The European Spring Vacation and the Autumn Japan Trip seem to have become annual fixtures for us. In a few hours, we will be boarding a flight to Tokyo, first staying (just like last time) two nights in our Shinkoiwa apartment building's guest room, then on to Tokyo Disneyland, and after that a hot spring resort in Kyoto prefecture (but not Kyoto itself).

We spent the last week of our European vacation in Switzerland (Bern - Chur - Lugano - Lucerne - Basel).

Schienenersatzverkehr

The ICE that was supposed to take us to Basel had to stop in Freiburg, because of a derailed freight train in Müllheim, but we could reach Basel and our connection to Bern with just two hours delay, using local trains and busses.

Schengen Area

Switzerland is part of the Schengen Area, so that there are no longer any passport checks at its borders.

Swiss Saver Pass

The Swiss Pass affords you unlimited travel throughout the rail, bus and boat Swiss Travel System network (including scenic trains), covers local trams and buses in 41 cities, a 50% reduction on most mountain-top trains and cable cars, and free entrance to over 400 museums.

Switzerdeutsch

At the national level, Switzerland has three official languages: German, French and Italian. Coming from mainland Germany, Cantonese German is difficult to understand.

Sunshine

We had great weather throughout the week.

Swiss Francs

Switzerland is an expensive place, especially with the Franc at an all-time high.

Shareware

In Bern, on the way from Einstein's apartment, via a public park with bears (who put on a great show, climbing up a tree to knock down a bee hive) to the zoo (motto: more space for fewer animals), we stumbled upon the offices of the creators of Cyberduck. They were out (it was Saturday), but I took pictures of their desks (the Cyberduck Hatchery).

Sausages

Supermarkets in Bern carry horse meat sausages. On the other hand, there is no deposit on bottles.

Spielplatz

There is a family car with a playground in the Interregio train from Zurich to Chur.

Scenic Train

The panorama cars of the Bernina Express take a four hour journey through across 196 bridges and through 55 tunnels that make up a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After a brief stop in Tirano (Italy), you can take a bus along Lake Como back to Lugano in Switzerland.

Savosa Youth Hostel

The Lugano-Savosa Youth Hostel is considered one of the most beautiful in Europe.

Swiss Miniature

The Swiss Miniature in Melide is the only miniature park in Switzerland. Eighteen model trains travel between the buildings on approximately 3.5 kilometres of tracks. There are also operating rack-railways, cable cars, suspension railways and ships (and a disproportionate number of yellow Lamborghinis).

Ships

With the Swiss Pass, you can also travel by boat, which we did on the lakes of Lugano and Lucerne. Some places, such as the Lugano Customs (as in "Border Control") museum, cannot be reached by other means.

Sports cars

Kai learned a few new brands that we never see in Shanghai, such as Triumph and Abarth.

Sweets

Invested the remaining few francs into chocolate at the Basel station.

We spent last weekend in the area around Mount Wuyi, a UNESCO Cultural and Natural World Heritage Site at the border of China's south-eastern Fujian and Jiangxi provinces. It can be conveniently reached by overnight train from Shanghai (8pm to 8am), and we had booked a two-day tour, so that there was a friendly local guide to take our group of ten around the area by mini bus. It was raining almost all the time during the first day (and sometimes really heavily, too), but the area is supposedly most beautiful with rain. It did make the longer hikes through the mountains impossible, though. According to the guide, there are three ways to enjoy the view from the top: Climbing up, paying someone to carry you up (in a way Kai chose that option, even though I did not get paid, but there were actually teams of two who would do that for about 200 RMB), or using your imagination. Fortunately, the weather greatly improved on the second day, so that we could enjoy a boat ride (six people and two drivers with sticks on a bamboo raft) down the river.

All three of us are leaving for a one-week trip to Taiwan today. Cissy has always wanted to go there, which is no easy thing to do for Chinese passport holders, given the difficult relationship between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. You also cannot change RMB to Taiwan dollars in either country, so we have to bring Euro, Yen, and US dollars as intermediates for a three-way exchange.

Tomorrow morning, the three of us are leaving for a week-long trip to Japan. We will first spend three days in Tokyo, staying at the guest room of our old apartment (which is, in fact, still our apartment, it is just that someone else is living there now), then travel to a hot spring hotel in Gunma prefecture (land-locked, so the traditional Japanese-style dinner is hopefully not as strongly based on sea food as usual) for two nights, and finally visit (and stay at) a friend's house in Funabashi.

For the first time in a long time I will not be taking my laptop computer along. Not that I had intended to (or would have been able to) get any work done during the vacation, but a year ago I would have brought the laptop in order to check email and get my daily fix of news. Today I do these things mostly on my iPod, so that all that goes into my backpack from the computer department will be this wonderful little device (along with its charger, of course, and just in case, also an AirPort Express and an ethernet cable).

We went to visit the Friedberg castle gardens, which have been recently reopened to the public after undergoing extensive reconstruction. The city is rightly proud of the result, and there are guided tours to be had about the history of the building and garden. Unfortunately, storm Xynthia has torn off the top of the castle's landmark tower in February, somewhat spoiling the view. The castle garden currently also hosts an exhibition of photographs about the visit of Tsar Alexander II and his family, who stayed at the castle for three months in 1910.

The last Russian Tsar Nicolas II met his future wife Alix, Princess of Hesse and by Rhine, when he was sixteen and she was twelve and the couple got married ten years later, even though both families had originally had other plans for them. They first had four daughters before Tsarevich Alexei was born. Unfortunately, Alix carried the curse of the European Royal Houses, hemophilia, into the family, a condition that was generally fatal at the time. The constant worries over her son's health led not only to desperate measures, such as the introduction of the mystic Rasputin to the St.Petersburg court, but also to a poor health of her own, which to improve the family decided to spend a summer at the spa resort of Bad Nauheim. Proper accommodation was found in Alix's brother's (Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig) summer residence, the castle in neighboring Friedberg (this sort of arrangement seems to be a tradition with the two towns; when Elvis Presley was stationed in Friedberg he took up residence at a hotel in Bad Nauheim).

The period of European history from about 1850 up to the First World War was either not covered in my history classes at school, or I completely forgot about it. But since Cissy is extremely interested in this era (especially as it concerns the various royal families), I am catching up with it now. This is a lot of fun, because these events occurred not all that long ago, and sometimes geographically just around the corner. Many of the protagonists are just one generation removed from celebrities that are still with us, there is a lot of authentic material such as photos, letters, and newspaper articles, people spoke languages still being used today, and they already used trains, cars, planes, and electricity back then, so that their lifestyle is also closer to us than that of, say, a Roman general.

The photo exhibition in the castle garden includes many pictures of the three boys; Tsarevich Alexei, and the Grand Duke's sons Georg and Ludwig. This is somewhat tragic, as both of their families would meet disaster during the following years. Alexei and his whole family (including his sister Anastasia) were murdered by the Bolshevik revolution in 1918 (which led to the Russian Orthodox Church declaring them saints in 2000). And shortly after the Grand Duke's death in 1937, a plane carrying Georg and almost the whole family to Ludwig's wedding in London crashed in Belgium, killing everyone on board. Ludwig's marriage would remain childless.

The night before the wedding, guests gather at the bride's house for hand painting. Women and girls get their palms and fingers covered in intrigate henna patterns, some only on one hand, some on both, some (such as a reluctant Priya) up to their elbows. It takes two hours to dry, so the men have to feed their wives and daughters. I received a little flower (I think) on the back of my left hand as well, and I got to eat cashew nut paste plated with silver.

I am spending Christmas this year in Pune, India. Priya and Martin have invited me (and four hundred other people) to attend their wedding reception here on Sunday. Again, Kai and Cissy are staying back in Singapore.

Pune does have an international airport, but the only two flights are to and from Dubai, and some exclusive business class plane to and from Frankfurt, so that I went to Mumbai first, which is about 170 km away. From Mumbai I took a very short connecting flight, which in hindsight was a mistake, because I spent a lot of time waiting at the airport, both scheduled transfer time and unscheduled flight delay. Bored in Bombay. It would have been much more interesting (and presumably faster and cheaper) to take a train.

Pune is in an interesting time-zone, GMT+5:30. I have never before been to a place where I had to adjust not just the hours, but also the minutes.

As with Jakarta, I have so far only seen more of the airport than I needed to, some scary traffic conditions on the road from there, and the hotel room, which is quite a bit better than the one in Jakarta (most likely because I did not book it myself), except that the Internet is not free and the registration for it via mobile phone (necessary to foil the schemes of terrorists and child pornographers) did not work due to some technical problem, please try again later.

But I also had an excellent dinner with Priya's father and uncle, who came to the airport to pick me up. Delicious South Indian food whose name I immediately forgot, at my request not spicy at all, with naan and lassi.

I arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia late last night. I am here to attend Audi's wedding dinner today (and hopefully retrieve the pictures Audi took with his intriguing action-cam at our own wedding in Shanghai six years ago) and will be staying until Monday. Kai is still a bit young to travel, so unfortunately he and Cissy did not come along.

Jakarta is just an eighty minute flight away from Singapore, which is about the time it takes to go the airport on either end. The weather (at least at the moment) is very similar, hot, humid, and when it rains, it rains. It is in a different time-zone, though, Jakarta is one hour behind, which meant that I got quite early today.

My first impressions on the taxi ride from the airport were similarities first to Shanghai (with its clusters of walled, castle-like residential towers) but then more to Bangkok, especially when looking at the traffic, which is dominated by motor-cycles and tuk-tuk.

The hotel I am staying in could really do with some remodeling, but the staff is very friendly and helpful, and there is free Internet in the lobby.

I carry several millions in cash here, but that is not as impressive (or risky) as it sounds, as the Indonesian currency sports a lot of trailing zeros, probably the result of inflation. I spent 800.000 for the hotel, 200.000 for the taxi ride there, and so on.

The advantage of being back in the GSM world is that you can very easily and cheaply get a local pre-paid SIM card. If you want to text or call me during these three days, I have +62 81 388 694 851.

For the first time since moving to Japan I am spending Christmas at home this year (the last time that came close was the January trip to Vienna in 2004). This is also Kai's first time to meet his great-grandmother, grand-uncle, and uncle (his grandparents and aunt have already visited him in Tokyo). He did not sleep much on the twelve-hour flight, but he did not cry the whole time either, so all in all that went well. He was very popular with the cabin crew and fellow passengers, and the flight was almost empty, so that we had plenty of room, too.

We'll be in Germany until January, 4th.

I have just returned from an extended weekend trip to Shanghai to visit Cissy and Kai.

On the flight there, for the first time ever, I exchanged words with my fellow passengers: I was sitting between a Finnish former Ryanair flight attendant (then based in the euphemistically named Frankfurt-Hahn airport) , and an Israeli manufacturing equipment salesman (who travelled with a box of cutting instruments). Both of them knew a quite a bit about airplanes, and about operating the emergency exit, which is what we were seated directly in front of. The Israeli, a frequent flyer, even had had to go out through it and across the wing once. Fortunately nothing of the sort happened, even though it was a bumpy ride, to the extent that food service was delayed, but not to the extent of it actually having to be cancelled.

On the flight back, I finally got a chance to ride the Shanghai Transrapid, pride of German engineering and too expensive for Germany itself to build, from Shanghai to Pudong International Airport. This magnetic levitation train takes just ten minutes for the thirty kilometres. Wikipedia claims the operating speed to be 430 kmh, but it was only going 300 today.

Northwest Airlines, which had over the weekend agreed to merge with Delta and changed their on-board entertainment program accordingly, decided to place me at the emergency exits again, which is fine as it provides for extra leg room and you can look at the flight attendants also sitting there. No conversations this time, except to apologise for the back of my seat refusing to stay upright and instead gradually reclining at the expense of the people in the next row , but I got a good book from the airport bookstore (Neil Gaiman: American Gods, more on that later).

About a year ago, Japan started fingerprinting and photographing all foreigners on entrance, and today was their first chance to get at my biometrics. I, of course, oppose the procedure on principal grounds, but there was nothing to be done about it (short of subjecting to deportation). Maybe a Christmas donation to Amnesty International. Interestingly enough, foreign residents in Japan used to be fingerprinted as part of their alien registration until 2000, when the practice was dropped because of a public outcry over invasion of privacy. This time around, all visitors (not only residents) are affected, the data is stored for 70 years and will be shared upon request with other agencies in Japan and abroad. I suppose this is only a stop-gap that was easy to implement because foreigners do not have much of a lobby, and the idea is to extend to program to eventually include Japanese citizens as well. Did I mention that German passports now include finger-prints?

05/31 Narita -> Charles de Gaulle -> Frankfurt -> Friedberg
06/02 Friedberg -> Dortmund
06/03 Dortmund -> Friedberg
06/05 Friedberg -> Frankfurt -> Charles de Gaulle -> Tours
06/06 Tours -> Paris
06/09 Paris -> Versailles
06/11 Versailles -> Charles de Gaulle -> Narita

We are leaving today for a week in Okinawa, where the temperature is above 20 degrees even now. Hopefully we can spot the Iriomote Wild Cat. Do not expect me to reply (or even see) any emails there.

PS: I have my sun glasses, but the elusive Friedberg jacket is missing again.

Weekend business trip to Fukuoka. A two day support session in the customer's data centre, the security measures of which would merit a blog entry of their own, but part of them is that they cannot be disclosed.

All the regular hotels are fully booked, thanks to a Glay concert, so the three of us have to a share one room, the good news being that it is a room at the luxurious JAL Resort Sea Hawk Hotel. Ironically is located right in front of the Yahoo (sic!) Dome, where the concert takes place. If they opened the stadium roof, we could even sneak a peek-a-boo (23rd floor, view of the beach, too).

The room price includes coupons for free entry to the nearby Asian Healing Spa Puna Ola. A five minute walk is kind of inconvenient, but on the other hand the place is positively big and at 1:30 in the morning practically empty.

09:24

Ebisu. Sitting at my desk in office. I realize that I am in real danger of missing my 10:30 flight.

10:12

The train pulls into Haneda Airport.

10:14

The self-service check-in machine refuses to issue a boarding pass. It can only do so until twenty minutes before departure.

10:16

I receive a boarding pass at the ANA counter. They tell me that there is no need for me to hurry. I keep on running anyway.

10:18

The security check is very smooth, a welcome change from how things went on our US trip, where we were selected for the supposedly random special screening process on every single leg of all our flights.

10:20

Arrive at the gate for boarding, which should have started right then. However, the plane is a little late itself.

10:30

Boarding starts.

10:35

I am in my seat.

The three most interesting items in the duty free catalog:

• A very cool, but totally over-priced Godzilla-vs-Mothra Hawaiian shirt.
• A special Lego set with an ANA plane complete with crew and passengers.
• Official FIFA World Cup T-shirts that spell Laipzig with an a.

We are just about to leave for a two-weeks/three-weekend trip (thus amazingly/unfashionably long by Japanese standards) to the home of the brave. Previous experience clearly leads me to believe that I will not be blogging about it as much as I should during the trip (the lack of a laptop this time makes this even less likely) nor after it. So instead I'll just briefly summarise the schedule in advance.

We are leaving Tokyo today at 18:00 and arrive in San Francisco at 11:07, a fact that Google Calendar seems to have trouble visualising appropriately, even though I registered these events with their respective time zones. We will be staying with Ashley and Maciej, who will also take us on camping trips to Yosemite for Saturday and Sunday (most likely in the rain), and to Big Sur the following weekend. The week in-between is reserved for sight-seeing in San Francisco, with a fancy cabaret/dinner show on Thursday. We will leave the Bay Area on Monday (May, 1st) for two nights in Las Vegas, including the world's biggest buffet and a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon. On Wednesday off to our final stop, New York City, where Lu and Martin kindly agreed to take us in and will join us for the musical Chicago on Thursday. Monday, 8th, back to Tokyo, arriving there Tuesday afternoon.

Kitty will be staying with Faiz in nearby Kameido. All involved parties are intrigued how that will play out.

And now I really have to go find my sunglasses....

Terracotta Warriors. Audacious taxi drivers. Cold weather. Daytime fog. Bell and Drum Towers. Riding bicycles on the city wall. My niece (!) Susan (studies music composition and plays the violin). Chinese food that I actually like.