Posts in Category: Europe
Sicily – a short visit in Taormina
In september 2017 I joined my parents and my brother for a week in sicily. We stayed near Taormina; went to the aeolian islands to see the stromboli and I also went diving near Taormina.
Corfu, Greece – Diving europe
2 years ago I started diving while being in southeast asia. Sadly, it’s not that easy to go diving in europe. A friend of mine and me, we gave it a try in Corfu, Greece in may. It was a trip over on an extended weekend so we arrived thursday and left Sunday – leaving 2 full days for diving :). We didn’t plan much, but decided for Paleokastritsa in the west of the island. To get there, we took an overnight ryanair flight with a stopover in Milano Bergamo – but sleeping at the airport wasn’t a real option because the airport closed at night. So we went for a walk to and around Bergamo. Not much to see at night :D. After another few hours of waiting, a flight and a bus trip, we arrived on the west coast of corfu where the hotel’s owner picked us up from the bus stop to the hotel which was situated about 5 minutes uphill. We spent the next 2.5 days hiking around the island and diving below it’s waters including 2 cave dives. Visibility was awesome, so I could test my newly bought actioncam and the color-filters – but there were really few fish around.
Prague and Trdelníks
A friend of mine found an advert on facebook offering a trip to prague over the long weekend – intended for students and probably mainly erasmus students who want to see more european cities and party in all of them. The offer claimed bus trips from Aachen/ Cologne and other cities, a city tour, boat trip, pub crawl and party with accomodation in prague which included a swimming pool. The price was too good to be true… we should’ve known it – but we booked.
1st bummer: No pickup in Aachen due to few participants from there – we were asked to come to cologne to start from there – reasonable.. ok.
during the trip: We’re not staying in prague. “the hostel made some errors” we’re staying 15km out of town – and there will be a shuttle service – WTF?!? But somehow most participants didn’t seem to bother much. Since we wanted flexibility to e.g. go to the city and go home whenever we wanted, we started to discuss about this ‘shuttle’ and it’s schedule. Finally, we got promised it’d be hourly. – annoying but acceptable.
After the city tour, we met back at the bus to go to our accomodation 15km away – It was in the middle of nowhere and took us about 2.5h hours to get there :-O And we ended up in wood-bungalows without electricity, heating or isolation. But the travel-time was the most annonying. Also, suddenly the schedule for the shuttle was ‘After partying we meet at 3:30 a.m. to leave to the camp. That’s the only bus.’
Long story short: when the price seems to good to be true (given you’re familiar with the local price level) don’t do it :D. We spent most of the weekend with annoying discussions with the organizators who broke their promises again and again – and finally managed to get 30% off our initial payment. We tried to enjoy the beautiful city anyway so here are a few pictures ;).
Next time: Plane + Airbnb
Dublin
A few pictures from my first trip to Ireland! Thanks to the Unitech EOY-Event hosted by Trinity college dublin,
Iceland!
I finally made it to Iceland 🙂
1.5 weeks ago I got into a train to go to the Düsseldorf airport – bound for a country with only 323k Inhabitants – less than most cities.
Tabea and me, we didn’t really plan… we googled a few places we had heard of and put it on a ‘want to see / maybe / naaah’ list. And we booked a car.
After arriving at eleven at night, I intended to go to a kiosk to find something for breakfast the next morning. The ’10 minutes that way’ turned out to be measured in car-minutes and I’m only a quarter as fast. After walking through wind and rain, I had definetly seen all of Keflavik (although everything was closed and covered in clouds and rain.) The next morning we picked up our Peugeot 208 and started our journey along beautiful scenery and hundreds of waterfalls. It took us 2 days to realize how to get music from our phones out of the car speaker (aux was disabled, usb sticks and my phone didn’t work and the bluetooth-options were quite hidden) and I emptied lots of coffee-cups as well as 3 camera batteries. Long story short, we had an amazing 2400km around iceland – but see for yourself 😉 [fullscreen suggested – upper right corner.]
The beauty of the North
It’s been almost half a year since I left the northern European paradise shown in these pictures. Goeteborg, Malmoe, Stockholm, Riga, Kiruna, Chalmers university, kyrkan, viktor-rydberg’s kök icehockey, canoeing on delsjoen, köttbullar, dogsledging, suovas kebab, snowmobiles, the northern lights and the hottest sauna sweden has ever witnessed, fika, afterwork, waffles^^, parties and afterparties (STEIL!), even the lectures – but most of all the people I met during my exchange semester make me want to develop a time-machine just to go back and relive these months. Thanks again to all who made this time so awesome &
Jag älskar sverige!