The first day I’ve visited my boss and his wife, who was coincidentally also staying in the neighborhood. They prepared dinner for me and I had a pleasant staying! The next day my mother and I visited a hidden mountain lake near Alhama de Murcia. You can only see it when you go off-road, drive for about 10-15 minutes on an unpaved road, and suddenly.. it appears! During the trip, we got stuck in the mud and had to call a friend to pull us out of it. I’m not going into details here!

Next day, my mother took me to the abandoned silver mines near El Portus, in the south of the Murcia region. The Spanish authorities had it closed – not so long ago – because they couldn’t make it work-safe. Nevertheless, these silver mines are still publicly accessible and, if you really want, you’re able to jump into a mine shaft right away (I remember, we threw a stone into the shaft and heard it hit the ground after about ~15-20 seconds, crazy stuff). I like these abandoned places, it’s nice trying to imagine how things went when there was still activity. At the last silver-mine, a road headed to a bay full of squatter huts. They belong to fishermen and locals. It’s actually very cosy, the place is loaded with seats, little tables and barbecues. They are very hospitable, you can even eat some fresh fish with them.

We also visited Cartagena. It’s a city that lives of student activity and tourists, but I don’t get excited of it. There’s not that much you can visit. We walked on the ancient rampart of the city and passed the port. You shouldn’t stay longer than half a day here.

Also a highlight on this trip was Calblanque, a very large nature reserve. It’s a place not that dry and arid as usual in the South of Spain, lots of palm trees, rocks and small lakes, all due to the custom irrigation canals. It was also really quiet, you could walk for hours without noticing someone.

I liked it very much. I remember stepping on a dead little snake, but I assume/hope it was already dead before I stepped on it.

Playa Flamenca is a small maritime city with a Flemish bakery, so obviously  we had to visit it. We ordered a rice cake and a Blonde Leffe (yes here in Belgium you normally don’t order beer at the bakery, whatever).

On the last day of my trip, we went to the capital of the region, also named Murcia. It is very similar with Barcelona, but then in the South. Lots of little streets, students, small and big shops, bands and acts playing on every corner, great atmosphere! Too bad I didn’t have time to visit it again. Something for next year maybe.

When someone tells me he went on vacation to Spain, I always see the same image crossing my mind: sea, lots of tourists, very dry nature and paella. My mother managed to give me a very nice one-week tour of Murcia. This trip was a blast, and honestly I didn’t expect a single thing of it. A life lesson that counts..

You can view all pictures of this trip here: Flickr.

Yeah, this summer I managed to visit my favorite city in South-Europe again: Barcelona! It almost feels as coming home.. This time we brought some company, the parents of my girlfriend. It was the first time they visited the city, so it was our duty to make it a pleasant visit.

We did the usual things: Parc Guell, Sagrade Familia, Mont Juic, and walking around at the Mare Magnum and the coast.

After that, we went to L’Escala, at the Costa Brava in Spain. We visited Girona, which actually surprised me of being so interesting and beautiful. We also went to Roses and Perelada. The latter is a city that is famous for it’s cava and legendary wine (from Castillo Perelada).

It has become a sort of tradition to fill our wine and cava stock every time we’re near (or someone else is near). It was good to have a place where we could relax after some very tiresome days in Barcelona.

Once we were loaded with energy again, we went off to Pertuis, It’s a city at the border of the Vaucluse (a region on Sout-France) and the Provence (about 20 kilometers above Aix-En-Provence). We didn’t do any preparation, so we didn’t really know where we were heading at.

The only thing we really wanted to see and experience, was the Gorges du Verdon and Lac de Saint-Croix (I’ve visited this also 10 years ago, but it’s not the same).

Gorges du Verdon is the Gran Canyon of Europe. You can drive by the cliffs on two sides (Rive Gauche and Rive Droit).

We did both of them (about 120 kilometers) and ended at a hidden place (very calm, not much people) at Lac de Saint Croix where we took a swim. After that we’ve visited some cities such as Gordes

(very famous for its restaurants, we had dinner there in a small italian restaurant), L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (well-known for it’s flea and little antique shops), Lourmarin (a small city on a hill with a castle, but cool narrow streets, nice to walk), Fontaine-De-Vaucluse (very touristic, there’s a lake embedded in a cave, and

a castle on the hills which used to be the vacation residence of the bishops of the Provence). And last but not least: Aix-En-Provence, a small but vivid city and lots to see.

Some weeks before our visit, I bought a new lens: Tokina 11-16/2.8 ATX DX. I always felt I was missing something in my collection. I had numereous situations where I wanted to take a picture of a landscape, big building, or a group of people that were standing very close. This lens has an ultra-wide field of view. As I already have a lot of pictures of Barcelona, I decided to only take pictures with this new lens there .

You can view my other pictures taken that day here.

The first day we went to Maspalomas, a beautiful scenery of sand and dunes. Of course we forgot to smear sunscreen on our back and shoulders, so we were both burned. As a result, the next days we explored the island instead of doing some sun-spotting at the pool. We drove up the mountain, looking for the lake Soria, above San Bartolome. Unfortunately, the clouds were too thick and we couldn’t see a thing once we were at the top of the mountain. The next day we went to explore some ports, one of them was Puerto de Mogan. A very cosy little place, often called little Venice. It’s beautiful to walk through the little streets decorated with flowers in all kinds of colors. A little bit further uphill was Mogan situated, but that was just a normal little town so we drove through it rather quickly. Once driving back on the mountains we arrived at a lake, actually a reservoir, and it was beautiful. I think the temperature dropped to 15 degrees or so, we saw some campers, tables where you could picnic, and lots of quietness. The next day, we decided to explore the other half of the island. We visited Anden Verde, about the most beautiful coastline you could see in Gran Canaria (in the upper west of the island). Close to that, you have Dedo de Dios, a typical rock formation that was destroyed due to a heavy storm some years ago. You could see that the city near Dedo de Dios really lived from its tourists, and is now rather drained. We also visited Cenobio de Valeron, some rock silos where ancient people store their cereals to let them preserve better. The next day, it was time for some sunbathing at the pool. I’ve played some water polo (and I won!), and – of course – we were both burned again . So the next and last day, we decided to stay on our terrace and watch the world championship.

Summarized, it’s the ideal location for a relaxing vacation. You can also do some cool hikings on the mountains, and the temperature is always great. It was worth flying over, and now I’m completely recharged and ready to dive into work again!

When we initially arrived there, the site was completely lined with barbed wire. Despite of that, the place was still a mess. There were several buildings in the area that functioned as a gym, places to sleep, classes, a hangar for trucks and cars and two big office buildings. The only interesting building on this site was the first one, a long building with a kitchen, probably a weapon depot (or is it just my imagination..), a bar and a washing area.

Every building we’ve visited had used bullets (blanks) spread around the floor. Other interesting things we’ve found were some pamphlets containing procedures when finding a bomb and talking with terrorists. Glass was broken, doors were hit down on the ground, the ceiling began to rot.

In the first building, someone put some red paint on the wall, which resulted in a super composition for a picture.

What really made me feel bad, is the fact that these buildings itself were still in a pretty good state. It took a lot of money (tax money) for constructing these buildings, and the government is just letting them rot. All you hear on the news today is that they don’t have enough space to house illegals, well I can tell you, they probably could give space to 500 people there without doing much extra costs.

The three pictures below have been created using HDR. It’s not really realistic, but I like the result.

We decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve somewhere, so we went looking for a cottage near the Ardennes. It was a real burden to do so as we found out all cottages in and near the Ardennes were fully booked. We looked further and eventually found something in Klotten, near Cochem in Germany. It’s called Ferienhaus Börsch. It’s a great cottage, room for six people and everything in place to cook wonderfully. We’ve made the Peter Goossens Event Menu, it turned out to be a lot of work but everything worked out pretty well, it was delicious.

I like the idea of spending New Year’s Eve on a different location. It allows us to get away from all stress stuff, and nobody needs to sacrifice his home and get all the load for preparing the food and serving dinner.
Here are some pictures shot in Klotten at the Mosel river.

First we took the plane from Brussels to Seattle, via Atlanta. We booked our flight with Delta Airlines in the end of January via Joker. We departed at 10.30AM (local time) and landed in Atlanta at 2.20PM (EST). From there on, we had a connection to Seattle departing at 4.50PM and arriving at 7.20PM (PST). Ine and kris,

two friends of ours, live in Vancouver and our initial motivation for going to the USA, was to visit them, as they lived for a year there and we miss them of course . We arranged they’d pick us up in Seattle and drive us to Vancouver, where we would spend the weekend. Afterward I realized we should make this visit a little bit longer, as we had to recover from  the Jet Lag. The weekend was over before we realized it. Sunday evening they dropped us off across the USA border in a small town called Bellingham.

From there on, we’ve rent a car and drove to the airport in Seattle (SEATAC). Our flight brings us to Salt Lake City.

What I remember of this first experience with Canada – and Vancouver BC more in particular, is how the lifestyle is very European. You’re not looked after when walking through the city, you can eat/buy most of the things available here, so adapting to it is not that hard as I thought in my opinion. It’s a very nice city, I realize now why Ine and Kris love this city and live here now.

The picture on the left show Tanja, Kris and Grizzly. I normally don’t have any affection with animals, but this one I liked immediatelly!

It was a very nice start of our vacation in the West and we’ll meet Ine and Kris again later .

Music.. First we had no idea what kind of picture would fit that theme. It needed to have something to do with Bruges, but not too obvious. We saw many contesters walking towards the conservatory or statues holding a music instrument. While wandering through the streets, we passed an afro hairdresser. We came suddenly to the idea of taking a picture of the hair cutter singing a song. Taking the picture was harder than it sounds, it turned out that the only thing she could express while singing, was opening her mouth. At the other hand, it needed to be naturally. It was very funny seeing the girls trying to sing their heart out, as you can see on the left picture.

Nena had the idea of taking a picture of a bird, so we searched for a pet market. Good thing we had a backup line we could call once and a while for help navigating through Bruges.  On a bird’s cage, there was a tag ‘Fijn zangertje’ (translated: nice singer). It was perfect! While Nena was taking the picture for our theme, I focused on the bird’s picture as seen on the right.
Finally, we also needed a picture that was somehow related to Bruges (we thought this would make our election more easier, but it turned out the jury didn’t mind after all..). Lacking a good zoom lens, we made a picture of a small replica of the Belfort of Bruges.

The second theme was ‘Rest’. This gave us back the hope we lost during the first theme, as this is somewhat easier. Per definition, every picture is a snapshot of a something, hence it’s in rest. So we went to the park and took two pictures of Nena sleeping on a bench. It needed to look a bit caught-in-the-scene while hiding. I think it were good pictures. Looking at the winning pictures, I think our pictures were better than the winning ones. It was a girl puking some food out of her mouth. Hard to see the ‘rest’ part in that picture..

The third and last theme was ‘Nostalgic’. It’s actually in your advantage for not knowing the city in which you have to take pictures. It forces you to walk around and open your eyes. Earlier that day, we came across a little store that sold old (1920-30) post cards. One of these pictures had the print ‘Une Pensée’. When we knew what the last theme was all about, we returned to the shop and Nena took a picture of it.

Some time ago, I went through some pictures a friend of mine took in Bruges. Suddenly I remembered she had taken a picture of a writing on a wall. The writing had everything to do with ‘Nostalgic’. It was located at the Katelijnepoort. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where it was, so we had to ask for directions to some people. We hiked about a half hour (which turned out to be a big detour..) to get there. The detour was worth it as in my opinion the resulted picture is great.

At the end of the day, the results of the jury’s selection were shown at the concert hall in Bruges. We were hoping for some price but unfortunately the jury thought otherwise. In my opinion, some of the elected pictures were much better than ours, but there were some (e.g. for the theme ‘Rest’) where I didn’t understand the motivation of the jury.

Our conclusion is to focus on compositions with figures and mis-en-scene. Lets see how it turns out next year..