Entries Tagged 'Current Events' ↓

Long time no see, eh?

OK, here we go:

Bazaar Indonesia @ Madrid

Luthfi and I made kolak to be sold in the bazaar. I joined the PPI-Spanyol booth and managed to sell some of the goods (mainly clothes, small purses, etc) using my broken-Spanish. Some of my classmates came to the bazaar (thank you guys!) and most importantly I had fun!

It’s Summer Time

In Madrid and Spain in general, the temperature rises to 30 degrees centigrade on average. Meaning: v e r y h o t! Also means: open that window wide while you sleep at night. At summer, the sun sets at around 10 PM and rises at around 6 PM. Must adapt.

School’s Over (but Thesis/Dissertation/Project is here to stay)

All of the taught part of my program, Erasmus Mundus MSc NeBCC, has been, er…, taught and I must say that the results are not too dissapointing :p I think I’m not one of the top students in the class, but anyway, I passed almost all of the modules (just waiting for one more result to be announced).

I will do my project at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, España, starting from October (but my supervisor insisted that I should start this summer). The project will be about BPEL and web wrappers. I hope I can post about it later.

Sport and Cultural Events in Spain

This summer, there are quite a bunch of events in Spain:

• Spain won the Eurocup 2008
• San Fermin festival starts at Pamplona (the one you can run for your life before a horde of bulls running after you)
• Rock in Rio Madrid festival, boasting famous artists like Alanis Morisette, Neil Young, Shakira, Lenny Kravitz, and Spain’s very own, El Canto del Loco
• and, the most shocking of all, Madrid Orgullo ‘08, a very-very large Gay Pride.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately for the last thing on the list), I missed them all. At Eurocup final match, I was studying for the next day’s exam. But I was able to hear from my room, the crowd cheered as the Spanish team scored the only goal and after the won the match. As for San Fermin, I didn’t manage to make it because it is not exactly close to Madrid, and did’t have enough time. Rock in Rio is far too expensive for me, I watched some of its highlights at TV though, Shakira was incredible! And as for the Pride, just browsed in the local news (do you know that Madrid is supposed to be the gay capital of Europe, what a world we live in).

That’s it! Sorry haven’t had the chance to upload pictures though.

¡Hola!

If you are somewhere near Madrid this weekend, you are invited to Bazar Benéfico Indonesia 2008. You are free to invite more people and we’ll be delighted to have you all to discover a bit Indonesia this weekend. You can see this event in Bazar Benéfico Indonesia 2008 Facebook event page (you don’t have to have Facebook account to view the page).

If you need a map from the nearest Metro (Arturo Soria, Line 4), you can view it in Google map.

Charity Bazaar 2008

31st May - 1st June 2008
Saturday and Sunday from 12:00 - 20:00

C/ Agastia n°65, 28043 Madrid (Metro: Arturo Soria)

Free Entrance

Traditional Dances, Typical Indonesian Food, Arts Flea Market, Lottery
and much more

We’re expecting you and your friends!

Organized by Republic of Indonesia - Tél 91 413 0294

Disclaimer: I made the (non-official) poster, grabbing photos from Flickr without really paying attention to the license of the photos. Sorry if you (the photographer) read this.

Greece is recovering from yet another national strike. Like the previous strike I posted before, but in a much greater scale. Last Thursday was the big day when the Greek parliament, despite all the strike, decided to pass the new law which will make a great negative effect on the Greek workers’ retirement fund scheme.

Here, in Thessaloniki, I also experienced the effects of the strike. The garbage collectors stopped working at least for two weeks. Garbage litter-ally (pun intended) piled up everywhere, making me remember about the garbage problem Bandung had last year. Also, we had several blackouts, allegedly connected with the strike. I don’t often use bus, but my friends said that buses were scarce, even one of them had to walk to campus for the first time. The students’ cafeteria closed one day and the other day they are serving the food while they were having electricity blackout. We had an unplanned semi-buffet for that day. Usually, we were given a tray with all the food in it over a window, like a (parking) ticket booth. But then, they arranged the food in an empty space of the cafeteria and we were given an empty tray so that we can take the dishes we want.

After the parliament still decided to pass the law, it seems that the workers started to work again. Yesterday, most of the piling garbage were collected, and since Friday we haven’t had any electricity blackout. I hope that everything will return back to normal. It’s my final week in Thessaloniki and it’s also my exam week. Wish me luck!

As you may aware, there has been some news that the Vatican is adding more mortal sins to Christianity. According to Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, this is done to prevent people from losing the notion of sin, and to stress that If people do not confess regularly, they risk slowing their spiritual rhythm. The new more-modernised and more-social sins include:

• Environmental pollution
• Genetic manipulation
• Accumulating excessive wealth
• Inflicting poverty
• Drug trafficking and consumption
• Morally debatable experiments
• Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

The original seven deadly sins are:

• Pride
• Envy
• Gluttony
• Lust
• Anger
• Greed
• Sloth

It can be seen that the new list try to target more specifically on what human can do only recently, where technology and money drive most of the human life.

Recently, a BBC report also mentioned about “progressive” muslim women in America. The report certainly put emphasises on how Muslim women in the states try to do more active role in practising Islam in their daily lives. But it also described the practises of putting the five prayers as secondary priority (while “remembering” God everyday gets higher priority), translating Quran (Islam’s Holy Book) in an unusual way, and allowing women to lead prayers, as “progressive Islam.” I certainly don’t have any problem with Muslim women to have a bigger and more active roles in the society, but the tendency of the news that somehow called, what I think, more observant Muslims as “traditionalists” make me a little bit uncomfortable.

I’ll admit and really stress that I’m not that religious, but this journey made me feel that I have to hold on to something in order not to lose my identity. I found that one of the things to hold on to, is my religion.

I don’t want to put my religious practise at the centre stage. What I want to do is ask these questions:

• Do you think religions need to be “modernised”?
• Don’t they have some general values that always be relevant?
• Should we behave in such a way to be not considered as old-fashioned/fundamentalists/traditionalists including changing the way we practise our religions?

To end this post I’m going to tell you that in the last several weeks, my door was knocked several times by young Greek man and woman. My conversations with them, which lasted around 15 minutes, are probably the longest ones I have with any Greek. They gave me pamphlets about their believes. They are Jehovah Witness’ Christians, and we’re discussing about religions at the footstep of my door. The guy invited me to have a coffee with him tomorrow at noon.

Meet Shrek and, ehm, his girlfriend.

The carnival week has just started here in Greece. People wear masks or costumes and celebrate. On Thursday afternoon, they have what is called Tsiknopempti (Τσικνοπέμπτης, literally Burnt Thursday, it is Greek equivalent of Fat Tuesday) where people had massive barbecue to prepare for the carnival. Unfortunately, I don’t have any picture for the barbecue. The word Carnival itself has Latin origin which means saying good bye to meat (carni = meat, vale = good bye; remember carnivore?).

The origin of Greek carnival tradition can also be traced back to Ancient Greek tradition. They said that it was for honouring the God of Wine, Dionysus. That’s why the Greek Orthodox church, the majority, seemed not too happy with the celebration. Nonetheless, old and young people were celebrating on Thursday night. The carnival is also related to Easter and one of my professors said that for forty days before Easter the Greek (at least the religious ones) fast by not eating meat or drinking alcohol. Continue reading →

Today, (Wednesday, 13/02/2008), Greece is on general strike. The strike will last for the whole day, crippling the whole nation, as buses, trains, and airplanes were shut down. Schools are closed and hospitals are only dealing with emergency cases. Almost all public services, even news agencies join the strike. From the news, I know that the workers are demanding a better pension in their retirement system.
Continue reading →

Not too long ago, more than a few of prominent Indonesian bloggers posted about issues regarding Indonesian former president, Soeharto, who was very ill. A prominent (dated way back, August 16, 1994) writing by Seno Gumira Ajidarma titled Waiting for the death of Uncle Scrooge (in Indonesian only, the title is translated literally from “Menunggu Kematian Paman Gober”) is also spread across mailing lists.
Continue reading →

Today people in Indonesia was able to watch lunar eclipse. It is a quite rare (but not that rare) moment, last time lunar eclipse was also visible from Indonesia on March 4th, 2007, at around 04.00 AM (all time in GMT+07.00). I somehow expected the eclipse not to be spectacular or anything. But yet again, people talked about it and news concerning it was broadcasted through the day. As the time of the eclipse was not too late at night or too early in the morning like last time, I managed to get a glimpse of it and shot several pictures. Continue reading →

The event was held on August 2^nd, 2007 at Le Meridien Hotel, Jakarta. Some of the pictures can be seen via raizamn’s album on ipernity: Erasmus Mundus 2007 Pre-Departure Reception.

Hope you like it and do forgive my lack of photographer skills

And for those who have an eye for one or more picture, just post a comment here stating which one(s) you like, and I’ll email it (them) to you.

One last thing, for other Erasmus Mundus Awardees, do publish your own pictures and let the rest of us know.

And Indonesians weep as Indonesia national team lost against Korea Republic 0 - 1 in the AFC Final Cup. Eventhough 88,000 Indonesian supporters in the stadium and millions other watching from national and cable TV, all cheered religiously for the national team, Korea Republic maintained their cool by not letting anyone pass through their defensive wall. Of course Indonesia had some chances, but definitely not luck.

With this result, Korea Republic will join Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to advance to the next round after the Arabs knocked out Bahrain with 4 goals to nil.