Oman: the bridge between Asia and Africa

February 10, 2013 • Blog

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World » Oman » Muscat » Al Alam palace

Oman is a little bit like the timid nephew of the economic bullies in the gulf region. Having fewer oil reserves at its disposal, the country has not been relying as much on expat labor, meaning that Omanis, guided by over 40 years of benevolent, if autocratic, rule, have a national attitude that is more down to earth than in the other oil states in the region.

That is not to say that the country was a backwater before the discovery of oil. It is said that the queen of Sheba took frankincense from the mountains of Oman, rich from its spice trade, with her, to see and impress king Solomon.
And, even much later, Oman was a naval power to be reckoned with. In 1856, when the then sultan passed away, the kingdom was divided amongst his two sons. The one received the sultanate of Muscat, the present day capital of Oman, while the other got the sultanate of Zanzibar. Indeed, Oman and its people, for centuries, controlled the island off the East African coast and constituted a major influence in the Swahili culture of East Africa. In fact, the only two countries in the world where the somewhat obscure Ibadi muslim sect has a national majority is in both Oman and Zanzibar.

Oman being a connection between Africa and Asia is not only exemplified by its presence on the Swahili coast. The Batinah coast is home to the Baluchis, originally from Pakistan, and the Omani enclave to the north of Dubai is home to the Kumzari language which is a mix of Portuguese, Persian and Arabic.

But, now, virtually all of Oman is spanking new. 40 years ago, the country had only 7km of tarred roads and only three schools, at any level. But, with the the country's architectural style being very subdued, there are no jaw dropping skyscrapers to entertain visitors, like in the neighboring Emirates. In fact, the defining style being replications of kasbahs, say desert fortresses, the Muscat area, surrounded by dry and jagged mountains, more has a central Asian feeling than anything else.
Even so, the small backstreets of Matrah, one of the urban centers in greater Muscat, do have more than a passing resemblance to those in Stone Town. Some of the older houses indeed have wooden doors that could have been lifted straight from the capital of Zanzibar. But there is also a resemblance, and perhaps even more so, between Matrah and the whitewashed streets of Harar in Ethiopia, though Matrah is in much better shape. But also, the newfangled city gates in Oman, as well as the city walls, feel like fancy versions of those in Harar.

The souqs, markets, are like north African or middle eastern markets everywhere else, if perhaps quieter, cleaner and more organized. But it seems the majority of salesmen are actually Indian, or at least from the subcontinent.
But expats do not make up nearly as much of a portion of the population as in the UAE. Where in the Emirates it's close to 90%, in Oman it's about a third, meaning that many regular jobs are also done by Omanis.
Even more, I noticed about half a dozen destitute, begging, Omanis on the corniche, boulevard, of Matrah, Muscat's main port.

Tourism appears to consist of the older European kind, with a solid sprinkling of Asians. But all of the kind that, 20 years ago, would have headed to any of the beach resorts in the northern Mediterranean.
And they are dressed accordingly, which makes the mix of individuals that amble around on the city's walkways an eclectic mix of cultures and disparate histories.

The 'weekend' is on Thursday and Friday, which is not too common, with even the UAE having its weekend on Friday and Saturday, useful, if you want to have as large as possible an overlap with the business community in the rest of the world.
And on Fridays, the streets are so empty, pretty much all shops closed, that it feels like the zombie apocalypse has swept through the country.

But, I'm told, it's Oman's wild natural attractions that make the country so interesting. Sadly, due to Rwandair annoyingly cutting my holiday short by two days, I missed out on quite a bit of that, though did manage to take in a few glimpses. Reasons to come back, I suppose.

Derive app at the World Summit Award

February 06, 2013 • Blog

World » United Arab Emirates » Abu Dhabi » Etihad towers

The reason for heading to Abu Dhabi was Dérive app being selected as one of the winners of the World Summit Award, a UN-backed, UAE-sponsored event promoting solutions in mobile technologies. The event was held at the Jumeirah hotel at Etihad towers, an extremely opulent hotel of over 60 floors. Our bathroom, with a freestanding tub, on the 40th floor, had a near 180 degree view of the city's shoreline. Still, even though the walk-in rate is 300 euros, rooms can be booked online for a not-so-outrageous 180 euros for a double.

The conference itself was not overly interesting. Many of the speakers were rehashing old news, while a session on mobile activism, in a fancy hotel in a country that stiffles political opposition, was laughable, mostly talking about commercialisation of mobile apps. But that perhaps was more due to the UAE's fear of giving local political dissidents the 'wrong' ideas.
The catering was superb, though a bit too much of the organisational planning left to be desired, possibly in part because the actual organisers are based in Salzburg, while the local partner is possibly more interested in the political clout that actually comes with organising the event. Not from the perspective of the participants, but for outsiders.
Perhaps this is underscored by the apparent lukewarm interest in the international tech press, let alone the conventional press, of the WSA.

Still, having said that, the WSA was a success for us at Dérive app. We did not become 'champion' in our category, m-Tourism and Culture, that honor went to Harpoen, but we made a host of valuable contacts and were able to focus our strategy through the people we met and conversations we had.
And we had superb breakfast, four times in a row.

Also, there's the WSA (non-mobile) coming up in Sri Lanka later this year. I suppose we'll have to try to get in. Who doesn't want to go to Sri Lanka?

Impressions of Abu Dhabi

February 05, 2013 • Blog

World » United Arab Emirates » Abu Dhabi » Etihad towers

Abu Dhabi is the somewhat more sustainable cousin of Dubai. That is, they spend less, meaning they have more money in the bank and managed to save Dubai's ass a few years ago when the economic crisis almost saw Dubai go under.
Abu Dhabi is also a bit more boring, perhaps, and certainly doesn't have an old town at its centre, the city being nothing more than a fishing village, if that, as recently as 1962.

The fraction of the population that are said to be Emirati is amazingly small. It's said, no census data exists, that in the country, some 13% of the population is native, the rest being imported labor. It's said that in Abu Dhabi, only 5-10% of the population is in fact indigenous. And even that is contested, with apparently at least a sizeable portion of the Emiratis being half something else, half Emirati.

It's not only young treasure seekers from the Philippines and Bangladesh who come to the UAE to work, but also plenty of Ukrainians, South Africans and a host of western expats. Weirdly, the male/female sex ratio is 2.2, smaller only than in Qater. This means that for every woman there are 2.2 men, on average.
Even weirder, the UAE's population currently stands at somewhere in the neighbourhood of 9 million. While in 1963, it was as little as 95000. That's right, a hundred fold increase in the space of about 50 years.

The result of this is that, eating, drinking, shopping, working, in Abu Dhabi, is doing so in an economy that is virtually completely run by expats. Occasionally, you can see an Emirati, in his national dress, walking around on the street, probably in the process of checking up on one of his businesses, as all businesses in the UAE need to have a 51% majority ownership by an Emirati. Or you can check out any of the really fancy hotels, where you might find a few having an expensive coffee with cake, both laden with suger as alcohol is difficult to get, and very expensive.
Immigration officials, though, are local. Perhaps to minimise the risk of them accepting bribes.
It makes the whole experience of being in the UAE quite a bit surreal, a country where those in power are virtually never seen.

The central area of Abu Dhabi being located on an island, the city is often compared to New York, and specifically Manhattan. The grid is indeed very rectangular, but Abu Dhabi's 'Hyperblocks' are the size of 20 New York city blocks, with the city designed for travel by car, only.

Let me be the tourist of your travel memories

February 03, 2013 • Blog

World » United Arab Emirates » Abu Dhabi » Etihad towers
Website

I’ve started a campaign on Indiegogo where you can tell me what location you have a fond personal memory of, and I will visit it.

That one corner shop with fantastic noodles? I’ll check if it’s still there. That superb coffee in that one backstreet? I’ll try the coffee to confirm it’s still as good. That place where you had that fantastic night out? I’ll be there.

In April/May/June, I’m (currently) set to travel from Kampala to Mumbai to Chennai to Guanghzou to Beijing to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Singapore to Chennai to Mumbai and back to Kampala. The reason for this trip is my attending a wedding close to Shanghai on April 29.

Funding this campaign means telling me where to go on the route I’m already travelling, or providing the cost for veering off course to visit that place that has or once had a special meaning to you.

The trip will be documented in writing, with photos and, whenever possible, by checkins and reviews. Note that, though I might visit typical tourist attractions because of my own interests, in principle this campaign’s intention is to visit spots that have a personal meaning to you.

If you choose to support this campaign, depending on the height of your support, the spot you want me to visit has to either be on my route, or the cost of visiting (bus? train? plane?) has to be reasonably covered by the height of your donation.

When traveling, or going on holiday, it’s hard not to visit the typical tourist sites, be they the pyramids of Gizeh, the Great Wall of China, or the St. Peter in Rome. However, more and more, visiting these sites, fantastic as they are, is becoming less and less unique. Not only are more and more people able to travel more and more, everyone is also documenting and sharing their experiences more comprehensively than ever before.

The result is that memorable, unique, experiences less often happen at the typical tourist hotspots, but in places that, by themselves, appear to have little to offer. That little cafe tucked away on that backstreet, that strange little shop two blocks over or that unexpected bit of architecture off the beaten track. With this campaign I want to make those little experiences, those events that made your journey stand out, into my tourist attractions, documenting my experiences along the way.

Visit, and support, this campaign at Indiegogo.

Virtual bottle post

In 2008, I conceptualized a virtual bottle post network. Participants would leave a note and throw it inside a web-based applet. Then, some other, physically nearby, instance of the applet would pick up the message and offer it to its visitors, who could read the message and then put it back in the applet, or not.
An very close approximation of this concept has been actualised with the app airendipity. The only real difference is that it’s a mobile-phone based app, not a web-based applet that runs inside websites.

Derive workshop in Abu Dhabi

February 02, 2013 • Blog

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World » United Arab Emirates » Abu Dhabi » New York University
Website

With our presence required at the World Summit Award in Abu Dhabi, we were looking for synergies for during our stay and were lucky to find them with New York University Abu Dhabi, doing our first, official, Dérive app workshop.
Running for two days, we had a good dozen students and several staff explore the urban space they thought they already knew, create a deck of cards specifically for Abu Dhabi and get lost a second time, now with the deck they had just created.

The first Dérive app workshop was a success. We really should do that more often.

Derive Day

January 19, 2013 • Blog

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World » Uganda » Kampala » Independence monument

Dérive app is maturing quickly, and with help from Veronica Yow, Eduardo and myself threw together Dérive Day, a simultaneous event all over the world, where participants used Dérive app to explore their own urban environment to, so to speak, get lost in their own city.

So, of course, we explored Kampala, and found several never-before-seen places while shooting some nice enough snaps. 

The hyenas of Harar

January 02, 2013 • Blog

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World » Ethiopia » Harar » Harar gate

Not on the religious circuit of northern Ethiopia, Dire Dawa is much less touristy. And has very little to offer. In fact, it's so sleepy that not only were hotel representatives not waiting in the airport lobby to score some clients, as they are on the northern circuit, not even taxi drivers outside the airport cared for jumping us the moment we left the building. In fact, it took considerable effort for us to bet a taxi to drive us to our hotel.

But we were heading for Harar.

The author of the most recent Lonely Planet on Ethiopia has an unhealthy fascination with the country. Too much is too great. As a result, we have been wrong footed several times. Harar, is, according to the Planet "more reminiscent of Fez in Morocco than it is of any other Ethiopian city". Technically true, but it's also closer to 122000 inhabitants than any other city in Ethiopia. It's also the only city that produces a beer with the city's name. Qualifications that are fairly meaningless. The Mongolian city most resembling Fez will not resemble Fez much.

There are some parallels with Stone Town, on Zanzibar, but the comparison is favorable to Zanzibar, not to Harar. Sure, there's an old town, there's a city wall, there are narrow streets and there are all sorts of markets, but it's Stone Town which is the more attractive one, let alone Fez.

Only really of interest in Harar is the hyena feeding, happening every day, around dusk, on the edge of the old town. Started on what must have been a whim or a bet in the 1950s, a bunch of locals feed hyenas with strips of waste meat collected in the morning of the same day. If you're daring, you can hold a stick in your mouth, with a piece of meat wrapped around the end, and have a hyena eat the meat off it.

The town's markets hold some interest, as the city functions as something of a crossroads for trade between Ethiopia, Djibouti and a few of the defacto independent republics in what is still formally Somalia. However, they also are quite the same as markets anywhere in Africa.

We spent an afternoon chewing qat, or as it is called here, chat. More and more qat is grown locally, more and more endangering the area's water levels while replacing less profitable crops like coffee. I wanted to buy a small bag, to try, but was only allowed to by a plastic bag full. For the equivalent of one euro.
The leaves weren't as bitter as we feared, but the effect also seemed minimal.

Harar also saw us for a third time in Ethiopia at a hotel that had no record of our reservation, though each time the reservation was done by email. It was the only time they could not rearrange their bookings to host us and we had to move hotels.

With Ethiopia's different calendar, not in sync with the rest of the world; they're seven years and some days behind, Christmas is celebrated two weeks later, also meaning that new year's eve is not new year's eve in Ethiopia.
We went out for dinner, but, with the restaurant slowly emptying, went home around 10, when the streets were already so quiet it felt like the dead of night. The restaurant on the top floor of our hotel was just about to close by the time we got back, meaning we heralded the new year from our balcony, overlooking an eerily quiet city.

As we did, a man walked by barking like a dog.

The rock churches of Lalibela

December 28, 2012 • Blog

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World » Ethiopia » Lalibela » Church of St. George

Legend has it that king Lalibela was drugged and, in a coma, was told by god to recreate Jerusalem in his backyard. The wide variety of building styles used in Lalibela's churches seem to suggest a much longer period for construction than just the reign of one man, but scholars do seem to agree on the churches having, roughly, been constructed during Lalibela's reign, in either the 12th or 13th century.
Also, several of the names for the town's landmarks hark back to Jerusalem. The stream flowing through the village of a mere 15000 is the river Jordan, the largest collection of churches have as their focus the 'tomb of Adam', just like Golgotha in Jerusalem is said to contain Adam's grave.

Lalibela's 11 churches are a testament to decay, if anything. In various stages of decompensation, it's reasonably clear that, once upon a time, these churches must indeed have been a reasonable second Jerusalem. Now, faded, crumbling, and, as they must have been when built, out of kilter, filled with ragged and mostly old believers, the churches are indeed still in active use, but by a people who would in no way are able to maintain the former glory, let alone construct something similar from scratch.
Begging for pens, bags or, straightforward, money, even the authorized guards of the churches go out of their way to show you a shortcut, hoping for a 40 eurocent tip. How the mighty have fallen.

The church of St. George, shaped like a Greek cross and one of the few churches not covered by a roof by order of UNESCO, is still quite impressive, if still off kilter.

Not the ark of the covenant

December 26, 2012 • Blog

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World » Ethiopia » Aksum » The Aksum stelae

With the rich history, mythical, mystical and real, and with the prominent place Aksum, even now, holds for Ethiopian Christians, the town and it's sights are a major letdown. The invisible centerpiece is the Ark of the Covenant, supposedly the actual container built to house the tablets with the ten commandments, given by god to Moses.

Tradition holds that the queen of Sheba, of whose existence there is no contemporary historical evidence, visited King Solomon in Jerusalem, was more or less tricked in having sex with him and ended up returning pregnant, mothering the future king Menelik, who then went back to claim the Ark as his own, supposedly returning with a thousand Jews of each of the tribes, 12000 Total.
All Ethiopian kings since have claimed direct lineage from Solomon and it is why, for example, the last emperor of Ethiopia, Heile Salasie, was called the lion of Judah.
But, also, Ethiopians were amongst the first to adopt Christianity as a state religion, together with Armenia and Georgia and, because of these early victories over the Roman empire, the country has St. George as its patron saint, just like Georgia, Egypt and England, to name a few.

In popular culture, the ark residing in Aksum only became common knowledge in the 17th century and is now housed in a small, rather boring, chapel close to the center of town. On one side, there is a nice 16th century church, perhaps on the site of the first church in Africa and off limits to women, on the other side, there's an imposing, not exactly getting it right, church built under Heile Selasie's patronage, while roughly under this modern church, in a museum, there's an impressive collection of crowns and crosses, very badly displayed.

Sadly, the whole thing is very underwhelming, not in the least because the chapel with the ark is completely off limits, only one person having access to the chapel itself, but also because the churches and museum are simply not very interesting, or at least poor cousins of their cousins the world over.
And the trick that, after paying a sizable amount for entering the grounds, a caretaker has to open up the churches for you, which really are closed, stays close, and then expects, however timidly, a compensation for his efforts, is a bit annoying. Granted, our 'guide' was friendly and helpful, but the setup is still a ploy.

Other sights include mildly interesting collections of stelae, a few ruins and a few tombs.
Little remains of the early Aksumite kingdom. Whether once ruled by Sheba or not, wealthy it once was, spanning both sides of the red sea. The founders, Sabaen, were once thought to be Arab, though recent evidence suggests it more likely that there was at least a significant local, African, component to it as well. Also, it has been shown that the Sabaens, one of the three 'people of the book' as mentioned in the Quran, were in fact likely Manacheans, followers of Mani, a third century prophet whose amalgamation of religions once had followers from Carthage to China, while the faith died out after the arrival of Muhammad.
Still, it is then no surprise that Ethiopia's form of Christianity is an obvious mix of Jewish and Christian faiths, with perhaps a sprinkling of Zoroastrianism, Mani's third ingredient to his religious mix.

Within striking distance, the rock churches of Tigray, semi-monolithic as opposed to Lalibela's monolithic churches, are said to be a worthy visit, but are also difficult to get to, and can require a lot of hassle with their religious caretakers. If they haven't gone off to market, collectively.

Also nearby is the site of the biggest African defeat of a colonial power. Menelik II curbed the Italians' intentions in 1896, defeating them at the battle of Adwa. Important to Ethiopia, little remains at the battle site.

Perhaps most fun was had on the terrace of the Yeha hotel. Staff crumble up uneaten bread which is then fought over by hornbills, squirrels and hawks, which also try to score the squirrels.

So this is Addis

December 23, 2012 • Blog

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World » Ethiopia » Addis Ababa » Taitu hotel

More middle eastern, or even eastern European, than African, Addis, as a city, has more to offer than many other African capitals. Not that the museums are too interesting, even though they clearly once were design according to European standards, and as the city is only barely a century old, the cultural history of the national melting pot that is Addis is limited.
And large swathes of the city are under development or redevelopment.

The organization on African unity set up shop in Addis some 50 years ago and disbanded in 2002. Interesting, as perhaps Ethiopia is least interested in a united Africa, perhaps because the country was never colonized itself. It's buildings are dilapidated, like much of the city. And the city as a whole has few landmarks that stand out, much of the newly constructed buildings being fairly hideous typical middle eastern glitzy office blocks that look just short of finished the moment they are supposed to be.
Airport road is lined in the obligatory neon lit fake palm trees.

Also, the general attitude of Ethiopians towards faranji, the Asian, not African word for foreigners, is quite different from what it is in most of the rest of the continent, if perhaps more annoying, sometimes even oppresive.
Thankfully, tourist-harassment levels haven't yet reached Egyptian levels, and some of the youth that try to strike up a conversation in the street truly only want to have a friendly chat, while at the same time small bands of kids might try to pick your pockets through their orchestrated methods.

The city is surprisingly cheap. With Italy's legacy and Ethiopia being its birthplace, amazing coffee being dirt cheap, as is excellent local food, while European food is affordable.

Water supply seems to be a structural problem, while electricity appears reliable. And the climate is a few notches more extreme than at home in Kampala. Addis is at 2500 meters, meaning that the sun shines bright and is warm, while the dry air and cool breeze get you burnt to a crisp before you know it. And nighttime temperatures go down to just a few degrees above freezing.

Two national parks and some mountains

December 15, 2012 • Blog

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World » Uganda » Queen Elizabeth National Park » Mweya lodge

Niamh's parents visited, which for them, having never ventured further than Spain and seldom having crossed the Irish Sea, was quite a big thing. So, we visited lake Mburo National Park, Queen Elizabeth National Park, winding down in Fort Portal, in a 1000km circular trek from and to Kampala.

Lion was seen, as was hyena, too many bucks to count, elephants, buffalo, hippos and much more. And expensive lodges were experienced, including a lunch at the spectacularly located Kyaninga.

In Queen Elizabeth, we saw both lake George and lake Edward, south of lake Albert, which is a stopping point for the Nile's waters on the way to the Mediterranean. Lake George, through the Kazinga channel (not man-made) empties in lake Edward, which, through the surprisingly small Semliki river which starts in the DRC, empties in lake Albert, which empties in the Nile.
This means that Ptolemy's claim that the Rwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, are the source of the Nile, is surprisingly reasonable. Well, if you wouldn't be aware of the river flowing from lake Victoria into lake Albert.

Presenting at MoMoKla

November 20, 2012 • Blog

World » Uganda » Kampala » Hive Colab

I did a presentation on Dérive app on Monday at MoMoKla, Mobile Monday Kampala. MoMoKla regularly organizes presentations on issues related to the mobile tech sector in Uganda and is part of an international collection of MoMos. This night's theme was 'Democatization of broadband' and, with the mobile focus, Eduardo and mine Dérive app, with its strong requirements for user participation, somewhat fit the bill. And, obviously, because Dérive app is a WSA-mobile winner, representing Uganda, it really made some sense to present.

The talk was a success, even if I ended up with a mere 10 minutes out of the implied 20. By coincidence, my presentation contained the 200th registered dérive, with within minutes after the presentation, the audience pushing the number to about 220.

The main reason for my talking time to be cut in half was the last minute addition to the list of speakers of Kai Wulff, now working at Google, with a talk that apparently lasted for an hour, and was somewhat interesting, but also somewhat baffling.
Wulff's two main points were:

+ There is too little content coming out of Africa.

+ As a consumer you can improve service quality just by voting with your money.

The first is certainly true, but without a plan for changing that (assuming there's a desire for change in the first place), the observation is meaningless. The second is not untrue, in general, but also not always relevant. And, in an African context, certainly more often not relevant than, say, in Europe. You don't like the roads in Uganda? Well, just drive somewhere else! That will teach the government who's supposed to maintain those roads!

The three other speakers, Ernst Fonternel, Mark Pritchard and some other guy, were all doing marketing for MTN, Smile and Airtel respectively, which made their talks, well, boring, though Ernst at least tried to walk through the changes telcos had to deal with over the last decade or so, until he was told his speaking time was cut.

Crossing the lake

On a weekend trip, we decided to cross lake Victoria. Well, actually Murchison Bay, which is the bay that comes closest to Kampala and, when looking at the lake from the elevated Tank Hill, could confuse you for taking the bay for the lake, even though the lake is perhaps 100 times larger, if not more.
We stumbled upon a chameleon, for the second time in a few weeks. Chameleons are cool. Were lizzards scuttle away when you spot them, chameleons are carefree and want to walk all over you.

Romney’s reality distortion is just a distorted panorama

October 30, 2012 • Blog

World » Uganda » Kampala » GOAL apartments

There’s currently another Romney gaffe doing the rounds, this one where Romney posted a really badly photoshopped image to Instagram. In fairness, buzzfeed, the whistoleblower, admits it might just be a bad panorama,  but it seems extremely obvious to me that that is all it is. 
True, Romney’s campaign posting this is facepalm-worthy, but not too much more. I suspect someone was walking along an elevated causeway, taking pictures as he moved, not while he was standing in one place, then stitching the individual images together.

In the image above, I took Romney’s original posting, cut it up in vertical bands, moving each band to the left, where it matched the previous band’s image.
In case you’re confused, the area that matters is bordered by the light grey box in the bottom half of the image.

Mountains of the Moon and milky breasts

October 28, 2012 • Blog

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World » Uganda » Fort Portal » Amabere caves

It wasn't Speke and Stanley who first went in search for the source of the Nile. Speke, though, was the first European to actually find the source in lake Victoria, the somewhat boring Speke monument just outside Jinja still reminding visitors of this.

The first credible claim for the source of the Nile is somewhat older, almost 2000 years old, in fact. The Alexandrian astrologer and historiographer Ptolemy wrote about the merchant Diogenes who, after being blown off course on one of his trade trips to India, beached somewhere on the now Tanzanian coast and made a 25 day trip inland.
The end of his trip brought Diogenes to, what he said the locals called, 'the Mountains of the Moon', which, he claimed, were the source of the Nile.

The Mountains of the Moon have been, though more recently, associated with the Rwenzori mountains, the mountain range in the west of Uganda, though some modern historians dispute the claim, suggesting Diogenes might only have gone as far as Kilimanjaro.
Diogenes claimed that the local name for the mountains referred to the mountains' snow capped peaks. Both Kilimanjaro and some of the mountains in the Rwenzoris are perpetually snow capped.

The actual source of the White Nile, the source of the other tributary of the Nile being the Blue Nile, originating in Ethiopia, is still somewhat disputed. Generally, it's accepted to be lake Victoria, but a few tiny streams coming out of the region to the south west of the lake are sometimes credited as the source, a British team of explorers for example traveling the length of the Nile in 2006, to it's "true source".
Still, a tiny bit of water coming from the Rwenzoris does end up in the Nile.

Milky white breasts

Fort Portal is the one major town in the foothills of the Rwenzoris, which mark the border between Uganda and the DRC. There is currently no road linking Fort Portal with the Congo, but the Chinese are building one, which would cut the journey for smuggling natural resources out of the Congo to Kampala by some 600 kilometers.
The mountains are gorgeous to walk around in, if apparently tougher than a walk up, say, Kilimanjaro.

Niamh and I only wanted a quiet weekend away, and only went for a small hike from the Amabere cave, the milky white breasts cave, so named for its stalagtites dripping with calcium rich water, up a hill with a view of three crater lakes. 
Gorgeous views were taken in.

Our guide was the excellent Robert Mirembe (+256 752492475) of Eco Adventure & Safaris.

Deriveapp, a World Summit Award winner

October 25, 2012 • Blog

World » Uganda » Kampala » GOAL apartments
Website

A lot of my work is in the development sector. Yes, development, as in information technology, but development as in getting food to those poor little fekkers in [pick a country], and, no, I’m not schlepping food around.
I did my first stint in what later would be called ICT4D, information and communication technologies for development, in 2001 (ah, to be young again!) and haven’t really left it since.

There’s no hard and fast rule for which types of organizations are best suited to deliver international aid or bring development to underdeveloped regions (sometimes small is better, sometimes it isn’t, etc.), and one organization that’s both blessed (by its extensive financial resources) and blighted (by its horrid bureaucracy) is the UN.

In 2003 (in Geneva) and in 2005 (in Tunis), the UN sponsored The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), “conferences about information, communication and, in broad terms, the information society”. One of its objectives was to close the digital divide between rich and poor countries and, in true UN fashion, established 17 May as World Information Society Day (srsly, why not have an international toilet day as well – oh, there is one?).
The Tunis summit resulted in the Tunis Decleration and Plan of Action (PDF), a 10 (ten!) year plan to “Achieve an Inclusive, People Centered, Development Oriented and Knowledgeable Information Society for All”. Of course, the 2015 deadline ties in with the deadline for the MDGs, but, mostly, the ‘plan’ is just an overly verbose recommendation.

In 2003, the World Summit Award (WSA) was initiated by Austria (why Austria?) in the framework of the 2003 summit in Geneva. This, in turn, spawned the WSA-mobile awards, in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre (something of a holistic ICT overseer for Abu Dhabi). Apparently, the WSA-mobile’s objective is to answer the question: “What is really out there in the mobile world and might still be slumbering inside a few creative minds, but can change our every day life tomorrow?”
Deep, if anything.

In 2010 and, now, in 2012, WSA-mobile presented an award for best mobile content in 8 categories.
Eduardo Cachucho and myself created Deriveapp 2.0, a web based mobile app for assisted semi-random meanderings in an urban environment, forcing the user to experience his direct surroundings as opposed to typical tourist attractions, and submitted it in the m-Tourism and Culture category.
Some of the competitors submitted interesting products, but few were really innovative. In my (undoubtedly biassed) opinion, Deriveapp is innovative, even though it’s based on a 50 year old theoretical framework, and, as a result, we are one of the five winners in our category.

The five winners are:

+ Deriveapp 2.0. That’s us!
+ map2app.com, an environment to create your own mobile apps with tourist information for destinations of your choice.
+ Tripwolf, a Lonely Planet wannabe.
+ TaxiPal, a mobile app for ordering taxis, particularly when you’re in a place you are not familiar with.
+ Harpoen, an iOS app to leave localised messages which can be accessed by other users.

See you in Abu Dhabi in February!

Situationist situations

October 17, 2012 • Blog

1 / 1
World » Turkey » Istanbul » Princess Islands » Buyukada

Istanbul's first design biennial hosts two exhibitions that are both reflections of the Situationists, in the light of the more recent grassroots revolt against top down control of society and it's interpretations. The description of the exhibition at Istanbul Modern even goes so far as to explicitly refer to a Society of the Spectacle, the crux of Debord's 1967 manifesto as an agitation and guideline against consumerist society.
The exhibition itself doesn't refer to the Spectacle or even Debord, directly, but many of the almost 30 pieces are very much about experiencing your environment in more alternative ways, the exact objective of psychogeography. And it is these, as opposed to the more conventional urbanism projects, which steal the show and make for a rather fantastic exhibition.

The biennal's second exhibition is more conventional, in that it mostly details a host of projects where individual consumers have become creators in and of their own environment, circumventing the consumerist industrial complex, making society in their own image, not the one prescribed by big capital.
Very nice, but from Arduino to Open Urban, more mainstream, or at least much more widely covered, and therefore less eye opening.

The two exhibitions, perfect backgrounds to Eduardo and my deriveapp, were pleasant coincidences, and pointed out to me by @alper, as I had come to Istanbul on a stopover to Konya and then Mercin, from where I had planned to take a ferry to Port Said, in Egypt, the first ferry between these two countries, apparently, to be in operation since 2004.
I had tried, but failed, to contact the operating company before but, with the help of my host in Istanbul, learned that the ferry now hasn't run for a month, and won't run for at least another. It meant that my now unnecessary stopover in Istanbul turned out to have a very enjoyable secondary objective.

The design biennial is on until mid December 2012. Check it out if you can. And if you're going to Istanbul Modern, bring some extra pieces of clothing. Seriously.

Also, as a more leisurely aside, I hopped over to Buyukada, one of the Princess Islands. Once the weekend retreat of the Istanbul elite and the limiting prison of disposed Ottoman kings, they are now a favored destination of the Istanbul middle class and perhaps the cat capital of Turkey.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

October 12, 2012 • Blog

World » Belgium » Brussels » Da Kao II

Debord was one of the main players behind the Situationist International and the very guy who coined the term psychogeography, referring to the experience of one’s immediate environment as it is directly presented. A way, incidentally, to counter the society of the spectacle.

The society of the spectacle is a manifest, if nothing else, primarily an agitation against consumerist society. The central tenet being that modern production systems have allowed society to accept representations of society as replacements for what is real. And it’s these representations, these spectacles, to which society gives meaning and value, not the underlying reality.

As Debord published this manifest in 1967, when still part of a decidedly left wing movement, when the Soviet Union was still competing on which system could bring ultimate salvation (even though he effectively denounces the Soviet state of affairs), it’s amazing how much of a vision Debord’s statements actually are.
Debord strongly identifies the spectacle with the provision of images. Images that don’t show life as it is, but create a representation of what life is perceived to be. That is, the representations become reality.
This is surprisingly relevant to today’s society, nearly fifty years on, where a service like instagram, thrives on the misrepresentation of reality.

Additionally, by mistaking the representations of reality as reality itself, striving to be seen as being part of that imagined reality becomes the ultimate goal. In Debord’s words, being becomes having, having becomes appearing to have.
This, of course, presages the rise in reality TV.

The only thing Debord did not take into account is that the creation of spectacle, in today’s society, is not limited to the few. In fact, with the advent of Internet, Flickr, Facebook and, yes, instagram, many have become creators as much as they are consumers.

There is a glimmer of hope, here. Research has shown that young girls who post doctored, beautified, photos of themselves online, reminiscent of the glamor shots they themselves find in the glamor magazines they read, feel better about themselves then the girls that don’t put up photos (annoyingly, I can’t find a link to the research on this). The implication being that because they know what needs to be faked to look good, they also know that the women in their magazines don’t look as good as they appear.
Or, as Debord perhaps would say, they get an indication of the being by looking past the appearing.

But this is only a glimmer of hope. After all, the girls still do manipulate their own photos to make themselves appear to have more beauty than they do.

Similarly, the ruling classes do no longer have a monopoly on providing and directing the spectacle, that is, mass media. And it’s specifically this societal change which has been playing a significant part in this decade’s social revolutions in some more totalitarian states.
To some extent, therefore, in general, there is less of a separation between the classes due to control of the spectacle by the few. In a way, we now all participate in creation of the spectacle. However, on the other hand, this also means that by and large, most of us have, without realizing it, bought into the concept of the spectacle, effectively resulting in the masses controlling the masses through the tools of the ruling classes. A form of mob rule which is still directed by the few, giving only the appearance of control from below.

Appearance, because the means of communication, instances of the spectacle, are exactly the tools to keep the masses individually isolated. Debord: the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

Debord also spends a chapter on, basically, consumerism which has become a goal in itself, where, when each level of need is met by the availability of certain commodities, it is supplanted by another level of need.
This is then how the ruling classes extend their control of the masses, by effectively dictating the consumerist needs outside of already dictating the masses’ working life. It is the perfected denial of man.
Here, it is Debord who sees hope, because the rising of consumerist levels, Debord claims, results in society realizing the fallacy of it depending on the economy, it becomes the economy which will have to depend on society. A premonition of the recent occupy movement, perhaps. 

Another chapter is dedicated to dissecting Marx’ and Hegel’s theories on socialism, with no kind words for Leninism, Bolshevism being a prime example of the society of the spectacle, with the workers’ representation being diametrically opposed to the actual workers.
But this chapter, perhaps the longest in the book, with Debord’s promotion of something of a continuous proletarian revolution and an agitation against the, then, ruling forms of the implementations of communism, feels hopelessly convoluted and outdated.

Too much space is devoted to describing the nature of time. In short, irreversible time, as opposed to cyclical time, is required for consumerism, as it allows for accumulation. Change, or perhaps the appearance of change, requires the absence of cyclical time.
Meanwhile, the working class is presented with pseudo-cyclical time, to essentially keep them busy producing while the commodity of leisure becomes the realization of irreversible time and the perceived goal of the working class.

Too short a chapter on urbanism, which Debord classifies as the natural playing ground of the capitalist state, where pseudo-separation of the workers is needed to recreate the apathy of the agrarian society where individuals were naturally separated and practically could not cooperate meaningfully.
And psychogeography, though not mentioned in this book, is of course Debord’s answer to countering the urbanist fallacy of the ruling classes.

An interesting chapter on culture, where Debord says that culture is the locus for the search of lost unity. But by art’s natural tendency to detach itself from context, art also makes itself irrelevant. And, when culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society.
Now, with users becoming producers online, culture is what indeed appears to bind us, from instagram filters to self produced cat videos.

In the end, Debord does offer a way out of the society of the spectacle. But it’s revolutionary class struggle which needs to become conscious of itself. Besides this being rather anachronistic in this day and age, it’s exactly the apparent blurring of boundaries and apathy which Debord himself describes which makes this nigh impossible.

In his last chapter, Debord makes a few more insightful claims. In essence, when illusion, the spectacle, rules, there is no more room for ideology, because we all get the appearance of an attainable perfect world. But, “the acceptance and consumption of commodities are at the heart of this pseudo-response to a communication without response. The consumer’s need to imitate is the need conditioned by his fundamental dispossession.” Debord then borrows from Gabel: the abnormal need for representation compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence.

Debord puts forward a whole lot of interesting and still very relevant ideas, but also loses himself in unnecessary complexity, borrowing too much from, and building too much on, classic philosophers.
Debord’s staying power derives from his visionary description of consumerist society, extrapolating the world as he knew and saw it some fifty years ago. But his critique is steeped in a language that formally lost relevance 20 years ago and practically many years before that.
That is not to say that class struggle is no longer relevant or possible, but it *is* very unlikely, possibly specifically because pseudo separation has made unification practically impossible. In today’s world, we all believe we are right and first and foremost put ourselves before any shared good.

Quotes

+ The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.
+ The spectacle is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself.
+ What grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at its origin.
+ The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion and the spectacle is its general manifestation.
+ Dissatisfaction becomes a commodity as soon as economic abundance extends production to the processing of such raw materials (with which I presume he means emotion).
+ Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society.
+ Paraphrased: collecting is submitting.
+ A product acquires prestige when it is placed at the center of social life as the revealed mystery of the ultimate goal of production. But the object which was prestigious in the spectacle becomes vulgar as soon as it is taken home by the consumer, and by all it’s other consumers.
+ The society which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation.

As the text is not in copyright, multiple digital versions exist. Start here.

What’s the competition at the World Summit Award

October 08, 2012 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Bot-Boender residence

Deriveapp, with Eduardo Cachucho as the artistic lead and myself as the technical lead, is Uganda’s submission to the World Summit Award in the m-Tourism & Culture category. WSA claims it’s “the world’s leading initiative to select and promote the Best in e-Content and innovative applications”, which I find a bit rich, but, hey.
In our category, we’re up against 51 competitors from as many countries, with only a handful from Africa. It’s not too much of a surprise that m-Tourism, with the ‘m’ specifically referring to mobile technology solutions, is somewhat underrepresented.
The award’s list of categories mentions the evaulation criteria per category, which are awfully broad, but does put an emphasis on being able to provide a fresh perspective with, specifically interesting for our app, “providing new perspectives on the space around us, using maps and navigation-based contents”.

Deriveapp 2.0 is about ready to move to ‘beta’, which means it’s pretty much ready for the big time. With users already having tried out derives from Mexico to Serbia, we’re off to a promising start. Here’s a shortlist of what I think are our biggest competitors.

Innovative

The WSA award has an emphasis on being able to somehow provide a fresh insight related to tourism or culture. In my opinion, besides deriveapp, only two of the submissions truly meet the WSA criteria.

+ backway.me, an iOS app which lets you memorize locations with a picture and then, later, easily allows you to pull up directions to the locations you saved.
+ map2app.com, an environment to create your own mobile apps with tourist information for destinations of your choice. Works together with placegrabber, an app to document your own destinations on the go. The current online environment for building your own guidebooks, in beta, feels a bit rough around the edges, but the potential is interesting. Basically, this allows you to be your own Lonely Planet. In English.

Historical, video-based, travel guides

Interesting and insightful, but hardly original, as several of the submissions focus on the same theme, are apps that perform the function of a kind of historical tour guide.

+ Vistory, the “interactive historical video app”, which allows you to compare historical videos with their location as they are now. Focussed on Amsteram. Seemingly in English.
+ Berlin Wall, an iOS app with a video-based history on the Berlin wall. In German.
+ My Warsaw, a Samsung sponsored app on historical Warsaw, which gives you a gamified and video-based tour of the city. In English and Polish.

Copy cats

Functional, if perhaps interesting, well executed and effective, copycats, were also submitted.

+ Xomo event guide, a mobile app listing nearby events with an added social experience. Basically, eventful or upcoming. In English.
+ TaxiPal, a mobile app for ordering taxis, particularly when you’re in a place you are not familiar with. Similar, if more generic, to Uber. In English.
+ Jets – Flight & Seat Advisor, an iOS app to show you seating arrangements on planes. Essentially SeatGuru on a mobile device. In English.
+ Harpoen, an iOS app to leave localised messages which can be accessed by other users. Quite similar to Wallit, if prettier. In English.
+ Lingibli, mobile apps for learning a language. How many of those exist?
+ Kunst på stedet, mapping public art in Denmark. Effectively a mobile version of my project Beeldenstad, dating from 2002, as well as Beeldenstad’s spiritual successor, the Hungarian Szoborlap. In Danish.

Nice, but…

+ Simplevox, an iOS app for constructing natural voice announcements in multiple languages relevant to the travel industry. Extremely useful, to some, but hardly innovative, as every PA system for every public transport solution in the developed world uses a system like this. Except, this one is free.
+ Touchotel, the concept of having tablets in hotel rooms to allow customers to easily order room or other services. In English, presumably, though the company is Senegalese and the idea doesn’t seem to have left the concept stage. And isn’t very innovative, as at least The Plaza Hotel in New York has been offering their guests iPads since at least early 2011.

Audio guides

A rather obvious use of mobile devices is to provide their users with audio guides of their surroundings. This can be extended to providing QR-codes at the locations for which audio guides exist. Using QR codes in this context is identical to how I used them in j-walk, which I did with Ismail Farouk back in 2009. 

+ JiTT, a mobile app, offline audio tour, for a few European cities. In English and Spanish.
+ GUIDE@HAND, location based audio guides for a few cities in Hungary and one in Slovakia. In English.
+ Escúchame!, audio guides on touristic cites in Panama, using QR codes. In Spanish.
+ QR-code based audio guides, for mobile devices on sights in Jerusalem.

Travel guides

A surprisingly, to me, large number of WSA submissions in the m-Tourism & Culture category were straightforward travel guides.

+ A virtual museum on the oldest wooden wheel in the world, which is some 5000 years old. Available in several languages.
+ Minube, an iOS app for tourist attractions in Spain, in Spanish.
+ 100NTO, a Windows-phone app with tourist attractions in Bulgaria, in Bulgarian.
+ Conaculta – Mexico Es Cultura, a guide on cultural activities in Mexico. In English.
+ ExperienciaColombia, an online guide on Colombia, in Spanish.
+ Historious Athens, a guide for Android with historical information on landmarks in Athens. In English.
+ Mosquito, a mobile app with tourist information, presumably in Montenegrin.
+ Smart Tourism El Salvador, a Blackberry app for tourists to El Selvador. In Spanish.
+ Tourism in Qatar, an iOS tourguide for Qatar. In Arabic.
+ Tripwolf, a Lonely Planet wannabe, mobile app, in multiple languages.
+ Vilnius Tourism, a mobile app for sights in Vilnius, in English.
+ Seoul, on, well. In English

The truly commercial and other non-contenders

Several of the submissions, simply by their backing or lifespan, should not have been submitted to the WSA awards, even if they’re great. This included a 17 year old guide for Beirut, the official London city guide, “India’s leader in premium quality digital maps” and a mobile solution for car-based navigation in eastern Europe.

Also, a few of the submissions were, if perhaps functional, hardly interesting. Apps for finding travel connections, translating local calendas or dictionaries. Or submissions only available in a local, to me unreadable, language.
And there were a few submissions that didn’t seem to have a product, were basically just an idea, or forced a download of an Android app without any explanation.

Do we stand a chance?

There are plenty of the submissions that can pride themselves on an excellent execution, but only a few that are interesting. And, I think, only three that are actually working products and truly innovative or insightful. These being deriveapp, backway.me and map2app.com. 
I’m hardly the person to comment on which one is the best of the three. What do you think?

A quick review of the Huawei Ascend G300

October 06, 2012 • Blog

World » Netherlands » Delft » Bot-Boender residence

I was ready to buy the iPhone 5 when it came out (the iPhone 3G I was given by an old friend at the start of the year (big frigging kudos to Maarten!) already had it’s LCD replaced and suffered from a dead camera), only to find that, not so surprisingly, the low end model was sold out pretty much before you could say ‘iPhone’.
My main issue with actually getting it was the price, a hefty 659 euros (20 euros more in France and Germany), as well as the, now, relatively small screen.
Shortly before we left Uganda for Europe, Orange Uganda started selling the Huawei Ascend G300 for around 190 euros. Good value for money for this phone, which has a feature set comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S II, but a total steal at the 100 pounds the phone was going for with Vodafone in the UK.
No iPhone being purchasable and the Ascend being available at that low price meant I got myself the Huawei. True, getting it sim unlocked was another 20 pounds, but for the two phones I got, one for Niamh, one for myself, I only had to pay this once.

Though the Ascend has excellent value for money, it ain’t an iPhone. Besides the specs being, obviously, less impressive, the whole user experience is also decidedly less slick. Part of that is to blame on the Ascend, with its plastic casing and not always too responsive screen, but quite a bit of that is also to blame on the operating system and the apps.
I found that apps regularly crashed and sometimes disappear from the phone altogether. Occasionally app shortcuts get hijacked by other apps and, overall, many of the apps just aren’t as well designed as their iOS counterparts.
The predictive text is practical, but turns itself on and off without it being clear why. Annoying when you’re typing passwords, email addresses or captchas.
Expandable storage, room for an SD card, is excellent, and a gripe I have with iOS devices. Even though the Ascend only takes a maximum 32 GB. But Android, or the apps, don’t always play well with the expandable storage. Regularly, reading or writing to the card takes ages and occasionally, files disappear.
One consistent and annoying bug is that apps sorted in folders are automatically pulled from their folder when they are updated.

The biggest drawback of the Ascend, and a major issue with the Android ecosystem as a whole, is that the Ascend ships with Android 2.3, a version of Android dating from 2010. And, true to Android, it’s anyone’s guess whether the latest version (4.1!), or any version after 2.3, will ever be officially, easily, available for the Ascend. Vodafone, the reseller in the UK, has apparently been promising for months it will be available. First, this summer, but now, tentatively, sometime next year. Arguably, this is less so an issue with Google as with individual phone manufacturers and resellers, but this uncertain ecosystem does prevent a smooth adoption of the platform, even though flooding the market is getting Android the majority market share amongst smartphones.

One thing Android fanboys can’t stop yapping about is the platform’s openness, it’s hackability.
So, I thought it fitting to try my luck to see if I could get my phone upgraded from Android 2.3.6 to 4.0 or 4.1. I managed fairly easily, but that’s when I was introduced to Android hell.

Android hell

Vodafone UK, the provider of the Ascend, is unclear as to when they will provide upgrades to the OS. Huawei, the maker of the phone, on the other hand, has the update available. In fact, it appears they have at least two downloadable from their website (1, 2). There is plenty of chatter about the official Huawei releases on the interwebs, but many of the links to the Huawei websites are dead and the updates themselves are also not easily findable from the Huawei website.
Nevertheless, I found one of the updates, copied it to my phone, and performed a regular upgrade. This, without hacking or rooting my phone. This was a, at least in my eyes, fairly regular upgrade.

However, I ended up with a version of Android, 4.0 no less, that was seemingly made for the Chinese market only. I had no Google apps on there, meaning I couldn’t access the Play store. There was another store available to me, which almost only sold Chinese apps, none of which either downloaded or installed.

Later, when I had abandoned hope of being able to get rid of this Chinese version of Android, I found that there are actually many other Android stores out there (see this list for starters), including an Opera store, though none carries, even remotely, the apps you’d typically be looking for.

And there was more hope. A few months ago, an enterprising coder threw together an APK downloader extension for Chrome (APK is the compression format for Android apps) which was then updated to work with later versions of Chrome by another coder. The extension, by feeding the Play store a user’s login details and the Device ID of the Android phone in question, allows for downloading the APK through the browser, for offline installation on the phone. 
Annoyingly, my Chinese version of Android was thwarting all attempts to extract the Device ID. Somewhere, it was said the Device ID is the same as the IMEI number of the phone, but I’m not convinced. Anyway, the extension wasn’t working for me.

So when that didn’t work, I toyed with the idea of downloading the apps through bittorrent, before stumbling upon a useful alternative for downloading many, but not all, apps through QR codes over at iapktop.

I had resigned to not being able to get rid of my Chinese Android. The downloading through QR codes is a bit cumbersome, but workable and many of the apps I like were available at iapktop. But… the lack of Google apps also meant that the Google Maps Android API was not available, which meant that apps like Foursquare and Instagram were either crippled or completely failing.
I redoubled my efforts to get rid of this infuriating operating system.

There’s a ton of information out there on how to root (hack) your Android phone. A few popular resources are xda-developers.com and modaco.com. Much of the information available suffers from two things. First, most of it is written by inexperienced script kiddies who don’t have a proper grasp of the English language. Second, the vast multitude of Android devices means that all rooting procedures were not made uqual. 
I spent many hours on many different procedures, constantly failing. 

The best guide, specifically created for rooting the Huawei Ascend G300, is the extremely readable and usable huaweig300.com, which I stumbled upon by accident. All instructions in plain English while taking it one step at a time. Sadly, however, the steps failed me, both on a Windows machine and on my Mac. One particular piece (clockworkmod) just simply refused to be copied to my phone.

Then, many hours and many back and forths later, tweaking my device in every way imaginable, I did manage to get the offending piece of software on my phone, which allowed me to remove my Chinese Android and install a proper English one, with all Google goodies that came with it.
Ice Cream Sandwich, the version of Android I was trying to install, is much more responsive and easier to use than the version the phone ships with. It’s pretty slick, even, though in many ways they learned from what is still, and by far, the best mobile operating system out there. 

Conclusion

Yes, Android is more of an open platform than iOS, but going down the hobbyist route is not for the faint of heart. And, if this would have been an iPhone, not only would it have shipped with the latest version of the OS to begin with, upgrading would have been seemless.

The Ascend ships with Gingerbread, Android 2.3, which feels decidedly buggy. Ice Cream Sandwich, Android 4.0, is a very decent Operating System which made the phone much more responsive, though still in many subtle ways not as good as iOS.

The Huawei Ascend G300 has extremely high value for money at the 100 pounds Vodafone UK is selling it for, even with the 20 pound fee for getting rid of the sim lock. This ain’t no iPhone, but at it’s price, it’s a good alternative.

A balmy September in Barcelona

October 01, 2012 • Blog

1 / 1
World » Spain » Montserrat » Santa Maria de Montserrat

After the cold of Liverpool, and both before and after our detour to Andorra, it was time for a break in sunny Spain. The day we arrived in Barcelona, we saw a colorfull spectacle downtown. Live classical music as well as puppets about three times the size of an average person, being carried around in the streets, dancing to live music performed by small bands moving along with them. This, pretty much exactly the same as a display I saw several years ago in Belgium.

I would suspect there’s a connection here which is related to the Spanish rule of the low countries, but UNESCO treats the Belgian experience, shared with northern France, as unique in its own right.

Close to Barcelona, we visited the overly popular monestary of Montserrat, by some associated with the home of the holy grail in Arthurian legend.

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