getting back from New Zealand

I have not written in this Blog for over a month - I spent a relatively long vacation in New Zealand.  In the picture above you can see me in front of Huka Falls in the North island,  below it is a picture of Doubtful Sound, one of the fiords in the south island. 

New Zealand has many types of views -- beaches, fiords, alpine mountains, glaciers, rain-forests and more.

You can view a full album (actually two - one for the north island and one of the south island) in my facebook account (I made it public, you don't have to be my FB friend to view it).  

The people of NZ call themselves "kiwis" after a strange bird that they adore,  there is also a big effort, seen everywhere to restore some of the original ecology of NZ before the human race destroyed it when introducing foreign animals and trees.  

Got back a week ago and catching up on other things, and will resume professional blogging soon.

On family vacation in Malta

I have not disappeared, spent most of the previous week in a family vacation in Malta.   Malta is a small country consists of several islands in the  Mediterranean sea  The climate is similar to the one we have in Israel.  The local language is also a Semitic language like Hebrew, it is actually a descendant of the Arabic language mostly. Like any other Mediterranean people - they are nice, friendly, and take their time.  We lived 5 minutes walk from the capital city of Valletta, which is a small city surrounded by walls and looks somewhat similar to the old city of Jerusalem.  In the evening it looks like a deserted place, nobody is walking in the street, and besides a few restaurants it looks like a ghost town. 

Some highlights:

There is a prehistoric site which has limited visitation (10 per hours), we made reservation 2 months ahead to get inside. 

Malta is a catholic country, and have a lot of ancient churches, we have visited some of them. 

We decided to rely on public transportation, which is cheap but time consuming, some of the lines have low frequency --- not really a good choice.

We took a day trip to Gozo, the northern island which has nice beaches.  

The Maltese people like to celebrate - we have watched too separate celebrations, one of them in the honor of the national fish, called Lampuki,   the other in Valleta  is the Valleta white night.  I am not sure what the celebration is about, but it was crowded and noisy, which is a contrast to the regular silent in Valleta.

Hope that my daughters will post pictures on Facebook soon. 

In general:  nice place for vacation.

I'll continue with professional blogging, hopefully tomorrow.

On family vacation in Western Canada

In the picture you can see a rain-forest within the Pacific Rim natural reserve in the western part of the Vancouver Island. This area is less known then other natural reserves in the Canadian Rockies, but IMHO it is the most beautiful one, and we spent several days there at the end of our trip. We started our trip in Lake Louise, in the Canadian rockies Banff reserve, and caught by sleet storm in the middle of walking uphill (we climbed down in heavy slit that turned into rain), but besides the first trip, the weather was relatively cooperative. We continued north to Jasper, where we also had one of the nicest tracks, the Malinge canyon. There is a parking lot up the canyon, and another parking lot down, so one would expect that there will be a shuttle between the two parking lots, as climbing back is not really fun, it seems that the Canadians don't think this way - luckily I found somebody leaving the lower parking lot who agreed to drive me to the upper parking lot, so I could bring the car and take the rest of the family, in turn I also took another person who waited there for the same purpose -- and idea for a start-up!

We spent one day in the Yoho park in the way to Banff, and then continued to the second part of the trip -- flying to Vancouver, going in the ferry to Victoria and driving to Pacific rim (300 KM from Victoria), and then back to Vancouver through the northern ferry. Most of the trip consists on walks in the nature - glaciers, lakes, mountains, and in the west rain-forests. We also sailed in the Pacific rim to an island with natural hot springs, and then in the way back sailed through the ocean to see whales (we saw some). Good trip, I've returned charged with energy (and intimidately got flu, so last couple of days have not been so nice - and I am still behind on Email answering, but am recovering now).

Next trip: Hong-Kong and Singapore (for VLDB) in September.