Well yes it is summer once again and while most of you are probably enjoying a nice vacation I‘m already back to normal for a week, melting away in front of the computer at work.
But hey I finally took the chance to see some more of Europe and got my dad’s big Mercedes to visit France. Our southern most point was Donostia or San Sebastian in the Spanish part of the Basque Country. The photos below are taken from „Urgull“, a hill formerly used as a strategic defence point, now giving tourists sight across the city and its beautiful beaches.
Last weekend Martin and I organized the „GIF Workshop“, a workshop that included an introduction on how to create a little animated GIF image as well as a day of creating GIFs ourselves. The university kindly supported us with all the equipment so in the end we had two photo sets, a number of cameras and a handful of people who were eager to animate with us.
We ended up with a high number of different and very funny short animations (although the flying-across-the-hallway-GIF was fairly popular) which I just uploaded on a website
my portrait (due to the low resolution you might not see it but I‘m actually scratching my beard)
While thinking of my thesis and what direction I could steer to I started writing down how many kilometers and hours I spent traveling in 2009. The numbers are really only based on my memories, Google Earth and other route planning software and do not represent an accurate result (Iran for example is surprisingly not included in Google Maps). The second point is that 2009 is not representative for myself nor for the average person, I assume at least.
Anyway the outcome surprised me of course. According to my calculation I traveled around 62,000 km last year – around 33,000 km of this in airplanes which equals around 50 hours of time, almost 12,500 km in busses which means about 140 hours and about 10,500 km in trains with about 160 hours time spent. The rest was spent in cars (~5,500 km / 60 hours), Moped (~120km / 3 hours) and on ferries (~450 km / 7 hours).
The result really doesn‘t tell me much about my topic and was yet another ‚time-consuming‘ activity but still it brought me back to a very essential question. Is travel necessary at all? Most of the distances I traveled were for personal and therefore rather egoistic reason. I can certainly say that it broadened my personal horizon, showed me many different places which were extremely different to what I have seen before, I met great people of which most don‘t have the possibility to travel as free and as much as I did and I have a huge amount of photos that I still haven‘t looked through completely (or properly). But why did I really decide to go through all this? It’s really not because I personally like spending time in travel busses .
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