Asia-Israel news and events - March 07

Lots of things are happening lately and I can hardly keep up. Here are some recent news and events related to Asia-Israel connections :

• Korea and Israel are celebrating 45 years of formal relations. Although relations went cold till early 90s, Korea and Israel pretend that never happens and have launched a full-scale campaign of “Know Korea better”. While visiting the Korean embassy a few weeks ago, I was informed that over 20 Korea related events will take place across Israel in the upcoming months.
• The Jerusalem Cinemateq wakes up to Asia -
  • To mark the Korea-Israel relations - the Korean film festival is starting today and will go on for a week. It’s the first opportunity for Israelis to enjoy such a wide variety of quality Korean films and I will certainly try to visit most of those. Ira, from the Korean culture center in Jerusalem, has offered free tickets for the opening movie, if anybody’s interested.
  • More Taiwanese and Chinese movies coming up as well. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the Cinemateq will screen one of my all-times favorite - the Taiwanese “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” as well as the wonderful “2046“.
• The Israel-Japan association is screening the important “Letters from Iwo Jima” - a movie which I already got some great recommendations for from a few friends.
• Last meeting of the “The Chinese dragon rises” series is to be held next Thursday in TelAviv, and the last part should be the nicest of them all with two of my lecturers - Avia Feldman (who likes to call me “di4di4″ due to our last name) and Dror Kochan - the Chinese cinema fanatic. Unfortunately, I will already be out of Israel at that time.
• Meijob, an old colleague friend’s brother’s Chinese company - meijob.com, has finally made it live with an official Chinese style public announcement. The Chinese market works, it seems, and although only up since August they’re already enjoying over 15000 visitors a day coming mainly through Baidu. If you got an idea and the right spirit - just do what these guys did and go realize your dream in China. Even you fail, and I don’t think they will, you’re probably in for one of the greatest experiences of your life.
• I’ve quickly translated the interface for one of the most popular Chinese<->English dictionaries online - CEDICT - into Hebrew. Next stage in work is to build a (first ever?) Chinese<->Hebrew dictionary.