'Have been traveling... We left 03Sep08 for Paris to attend the 15th Dieppe International Kite Festival (6-14Sep).

Dieppe is still as glorious as ever. Nice kite people, good organization, good food, amazing kites...
'Had the chance to meet an old friend- Michael Steltzer of Berlin, and he was organizing the Potsdam International Kite Festival (19-21Sep). So who's gonna miss this chance? Not us!

It was another week of the good life... German beers, sausages, tours, etc. But it was too good to last. We left Berlin 24Sep.

Like clockwork, the Amihan wind season arrived early October, and we just had enough time to prepare for the 3rd Shenzen International Kite Festival (6-11Nov). We did appear in an early morning TV show at ABS-CBN which featured traditional Filipino kites.

Shenzen has grown since we were there a year ago. Chinese tea, Tsingtao beer, roast pigeon, dimsum, noodles, Chinese chicken, steamed fish, oysters, Chinese vegetables, pork dumplings, and more food than we can take in one sitting.

But then, there was also more than enough wind which broke strong lines, fiberglass and carbon spars. Several kites were blown out to sea. Peter Lynn's giant shark and fish kites broke lines dove into the sea, but were fortunately retrieved at the cost of several hundred yuans paid out to the boatmen. Sami Sayegh of Lebanon lost his giant snake kite. The Korean team lost more than a hundred kites when their long kite train snapped its line in a sudden strong gust. My medium size crown snapped it's line twice and a strong gust bent-open the metal clamp.

18Nov, I'm flying to Singapore to meet with Peter Lynn, Scott Skinner and Ali Fujino of the Drachen Foundation, Hj Hussin Haron of the Malaysian Kite Council, a group from the Jakarta Kitefliers Association and the Singapore Kite Association.

We are dividing the ''loot" which Peter Lynn gave the ASEAN Kite Council (AKC) as donation. It's a container-load of excess kite materials from Holland. 700 rolls of rip-stop fabric, a ton of carbon fiber tubes, 10,000 pieces of 10mm fiberglass tubes, kite buggies and parts, kiteboarding equipments, rolls and rolls of dyneema lines, more, more, more.