Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
The island of Cuba offers different good drinks – and I don’t mean the local Bucanero beer or tuKola (which I both like). You’ll have to try the Daiquiri at its birthplace, the El Floridita. You can try pure rum at the Museo del Ron Havana Club in La Habana, Cuba. Or you choose the iconic Cuba libre; a longdrink made of cola and rum, served with lime. Continue reading “Cuba Libre”
Cuba is a paradise for lovers of old US-American cars. Everywhere you can see old Chryslers, Chevrolets and Fords cruise the country. If you call a taxi it might by a trip 60 years into the past. During the Cold War the US created a trade embargo in 1960 and the people kept and repaired their classic cars. Continue reading “Ride a Chevrolet”
Besides a lot of normal roads – sometimes in quite bad condition – there are also motorways on Cuba. Gasoline is very expensive for the local population and the people use busses and lorries for transport; in villages also horses and carriages. For tourists there is a special kind of gasoline available at the limited gasoline stations you should have on a map. Continue reading “Lonesome motorway”
I’ll never forget the Sierra del Escambray in Cuba. Because of the wonderful nature there and because I nearly killed my Peugot 206 rental car. I had to cross this mountainous region – more then once used as a hideout for guerilleros – to get to the city of Trinidad. Continue reading “The Sierra and the Peugeot”
Travelling to Cuba brings you the strange situation that within the country two currencies are circulating: CUP and CUC. The Cuban peso (CUP) is the actual currency of Cuba, divided into 100 Centavos. As it is a weak currency, the US dollar was used in addition on the island. Continue reading “One country, two currencies”
It was an easy decision: when one of my favorite scientific conferences decided to hold the annual meeting in a hotel at the shore of wonderful Lago di Como, I wrote and submitted a paper. Some days in advance I took a flight to Milano, Italy and went with a rental car to the south.
Continue reading “Firenze, Toscana, Pisa, Cinque Terre, Milano and Lago di Como”
I went to Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands to present a scientific poster about a project at a conference held in no-man’s-land. A good location to concentrate on science – a bad one for additional exploration tours. But in fact there was a bus route from Amsterdam to Den Haag crossing this place and I tried different stops. Continue reading “Where the tulips grow”
In 2011 I started a road trip with two friends to explore some art in the Ruhrgebiet – the section in the west of Germany formerly producing coal and steel; the one which was hit hard by the structural change of the industry and which therefore hat to change pretty much. Continue reading “Ruhrgebiet”
When I was a child we were travelling every year to the same flat in the same village: Dorf Tirol near Merano in Tirolo, Italy. At the end of my twenties my brother and I decided to return for a short visit. Therefore we took the train from München, Germany via Brennero to Bolzano, Italy and continued to Merano. Continue reading “From Alto Adige to Veneto”
