Our 600th post !

We are caught a bit off guard when the admin page of WordPress indicated that our next post will be the six hundredth (600th) that we published. As previously said several times, we are surprised that the interest in keeping up this blog has not fizzled out over the last 5 years. True it is, that we are still living in Europe and away from our friends and families, the primary reason for starting the blog. But we also find that this blog is a convenient medium to capture and frame memories of our time in Switzerland and our travels, and it became a habit and a hobby (at least for Chris).

The blog was launched on November 4, 2009. The first trip ever reported here was our visit of Playa de Carmen, Mexico in November 2009 (click here to see). We had not yet left the US at that time but were starting to pack our belongings and worried about the move.

Fast forward to now, posts on our quick tour of three cities – Taormina, Siracusa (Ortigia) and Catania – on the east coast of Sicily, taken during Easter, are under preparation now. Our most recent visit to Berlin and Copenhagen earlier this month has not yet been written up. Most of the photos are still in Raw format.

Since March 2013, we have been posting a series of photos on Facebook, one a day except Sunday and Thursday when the blog is updated. There is no theme – just something random and per se visually interesting. They are essentially pictures that did not make the blog for some reasons. We gave each a serial number, a minimally-worded title and a mention of where it was taken (to the extent we could remember the location). But we wanted to share them with the readers here too – so we started showing 5 of them in a post – somewhat irregularly. This is the first of the series – #1 – “the history of cool” –  Munich.

So far we have shown about 150 of them here, but on Facebook, we are at #444 – there is a backlog of almost 300 random photos! On days when we are not writing the blog, these photos could keep the blog going for a while. This is #443 – “dark 3” – Taormina.

The readership of this blog has stabilized at around 50-70 views per day. Apart from posting a link in Facebook, Twitter and Google+ each time a post goes public, we made little attempts to drive up the statistics. We also signed up Pinterest but have not seen much changes (perhaps we are not leveraging the site properly). But other people have pinned our photos on pinterest.  So if you do not feel like writing a comment, pin a photo.

Recently, we noticed that the page view of one of our posts in April on eating durian on the street of Petaling Jaya (click here to see) has gone through the roof (more than 120 views last week alone and maintaining the momentum). It must have caught the attention of certain netizens in Malaysia (as reflected in WordPress statistics), and got linked to an index or a popular site.

The reigning champion of page views is still our first post on HSBC’s poster ads as seen around major airports in 2010 (click here). Its two siblings are receiving decent traffic too.

This blog has changed its theme (a WordPress term for the overall look and feel of the blog) only once which happened within the first month of its launch. So the appearance remains constant for the last few years and it is getting a bit aged. But we are hesitant to change to a more modern theme as it could affect somewhat unpredictably the old posts. More experimenting is needed (if we have more time).

One day we might want to make a book (or several books) using these photos, like the ones we did for Yellowstone National Park and Iceland back in 2007.

We have been buying books showing photos of a city “then and now” or aerial views of an area.

Before signing off, we want to thank our readers for their interest and support, and Susie who has been responding to our posts consistently and ranks No. 1 with the highest number of comments.

Your feedback is important as it is the only way we know someone is reading the blog. So please comment, like, retweet, follow, clip, subscribe, pin, bookmark, repost or do some good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. In the meantime, we will continue to share words and images of our adventures.

Cheers.

2011 Goodbye

Happy New Year !

Wishing You All The Best in 2012.

Before we welcome the arrival of 2012, I will do a little personal review of the world events of 2011. This past year seems to be packed with big news, more so than 2010 and other years past.

Is it me (who is bored or just me consuming more information because of the electronic gadgets)?

Are more things in the world going out of control? or is it the efficiency of news gathering and dissemination? Probably a bit of both, depending on one’s point of view, access to and appetite for media.

Remember these news and how they grab your attention in 2011?

• Changes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen – people rising up against repressive establishments.
• Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor disaster – can people afford to not have nuclear energy ?
• Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gadaffi, Kim Jong-Il – better future for the people now ?
• Steve Jobs – greatest toy maker of all time !
• Royal wedding – cheers, yawn …
• European financial crisis – mismanaged establishments galore.
• Anti-austerity protests, London riot, and Occupy movement – people rising up against mismanaged establishments.
• News International phone hacking scandel – the people, the paparazzi and the establishment.
• Wikileaks, Anonymous hacks – some people rising up against some establishments.
• US political deadlocks – a mismanaged establishment that cannot be fixed by petty and radical people !

I just came across an article “On Distraction” by Alain de Botton (more about him in the next post) which touches on what I am thinking:

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds …

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.

Let’s see how 2012 turns out, I hope for the better for all of us.

In case you are wondering, the above photos were taken in Hong Kong (crowd), Berlin (graffiti), Lausanne (sculpture) and Barcelona (spiral).

Swiss demographics

We have become a part of a statistic.  According to the latest figures:

Neuchatel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Foreigners made up 21.98 percent of the Swiss resident population in 2009, figures released by the Federal Statistics Office show, a relatively stable percentage. Overall, the resident population of Switzerland continued to grow at a steady pace, to 7,783,000, with a foreign population of 1,711,000. The increase in the total population was due mainly to a positive migratory figure (immigration minus emigration), with immigration accounting for 81 percent of the total growth. The birth rate rose by 2 percent, with both the Swiss and foreigners showing increases. The average number of children rose, but almost imperceptibly, from 1.48 to 1.49 per woman. The age at which women start families continues to climb and is now 31.2, up from 31 in 2008. Women over age 30 were largely responsible for the growth in the 2009 birth rate. The figures also show the divorce rate slipping down for the third year in a row, to 19.000. Swiss marriages have stabilized at around 40,000 a year for the past 10 years.

22% foreigners – that is at least in one in five – I wonder what is the % of foreigners in NYC and the % in the US as a whole.

I took the picture above on a street behind the main train station of Lausanne.

2010: What Matters Now

Happy New Year !

Wishing You All The Best in 2010.

What Matters Now – Things to think (and do) this year. Seth Goldin asked a group of internet writers to contribute something on this timely topic.  He collected the output and made them available online in the form of a free e-book.  The e-book contains one key concept per page.  Interesting stuff.  I hope the snippets of insight associated with each concept might help people shape their new year resolutions and change something somewhere for the better in the future.

Page 42 is about “Adventure” and shares the spirit of this blog.  I particularly like the following:

Go slow; gaze absentmindedly and savor every moment.

Invest now in future memories.

Resolve to leave the screens of your virtual world momentarily behind, and indulge your senses with a real world adventure.

There are a total of 82 pages in the e-book.  Since the ideas are not in any particular order, you may want to preview the whole set or jump around by switching to tile mode (see bottom right side of window). It is also available as a free downloadable PDF here.

View this document on Scribd

Dangerous Quotes

www.dangerousquotes.com

A friend of mine, PK, is building this web site that serves up quotes.  Over the years, he has collected several hundreds quotes and kept them in a page on one of his blogs.  On the new site, the quotes are listed by the topics to which it lends its relevance.  Although the site is under construction, it’s worth a visit.  For example, it contains a quote, by the Sci-fi author William Gibson whose book I am reading (“Pattern Recognition” mentioned in an earlier post).  He said:

Predicting the future is mostly a matter of managing not to blink as you witness the present.

Guess who said this ?

Do or do not, there is no try.

Yoda did, in The Empire Strikes Back when he was teaching Luke how to raise his X-wing from the swamp.  Don’t know why these quotes are dangerous.

While I was writing this post, for due diligence, I poked around the quotes. Unexpectedly, I discovered that I was quoted on the topic of, guess what, – Toys.  I am flattered.   – C