Epernay, smack in the middle of Champagne region (at least to me). There’s a rather impressive street called Avenue de Champagne where some of the large champagne houses reside. I was told there’s another one in Reims, but its so big I didn’t see it there. In Epernay, the champagne houses takes up a large majority of the town. You have Moet & Chandon, there’s Mercier as well and a bunch of others. Out of these Moet is the largest as far as I know.
Back to Castellane. I’ve heard of this champagne before as everytime we celebrate something in the office there’s at least a case of it. We wanted to go into the Mercier cellar tour but it was winter when we were there and was told later that most cellar tours (they call it “cave tours”) are closed. Castellane was open.
The cost of the tour was 7 Euro (early 2007) per person including a glass of brut champagne. Other than the usual “how do we make it”, there’s a nice walk in the cellars, that’s supposed to either stretch 1km or totaled 1km. I think it should be the former since we saw a long alleyway that stretches into infinity. Some of the bottles of wine still aging in there are covered in soft fungus.
Very interesting… The picture above is a spy picture of the racks of champagne bottles that seems to be filled, either waiting for eternity, or waiting to be put on a robot arm that turns the bottle automatically.
Champagne de Castellane
Continue reading 'Travels: Castellane Champagne, Epernay, France'»
I think the title to this post is a little misleading. The church is not really called that. Have no idea what its called!
Anyway, the story here is that we were driving around the Champagne region in January 2007, and just outside Epernay, we stumbled across a rather nice looking village on a high ground, hence called hautevilliers, I suppose. Without a guide book and on the wrong road (we were supposed to be on the road to Reims) we came across a little church, that’s rather empty. We saw some German tourists outside, and thought maybe we’d take a break. When we went inside the empty church that has some monastic background music playing, we say a sign in French pointing in the direction of Dom Perignon’s grave, which is just in front of the altar. Dom Perignon is the monk everyone thinks invented the Champagne drink. The village is surrounded by vineyards. Can’t tell what they are, but I suppose all 3 type of grapes (Pinot Noir, Pinot Muniere, Chardonnay) are grown there.
Its not everyday that you get lost with a GPS and stumbled on an important place!
The church is here
Continue reading 'Travels: Dom Perignon’s Church, Hautvilliers, France'»
Two more weeks to go before the packers come for the move to Shanghai. Trying to think of what I need to bring over there. Just yesterday I was out to get a bread making machine, after tasting the substandard Brioche in Shanghai last week on business trip. Finally got my hands on a Staub cocotte as well, that heavy metal cooking pot/utensil. It was not that easy having to lug those two items back from the centre of Paris to Boulogne-Billancourt by metro. But got back safe, and hopefully today I’ll try out the bread machine since its Sunday. Not that there’s no boulangerie open on Sunday, but they’re a fair bit of walk away.
This is my first long haul flight during my time working in France. First thing I noticed is that there’s a check in queue when I arrived at Charles de Gaulle 2C. So far, within europe I could do an electronic checking on one of the kiosks, but international I have to queue up like everyone else. Then I overweighted the luggage. The usual economy flight limit is 20kg, but most airlines give a little extra before charging excess luggage. Singapore Airlines’ limit is 30kg. But Air France is only 22kg! I had to try and bring some items to Shanghai first before my next trip for good, so I had at least 26kg in the luggage.
No problem, small issue. Then when boarding the flight I had to take the bus, and it seems that in the last 2-3 trips out of France I’ve been using the bus and not the aerobridge directly. I think the Parisien airports are too small.
Once the Boeing 777 took off, I realised that my touchscreen LCD doesn’t work at all. Out of all the buttons that shows up one the screen (3×3 matrix) only the bottom right works, and on Air France its the button for “info” that has no information at all. So during the whole flight I had nothing to watch on the screen. Worse, the flight seems to be filled with very young chinese babies and their mothers, and they cry all the way from Paris to Shanghai.
In summary, I’ve had 2 out of the worst flights I’ve had ever in the last few months. The one to London before christmas included strikes by airport bus drivers and a heavy fog delaying all flights.
Nice sunny day today in Paris. After 2 slices of bread with peanut butter, its out on the bike for a couple of rounds at the nearby race course. Like the other parisiens, the place was packed with families and cyclists (and also joggers). The cyclists go clockwise, and before long I was already in a 20 strong peloton, and to grow to a bigger group. There were so many people this morning that it was not too easy to be left alone fighting the wind. Luckily most of the peloton was going at a normal speed (average 30kmph, and up to 40kmph on the level ground) so it was not too bad. The road was a little wet from an oblivious rain sometime last night so if I start to draft a mountain bike I get road juice all over my face.
But nice though, 1hr out there and I covered 35km, which should be about 6-7 turns of the course.
Just got the index.html up and running on nangka.org. Not that easy to sit around all day during the Paris winter sale to think of a design for the front page. The one that’s up right now (as in today) is an empty page with the permanent features up, and might be tweaked as time goes by. I consider this as a “beta” version. I’ve established a workflow where I can put pictures on the front page and get transparencies, etc etc. You’ll see it coming.. I think I will need to work on the bottom buttons since they look rather big today.
Managed to migrate the photo albums to the new installation of Gallery on my new web server last night. I had the option to make a complete move with the comments, etc but that would have meant that I will have to play around with the SQL database backups since my gallery paths were a little different this time. Finally decided to go on with the import of the previous gallery structure only and forgetting about a SQL migration.
Obviously no problem with the migration from Movable Type exported file into WordPress. Everything seems smooth. Did as well a compression of the number of categories in WordPress compared to my old MT site. WordPress has this nice feature where you can set the default category, and when you delete a certain category, it will mark all the posts affected with the default category, so that you dont have to go into every posts one by one.
So the applications are now running. I think I’ll do fine with just WordPress and Gallery this time. The next thing to do is to work on the graphics and the start page. I think I’ll start as soon as possible with a very simple text based front page while I work on the elaborate long term website.
WordPress has this nifty feature where you can send an email to a special address and the server parses the mail into a blog entry.
Problem so far is that there is only one possible category and its hard coded in the WordPress options. That’s a small problem. I’ve tried to send a blog entry from my office’s Lotus Notes email client and what happens is that the entry includes a couple of redundant extra line which is just markup excesses that is not stripped out. Same for attachment. WordPress displays the text version of the file (the hex bytes?), but then again I’d be really surprised if it can identify attachments! So no Lotus Notes email.
The convenience obviously outweighs the stuff above. Now there’s no need to log into a certain web based system to blog anymore, at least for me. I’m just imagining the future where I can use my iPhone to email blog entries! Too bad the phone wont be out in Europe nor Asia till end of 2007 or even next year. I’m sure you can get it in the US before but I’m betting it will SIM locked to Cingular… that’s another issue.
Switched my ISP to GoDaddy this week. And most of the stuff are up and working. I’v migrated the blogging software from Movable Type to WordPress and still have not migrated the entries into the new system. Same for the gallery installation on /gallery. Will do it over the week, I dont think I generate enough traffic to do anyting too hasty.
The other thing I’m thinking of is to remodel the site so that its simpler to design and modify. I think I just need 2 directories and a main page that’s really simple. I’ll sit down one day and think about that. In the meantime you’re not going to get any main page (too much time to redesign) until the final one is up. I dont think there’s a point to put “under construction” either since its so cliche’d.
Enjoy!
If you remember, a few months back, I attempted to cycle from Paris to Rambouillet (50km away) but my wheel spoke broke just a few km shy of destination. Here’s a link to Google Maps for a rough idea of the route.
So this weekend, I decided to try it one more time on my new wheels and managed to do the whole thing in 4hr 30mins. The odometer on my Polar says 95km to and fro. Average temperature was about 10C. I brought 2 bottles of water (one of them insulated, the other turned into ice water after a few minutes out there) and a banana for the celebratory food once I reached Rambouillet.
Nothing broke this time. When I passed the exact location where my spokes broke I had this feeling that something bad would happened so I slowed down somewhat. But at the end it was all fine. Did my goal now, although the return trip was quite punishing since I had 2 large hills to climb with a sore leg.
I doubt I’ll do it again before leaving France! The next cycle trips will be much shorter for me.
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