Cáceres, Saint Jean, bonfires, music...

For the past few days I spend quite a lot of time trying different combinations of planes, trains and whatnot to find the cheapest and more convenient way to Cáceres. Finally I settled for a pricey ticket to Lisbon which was quite convenient time-wise, and allows me to pay a visit to some friends.

So yes, I'm going to DC9! I'll be arriving the 25 in the morning (if this morons who cannot build a website finnaly decide to sell me a ticket), and I'll stay until the 30 in the night.

So, having solved this pressing issue, I went to see what La Fête de Saint Jean was about. There were announcements about the celebration in the neighbouring town of Valbonne. So I went there, got my small torch, marched with hundreds of people across the old town to the big bonfire, escorted by a marching jazz band and finally jumped over the fire, as the tradition indicates. It was a nice experience, and it felt quite authentic, there were not many people speaking english around :)

Image of people carrying candles to the bonfire
(Image from YeTI78's flickr album, my camera is broken)

Community service

While playing with different ways to bypass the stupid firewall that I have at my current home, I found that the Google servers for XMPP/Jabber/Gtalk accept connections on port 443. So, next time you cannot connect with the standard 5222 port, you know what to try.