It's a long time ago and the memory of my last vacation has already faded, let alone the feeling of relaxation, but some three weeks after returning from Okinawa the photos are finally ready.

Okinawa is a relatively small island in the south of Japan and inhabited by a little more than 1.3 million people. Actually, the whole prefecture includes hundreds of little islands, the Ryukyu Islands, but we only visited the main one. We spent two days in Naha, the prefecture's capital, and southern area before heading up to the center and eastern part.

Some of the views are breathtaking and so is driving on the left side for the first time in your life. Apart from the occasional struggle with the GPS (strictly Japanese and only workable with the handbrake pulled - learn the hard way!) it went fine, though, and we enjoyed five relaxing days in the sun.

The pictures, complete with GPS coordinates, thanks to my trusted and always present "Easy Showily" GPS logger:

Okinawa (Days 1 and 2)
Okinawa (Days 3 to 5)

All good things come to an end. This is especially and unfortunately true for vacations.

If you think that vacations are relaxing then you should try coming back from one of my vacations. Hundreds of photos and dozens of GPS traces are waiting to be combined and put online.

Luckily, I finally found a working program that does this job quite well: Geotag. It loads pictures from different directories and multiple GPS tracks and with a little bit of magic you'll have coordinates in your pictures in no time. The result of this can be seen here:

Turtle Island album

Turtle Island (龜山島, Gui shan dao) is a small, uninhabited island on the west coast of Taiwan. Unfortunately it's still under military control and visiting involves going with a rather large tour group or a lot of paperwork (If you have the choice, go with the paperwork! :-), but it's worthwile in spite of that. See for yourself.

Oh, and pictures from Okinawa are coming up soon. At least some of them; turns out my camera is allergic to water. ;-)

It's fun, after living abroad for a while, to go back to your home country to see what has changed and what hasn't. Some things never seem to change:

• Mother's cooking is still the best
• Shops close over lunch time
• The amount of snow
• The challenge of getting food after 22h!

And some things are not quite what they used to be:

• I can walk through my parents' home town largely incognito
• I feel weird going to a Chinese restaurant (especially accompanied by a Taiwanese)
• My ability to speak my mother tongue (it's embarrassing trying to order something in a bakery and not remembering its name ;-)

Together with Ivy I traveled through Switzerland in what can be described as a mixture between Swiss retiree style (i.e. sitting in the train a lo-o-ot) and Japanese city hopping. In three days we went from Chur to Lausanne in the Glacier Express, from there to Basel and Bern, and via Zürich back to Chur. Our vacation also included a Snow Show in Arosa and a one-day trip to St. Moritz, one of the most expensive (and, if it wasn't for the scenery, most boring) towns in Switzerland.

But Chinese food (not my idea, I swear) was not the only thing that reminded us of Taiwan. See for yourself:

Apparently, the Love sculpture in front of Taipei's 101 is not the only one of its kind. Turns out that there are more instances of Robert Indiana's art piece than you'd think as a quick Internet search reveals. :-)

My gallery has more pictures from our trip. Enjoy!

It was a hard piece of work but my Japan pictures are finally online in the gallery. Over 200 photos of six days in Fukuoka, Kyoto, and Tokyo.

But fear not, you don't have to look at 200 photos to get an impression. As always I've sorted the pictures by their attractiveness (in my eyes), so if the default shows too many or too few for your taste, you can click the 'Fewer items' and 'More items' links. Furthermore, all pictures have coordinates, so there are also Google Maps and Google Earth versions. Visit the gallery front page to see all the fancy options.

Despite all the traditional sights and beautiful impressions this was a high-tech (well, compared to the average) trip in many ways: daily uploads, on-the-fly trip planning, and GPS logger. I'll post a somewhat geeky article shortly, so stay tuned if you're into that sort of thing. And turn a blind eye if you're not. ;-)

While typhoon Krosa was heavily battering the Northern part of Taiwan last weekend a group of eight people decided to flee Hsinchu in order to visit one of the most famous tourist attractions, the Kenting National Park (墾丁國家公園, Kěndīng guójiā gōngyuán) in the south of the island. It turned out to be a good choice because medium strong winds were the only effect of the typhoon we felt, and those made for a memorable experience. (If you're wondering what happened in Hsinchu, stay tuned for pictures.)

Instead of boring you with a description of the entire weekend (I'll leave that job to the photos) I want to share two little episodes that are characteristic for what I like so much about Taiwan.

Winds were rather strong on Saturday, so not many people dared (or bothered) to go outside. Given our short stay we didn't want to stay inside and live off of instant noodles, so we decided to drive around the area and enjoy the beautiful scenery. One of our destinations was the Erluanbi Lighthouse National Park (鵝鑾鼻國家公園, Éluánbí guójiā gōngyuán) at the southernmost point of Taiwan. Unfortunately the park was closed during the typhoon and we were already heading back to our car when the staff told us that we could visit anyway, just at our own risk. No need to tell us twice! We ran in and fought our way against the wind to the top of the hill on which the lighthouse is standing. We had a blast (literally and metaphorically speaking)! It's great when rules can be bent once in a while and the fear of a legal suit doesn't stifle every hint of flexibility and common sense.

Later the same day we had lunch in 恆春 (Héngchūn), a town in Southern Taiwan. With eight people it tends to become a little difficult to choose a restaurant, so our group ended up split into four people preferring rice from one store and four people preferring food from the noodle store next door. Not a problem in Taiwan. The noodle store owner saw that we were one big group and told us to go sit together, she would bring us our food over. If that's not great service, then what is? Try the same thing in Switzerland and you'll find yourself kicked out before you realize what's going on.

I'm still sorting through everybody's pictures and making a selection. Today was National Day and I was busy trying to ride a scooter. Anyway, Candy was a lot faster, so until I'm done, go ahead and check out her gallery.

Update: (date censored) My album is online at last. Check it out!

If you thought vacations were relaxing you might be right. But you'll pay the price when you get back and took too many pictures! In my case the agony lasted two weeks, but I think it was worth it. The rest of my Switzerland pictures is finally online and there are some really nice ones among them. Check them out:

Grimselpass and Rhonegletscher
Flight Zürich - Taipei

I've made it; the second album of my Switzerland trip is online. The first one was five pictures of Basel, so I didn't really feel it was worth dedicating a blog entry it. (Either that or I just forgot. ;-) The second one is a little more interesting, especially because this was the first time I went to see the Aareschlucht (Aare gorge) and the Reichenbachfälle (Reichenbach falls).

If the latter name sounds familar, you may have been reading Sherlock Holmes books. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so impressed with these falls that he let his hero fall down and "die" at that location, struggling with his archenemy. There's still a large number of fans who pilgrimage to this place. You can check out the official website if you're interested.

For the tech-savvy and the always busy out there, let me point out that you can see most of my photo albums in different versions, including Google Map, Google Earth variants, and a Quick tour by going to the gallery page and choosing the corresponding link.

More pictures to come soon ...

As most of you already know, I was on vacation in Switzerland for almost two weeks. And while I'm still processing and uploading the many pictures I took, let me entertain you with something tiny I encountered twice during my travel:

Yes, this is it. The proud five centimeter diameter "menu" that SWISS offers on their European flights in economy class. On one flight from Paris to Zurich it was even accompanied by the kind request not to order more than one drink "for time reasons due to the high occupancy".

Of course, as a SWISS customer you're quite happy with this muffin. Some of you may remember the infamous resurrection phase when SWISS rose out of the ashes of Swissair and fairly decent quality came crashing down together with Swissair's finances. During that time, customers paying several hundred Swiss francs for their ticket (plus 20 CHF "service fee", a.k.a. the this-will-teach-you-to-book-SWISS fee) had to pay 4 CHF for a small can of coke and a similar amount for a baby sandwich that most people would consider finger food.

Then Lufthansa bought SWISS and decided to bring back the image of luxury and stability that Swissair had enjoyed for decades. Care for some excerpts from the official SWISS Facts and figures page?

• "[...] SWISS will remain true to its mission of providing quality air services [...]"
• "People who fly with SWISS should always feel at home."
• "[...] with its core values of 'personal care', 'Swiss hospitality' and 'quality down to the finest detail', SWISS will continue to maintain its high market profile as Switzerland’s national airline."

You know how when people talk about quality flights they think tiny muffins and a cup of water? And remember when at home your mother would cook tiny portions and bake minute and preservative-laden cookies? I guess "quality down to the finest detail" really should have been "quality down: food becomes finest detail".

I urge you not to associate your SWISS flight experience with Swiss hospitality. If you come visit I'll prove it--by providing plenty of food. After all you'll need it if you just flew SWISS.

In case you were wondering what I did last weekend instead of blogging, here is the answer. I went to Hong Kong to visit Marco, an old friend from high school and we toured the city with some other friends. I'll write about it some more when I get a chance!

I have barely unpacked and already I'm packing again, although only for one day. I'm going to the north of Taiwan to the beach. Yes, that's pretty much the extent of what I know so far, I guess I'll find out more on the way. I'm still struggling with spontaneity but I think I might get there eventually. :-)

So, while I get suntanned at the beach (or maybe not, cause suntans are not very popular in Taiwan, at least among women; have to find out if the same holds true for men) I invite you to go outside and enjoy the sun with me or, if it rains like it currently does in Switzerland, you can just look at my Hong Kong pictures.

If you were jealous because I could enjoy summery temperatures in California while you were freezing body parts off in cold Switzerland, you're going to hate me now ...

For the next three months my home is Hsinchu, Taiwan where we currently have between 20 and 30 celsius--all day long, notably.

Everything is still slightly scary because of my tiny knowledge of the language and my even smaller knowledge of Chinese writing, but after all the English and French speaking places I needed a challenge. ;-)

Despite my jetlag and the fact that it's almost 2am here I managed to upload a few pictures. No comments yet and no location info because Google Maps doesn't work very well (read: not at all) in Taiwan.

More experience reports (in particular about my first Chinese meals) and photos will follow shortly! Zàijiàn!