arnaudfercq

The only rules I consistently break are my own. A year ago I decided to keep up a blog. I thought that keeping an online diary would help me focus on the interesting and fun stuff I do, while at the same time help me improve my writing skills. Use them or lose them, I figured.

Here I am, more than a year later, having penned absolutely jack shit about what I’ve been up to since 8^th September 2008. And I have been up to a few things, here and there:

• Visited Dubai just before Christmas, and went on a photo shoot with a colleague to the old part of town. We ate at a restaurant which proudly claimed to be the oldest establishment in the city. It opened in 1977.
• Went skiing in one of the ritziest resorts in the French Alps, all expenses paid, and managed not to break any bones despite the fact that I really can’t ski.
• Explored and photographed a lot more underground Paris, including several different networks of quarries, a couple of phantom metro stations, and an ancient aqueduct. I also like to think my photography improved quite a bit – taking pictures underground where the only available light is that which you bring with you requires a set of totally different techniques to those you use on the surface.
• Travelled through Laos for a month, taking in magnificent scenery and meeting lots of genuinely good people. I came back with thousands of photos and a desire to do more to help this desperately poor and mismanaged country. More on this later.
• Turned 50. This didn’t suck as badly as I thought. I compiled a long list of things that had changed since my childhood. More on this later, too.

This is a rather silly, but parts of it made me smile. The Guardian invited its readers to ask the questions in an upcoming interview with Daniel Craig.

Two expatriates you may have heard of added to the general mayhem this morning.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/09/do_you_have_a_question_for_dan.html 

This is not the abandoned NATO base I had planned on visiting. This is part of the Grand Reseau du Sud below the fourteenth arrondissment in Paris. The NATO base is off-limits to anyone even vaguely sane since a crowd of imbeciles attacked it with spray paint earlier this week, so I decided to join my would-be guide in the GRS instead.

At 7.30pm, as I was already in Paris, and he and some friends were 30 kilometres away and about to visit  "beautiful quarry for to drink apéritif", I said I'd meet them somewhere I thought I vaguely knew how to get to in the network at around midnight.

Well, how difficult can it possibly be to navigate the 250km of tunnels on your own armed with a tiny and, at best, approximate map and no reading glasses? This is the a photo I took 30m below the rue Sarette, shortly before I became hopelessly lost.