After 2 weeks in France I am finally back in Beijing and so happy to be here! The way back was rather hectic due to bad subway/train fare charging and no signage in the airport. In fact you can buy a subway ticket that let you take the train to the airport, however the fare is more expensive and you have no option to pay the difference on arrival: you arrive at the gate where your undervalued ticket doesn’t let you go out and there is no counter or staff around! Luckily someone was nice enough to use his monthly card to let me out (together with another lost soul) and send me to the wrong terminal. It’s probably too difficult for the French (Aéroport de Paris I should blame) to place signs telling travelers which airlines take off from which of the 3 terminals…

That being said the trip was rather ok with half of the time sunny days, no special trouble, my 99 years and six month old great-aunt perfectly healthy, my good friends happy to see me and a few unexpected encounters such as Mandriva‘s nice office and team, Mozilla Europe President and the people behind the Gdium project!

On top of that I also went to an Open Source meeting organized every first Thursday of the month by the Paris LUG called “Parinux” (among many other events they organize). It was nice to see how other countries and LUG do but what I can tell you is that the Beijing LUG is definitely the group to join if you want to see more girls and meet Open Source programmers ;). I was told that in France developers tend not to attend those types of events and that LUGs or other communities are rather influential with the politicians. As an example AFUL together with a few other associations just won a battle about a non-refundable pre-installed Windows against DELL for 50,000.- € just for 1 case. Class action suit is not allowed in France so each case is reviewed one by one. Of course you can imagine that there are a few cases in the pipeline and that manufacturers and OEMs do worry a little ;).

That’s about it for today. I will probably write a bit more about each encounter as they do warrant a full report!