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"The morning after my lecture,
in Amsterdam, in the hotel where the lecture took place." |
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Impressions from Amsterdam the 17th of November 2008
Dear friends,
It took me 48h to digest the event of the Amsterdam symposium: so many things happened !
Almost a thousand people came, attending lectures assiduously throughout the day and evening. Twenty-one lecturers, a score of exponents, plus the terrific Dutch team in charge of supervising and organizing.
I have to say that Frontier's team is quite remarkable: good reception at the station (thank you Aldo !) as well as at the hotel (thank you Herman for your organization !); excellent technical team: indeed, to provide good sounding is not such a simple task in a huge hall of more than 600 people ! I had a cameraman who filmed the whole of my lecture in HD, for a future DVD; and Power Point worked perfectly well on my own computer, with my videos (slightly too long) in the right format.
Our host Filip has been of utmost delicacy and discretion; I had the opportunity to share with him several conversations about Egypt (he is an expert and an excellent author; have a look at his website, listed in the link section "new paradigm" of my website), as well as to sit next to him at the lecturers' supper, he is a very interesting guest.
My first preoccupation was my four students coming as supporters from the Parisian region: the French suppporting team ! And my colleague friends arriving specially from England. I have then immersed myself in a web of various relations. My lecture was only starting at 8pm: I had to bear until then in this bustling crowd.
I soon ran into three people I had met a long time ago in London. Then, after having granted a 15-minute interview in English for Frontier TV (standing in a corridor in the middle of the noise, answering very provocative questions !), I joined my publisher (from "l'Egypte" magazine), who had come to speak with our host and to support me with the reviews.
We could thus have very interesting discussions with Filip from the Frontier Sciences Foundation, about the Egyptian archaeologists' reactions in Bosnie concerning the pyramids over there (I am going there in 2009 to give you a detailed report). Actually things are evolving at a rapid pace. I will write an article on it very soon.
Next I spoke with many Dutch people who didn't know me (of course, since my website has only just been put into English and my thirty articles have not been translated yet! Thank you Gabrielle for helping with the translation, and thank you Antoine for the website !).
Then I spoke for more than an hour with one of the lecturers: Jan Peter de Jong, who made a DVD that I particularly appreciate: "The Cosmogony of the three worlds", concerning the work of a Peruvian from Cuzco who has a rather strong theory about the similitudes between various very ancient stoneworks in Peru, Egypt etc... We will invite him for the big public event that we will organize during the first term in Paris, for the launching of the association Giza for Humanity. His remarkable work will thus be introduced in France.
I could also talk several times with the lecturer Geoff Stray (the Mayan Calendar specialist) and many others... I spoke with several exponents too, one of whom I had a discussion with about the great epic poet Wolframs von Eschenbach and his Percival, which gave me a few interesting clues.
Afterwards the lecturers were invited to a dinner with our host. Just before my conference: less than ideal... but the Gods (Egyptian of course) were there, manifesting through a small incident. As soon as I arrived. I was at the private lounge buffet, and there a waiter pointed at me, telling our host that he would speak to me in Egyptian, which of course he did immediately; I answered in his language. Now, this waiter did not know I was giving a conference, neither did he know whom I was (moreover the dinner space was quite remote), and when he was asked how he knew I could speak his language in the middle of the other twenty people... he answered: "My soul immediately sensed it !"... Enough to brighten up my mood right before my conference, given that I had started to become tired.
The latter went very well, and my long videos made them react with surprise. My conference stood out among the others, being a bit more of a French University style; introduction, synthesis etc... and I realized how much the English-speaking world is not used to it, preferring the sensational over the serious, sometimes in quite an unfortunate way.
The audience questions were to make me "speak about my secrets", to which I replied that I only speak when I have proof for what I am saying and when I have done sufficient research... This strengthened my own specificity... this laborious task I have been working on for a long time and that is getting reinforced little by little.
It was very interesting to find out that this audience is not used to discover other sites than the three Pyramids and the Sphinx; they even think there is nothing else interesting, in spite of their readings... There they gained a much wider perspective, and obviously they wanted more of it ! But I had a time limit (45 minutes), that I slightly exceeded. I was told my English was perfect... Phew !
We will see in due time which path this conference is leading me on.
Gigal |
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