Wow it’s been a while since my last post. Shame on me ! The thing is that I don’t spend much time at my place and when I’m home, well, I have to admit I’m a bit lazy. Cheap dvds don’t help either :]
Last weekend was a 3 days long weekend so I decided to go out of Shanghai with some friends. We went to Zhujiajiao, a lovely small water town not far from Shanghai which looks like Venice in a chinese style. It’s a nice place to visit, although a bit crowded. But which place is not in China?
The week before I’ve been to Attica, a famous local night club, to attend a Ministry of Sound’s party by Sébastien Léger. The french DJ played a great set compared to what I’ve heard here. There were some really good tracks like Daft Punk’s “Around the world” or “A new cage” by Sono, but the one I will remember is definitely Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the silence”. Yeah, that was good ! \o/

Well, except from that, I spend a lot of time eating and shopping. Cost of life is kinda low here so you can eat for pretty much nothing compared to France. That’s the good thing here! I miss french food though.
Ok, that’s it for today. Take a look at my pictures on my flickr page. And here’s bonus track for you : Symbolone - Love Juice.

Finally, I found the opportunity to report you my beginnings at Shanghai, 3 days after my arrival.

After 11 LONG hours, my plane landed in Shanghai Pudong, the local airport. First surprise at the airport’s exit, a man carrying a sign with my name of it, classy ! Actually Ubisoft called the craziest taxi man of Shanghai to bring me to my hotel, I think it may be the local Samy Naceri. The guy was driving insanely fast, could’nt stand in a line more than 2 seconds. He just lacked the hidden spoiler and 20 inch wheels.

I then discovered my room at the hotel, a nice 30-35 square meters with everything you need in XuJiaHui district, a place full of shopping centers, especially for electronic stuff. I didn’t stay long at the hotel, and went out with my friend Jeanne to discover the city. I don’t remember well the name of the places I’ve been, but most of them were shopping areas, not sure there’s anything else here anyway :]

Well, my first impression of Shanghai is that it’s huge and full of chinese people ;] I gotta get used to the life here !

That’s all for today, take a look at my room’s pictures in the full post.

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No, I’m not dating (I wish) I ‘just’ have the date of my going to Shanghai. I’m supposed to begin on the 3rd of March which is a Monday. I asked to leave on the Friday just before so I have time to move in and have some rest before my first day of work. I don’t realize yet that I’m going to leave next week ! The coming days are going to be very boring. I have to move into my new house at Bussy Saint Georges (77) this weekend (you can imagine the mess), open a chinese bank account, extend my mutual insurance to international cover, renew my contract with Ubisoft and other joyful things.

Nothing’s better than a bit of headbanging to destress so I’ll share with you my artist of the moment : Facteur and my favorite track ‘Kill Mr D.A’ (the others are really good too btw). A must have for those who like Electro music.

Facteur - Kill Mr D.A

Last week was a very productive week in terms of photography.

Monday was the deadline for the 10th We Contest of Lense.fr whose subject was ‘Géometrie’ (Geometry). I really wanted to participate in this one so I grabbed my DSLR and walked for 3 hours (until I ran out of battery) near the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France). I was amazed to see so much new buildings with original architecture and of course I took a shot for the contest there (see the shot a the end).

But the BIG event of the week was clearly the Lense Party #7 (Paris Safari) which brought together about sixty members of Lense. After gathering at Chatelet, this small world was split up into 8 or 9 teams, each one of them heading toward different places. The lottery made me join the group leaded by Soket : Double black gommettes \o/. We spent about 3 hours walking from Gare de l’Est to Montmartre with a little coffee break to warm up. I really enjoyed this afternoon, everybody on my team was nice, we talked about our equipment, techniques, and experiences while shooting. Around 7pm, we got together with the other groups for a party at the Cleub, the occasion to see the favorite shot of each member on a big screen and of course talk, drink some beer and blind everybody with a tupperwared cobra flash for others ;). In one word : A-W-E-S-O-M-E !

A funny thing about this Lense Party is when I realized that I kinda knew Beorn, one of the coaches. Actually, he attended to my end of studies project final presentation as a jury a few weeks ago :).

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As days pass, the stress of my going to Shanghai is growing. I don’t know the exact date yet but what I know is that it’s getting closer and closer. I feel like I have tons of things to do but no time. Strange.

For those who don’t know yet, I’m leaving for a 6-month mission at Ubisoft Shanghai, my first time in a studio. I can’t tell much about the project I will work on because of the NDA I signed but I can tell you it’s really exciting. On top of that, it seems that I’m going to have some responsabilities in the project. It’s a bit more pressure but also more rewarding (if everything goes ok, of course, but I’m confident).

I hope to get some more detailed informations about my going in the coming days. I know I keep saying that over and over…

To conclude, here’s a remix of Pogo (Digitalism) I discovered in Kitsuné’s last ‘Maison’ compilation. Just awesome !

eBoy is a pixel art group who became very famous on Internet for their amazing posters and more recently for their Peecol toys. Last week, I discovered that Skinizi had launched a new collection of ipod skins based on eBoy’s “New York” poster. I was already thinking about relooking my ipod nano so it was the perfect opportunity.

Since yesterday, I’m the happy owner of the skin 008 (because it’s a limited serie, only 100 copies). As I expected, the skin looks great and is really robust. Applying the skin on the ipod is quite easy if you don’t have Alzheimer but the for the screen protection film, a little more skills is required to remove all the air bubbles. Actually, I didn’t manage to apply the film perfectly, there’s one small bubble remaining but it’s ok.

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I’ve been reading blogs for some time and lately I wanted to create my own one. For what, I don’t know, I guess I just want to share a bit of my life. Some say that I don’t give them news about me. Well, I must say it’s quite true, MSN pisses me off sometimes and therefore I’m often Offline.
So, as I’m leaving to Shanghai soon, I decided to create this blog to keep all of you updated. In the mean time, I’ll use it to post some photos of mine and songs I like.

I’ll try to keep it alive as much as possible but I have to warn you, there’s a 50% chance that this project ends into a 404 page during the next 6 months.

Concerning the design of the blog, I picked a theme from the Wordpress website but if you know me well, you know that I love web design and that I can’t keep this one (though it looks nice). So, I hope to present you a new design soon.

Another thing, I’ll be writing this blog in English because it’s just cooler than in French.

And for the geeks, here’s the RSS feed linked to this blog.

Stay tuned !