Suzhen the beautiful fairy fell deeply in love with Xu Xian the poor simple dude because he let her borrow his umbrella -chicks were a lot easier to pick up in these early days!
But Fa Hai the evil bastard magician priest disagreed with this love between a beautiful fairy and a poor simple dude and although it was none of his business, wouldn't let them mary and live happily ever after!
So beautiful fairy Bei Suzhen got super mad and started breaking all kinds of shit (you know how girls are when they get mad) and she launched a war campaign against evil bastard magician priest Fa Hai.
Great magical powers were unchained, the earth trembled and as a result of all this mess, the region got flooded. And that is how this war gave birth to the west lake as a symbol of the love between beautiful fairy Bei Suzhen and simple dude Xu Xian...
Now it seems that naughty -yet beautiful- fairy Bei Suzhen had not quite been a good girl all the way as she already had a baby in her womb when she launched the magical attack!
As a result, her magical powers were diminished and Fa Hai the evil bastard magician priest was very powerful so he defeate naughty beautiful fairy Bei Suzhen and to punish her, emprisonned her inside the Leifeng tower, by the newly created lake..
And this would be the first fairy tale i know of where the bad guy wins in the end, if -god knows how, and don't ask me cause nobody seems to remember!- the tower didn't somehow collapse years later, freeing beautiful fairy Bei Suzhen and her grown up son so they could meet again with the old beloved simple dude Xu Xian -who never did anything in the story except for lending his umbrella (and maybe a little nick-nack-pushy-pushy-whack with beautiful fairy Bei Suzhen, but who'd blame him!)- and finally live hapilly ever after... it was about time!

You can go to sleep now children!

ASB's new year party

There was a company party on friday for the chinese new year.. about a hundred people in a restaurant yelling "chi'nye how" (or something like that!) and of course you have to finish up your glass every time!
..needless to say i got back to my hotel completely drunk!

Friday, January 20, 2006

The spring festival is coming up...

... and everyone is getting ready, preparing the decorations and the great food, to celebrate the new year.. Like here, the keepers of this camera store, let their fish dry in the breeze of the entrance door!

Rain...

Rain,
Rain,
Rain,
and more rain!

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

A bit of culture!

Oh nothing serious don't worry!
I just thought it was funny.. the other day as i was bragging that i could write my name in chinese, at some point i drew a black rectangle around it (in the discussion, just to draw the attention back to it), and they all freaked out, like "are you crazy?! don't do that! It represent death for the person!!"

So I just thought you should know: "Thou shall not draw a black box around your name -nor around anybody else's name for that matter!"

Then i asked if i could circle my name and that was OK!

Contact (2)

I finally made some local friends here, aside from workmates, and whom i can hang out with.. thanks to Richard Lui who's a photo reporter here.

Let me introduce you...
Richard, Cheng Lu and Tao Jie Hui, my blog readers,
my blog readers, Richard, Cheng Lu and Tao Jie hui!

They even tried to teach me how to properly use them damn sticks, but i think i'll just stay with my good old funky method (at least i can grab something!)