Guess where we’re headed… 
We will leave on 18th July and get back 8th August. Two fantastic weeks of hiking and travelling in a marvellous landscape. I’m so looking forward to it.
Afterwards we’re going to be one week in Austria to attend Mimi’s sister’s wedding.
daniel@miyazaki:~/.xchat2/xchatlogs$ grep "dholbach hugs" * | wc -l
4645
daniel@miyazaki:~/.xchat2/xchatlogs$
I’ve not been asking the Lazy web a lot yet, but I hope to get some good recommendations here. I’m looking for “Balkan Beats” music on vinyl. Inspired by the legendary Bucovina and Balkanbeats parties and compilations, I’ve been looking for that kind of music for a bit longer now.
I already have:
Let me know if you found more.
Hardly surprising – it’s winter.
Funnily enough my panel applet said it was 4°C for some weeks now. This surprised me because the ice and snow outside, the freezing canal nearby and my chattering teeth when I was walking the dog definitely felt a lot lot colder.
It looked like the 4°C in the applet were stuck somehow.
It struck me yesterday: I had set the applet to Berlin Tempelhof airport (since it was closest to me), but as it was closed down a few weeks ago, the 4°C stuck. Now that I set it to Tegel, it’s all “good” again:
It’s just f.cking cold.
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My 5 today: #313987 (git-cola), #303316 (gourmet), #46435 (netgo), #312723 (gtksourceview2), #313279 (gnome-pkg-tools)
Do 5 a day – every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day
Short version: I uploaded pictures of our trip to India.
This is the route we chose in the end:
Parts 1-5 are also known as the “Golden Triangle” and is where most tourist offices are likely to send you… although the ones in Delhi tried to send us to Kashmir a couple of times, which looked absolutely fantastic but we didn’t feel safe doing.
Some people predicted us the “Delhi shock” and we sure experienced it on our first day there. Deciding to “just walk out for a bit and see what happens” caused us a few raised eyebrows from the hotel reception and we found out why: we were out in Pahar Ganj on an extremely busy, extremely hot and stifling Monday and almost every third person on the street asked us where we’re from, if they can sell us something, if we want to go to some shop they can recommend, if we can give them some money, and so on. Kids and old people were lying and sitting in the dirt, tried to make a bit of money from the little they had. Some scenes on the street were piteous, the sheer amount of people we attracted was overwhelming and the climate only bearable if you found a shady spot somewhere and didn’t move. Once we started exploring the city, we slowly got used to constantly being approached.
After lots of thinking, checking, consultations with tourist offices, talking to members of the very helpful Ubuntu India team (YAY!), we decided on the route above, knew we’d definitely come back to Delhi and see more of it. After our first day we were happy to move on and see some more of the country.
I know you expect the “this is what we did on day 1, this is what we did on day 2, nice pictures, etc” here and I started writing it, extending it, changing it a couple of times and so on. Describing just bits here and bits there didn’t seem right to me. If you want to know more about the trip, maybe want to see some more pictures (we did like 1200 of them), talk to me, I’m happy to go into full detail.
The trip was amazing and a great experience. India is just an country we definitely want to go back to. It was great meeting Vivek in Delhi (thanks again!), 3 weeks of vegetarian Indian food were just awesome (we didn’t feel like we were missing anything are ‘hobby vegetarians’ since). There were just so many things that impressed me deeply: the deep religious beliefs, the social interaction of people in their daily lives, the strong will to make something good happen, the friendly people, the foothills of the Himalaya, the bright colours, the music and lots of other little things made this trip so great.
Future tours I could imagine:
Enjoy the pictures.
We’re in Berlin again and once I feel fully at home again (and got through most of the x thousand emails), I’ll blog some more about our India trip. Also I’ll upload a bunch of pictures we made.
India has been an awesome experience – it’s been very different to everything else I experienced up until now. We’ll definitely return to India.
This Tuktuk driver expressed very well what I feel after the trip.
…and we’ll be off into our holidays again. Guess where we’re headed:
Right! India it is!
I’ve been looking forward to this for ages and we prepared for the trip by:
)I know this is going to to be awesome and I’m quite sure that this won’t have been the last time, we’ve been to India. It’s a shame we can only go for 2,5 weeks.
Right now our plan is to do roughly this tour, so if you have
post a comment below.
For a few hours today my mail was inaccessible. I’m glad Stefan fixed it quickly.
If any mails you sent to me bounced back, please resend them.
Aristotelis Grammatikakis just let me know that the hand gesture in my last blog entry is deemed highly offensive in Greece. To my readers in dear Hellas: this was not intended at all and I’m thankful to learn about differences in our cultures. Even if this incident was a bit unfortunate, it’s something I love about the Ubuntu community: being in touch with so many people in so many different countries and learning a bit more about them every day is just great. Apologies to all my greek readers again.
It seems like ages since we did our trip to Greece – for those of you who haven’t seen them yet: I put pictures of the trip up and used a lot of them to accompany my mixtape blog posts already. They still absorb me every time I look at them.
It’s really time for another trip and Mimi and I were pondering India (among other destinations). The Lonely Planet guide mentions ~220mm of rain in July/August in a lot of cities like Delhi. Is that much? Can anybody comment? I spent quite some time reading the guide on the weekend and in the evening we watched some movies and it was just great to recognise some places (just from reading up on the topic).
Let’s see where the trip goes in the end…
