Scribblings about this site, new places I've been, plans for future travels and other such things.
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Finally, some new photos from a new country - the first new one this year, in fact. A week ago I returned from a trip to Iceland, and I'm getting there with the photos now. They're mostly of the countryside, and include some photos of an erupting volcano and geyser! Enjoy. :-)
Here's some photos from a few recent trips to nearby places. First up, the lovely Trenčin in the north of Slovakia. Second, the smaller but also very pleasant Hainburg, a town not far over the Slovak border with Austria.
I finally got around to uploading some photos I took this winter in Riga and Prague. Not the best photos ever, partly due to lack of time and weather (it snowed just about my whole time in Prague), but they're offer an idea of these places, anyway. Oh, and that takes us up to 33 countries now. :-)
The photos from my month-long trip to Japan and South Korea are now on the site. Check them out, and enjoy!
Also, I've done a few small site improvements, including switching to a different and slightly more user-friendly photo browsing thingy (and moving to JQuery along the way). I like the way it makes it obvious there are lots of photos to browse through, and I'm also rather happy it fixed the bug on the per-location pages. Also, the list of countries under the Browse now uses the space on the page better than just a boring bullet list.
I've finally finished getting all of my photos from Italy sorted and uploaded! What a stunning country. Well, Naples aside, which was just stunningly dirty. But hey, it was a good base to see Pompei and Vesuvius. Otherwise, I think the most beautiful city was Pisa, and my favorite outdoors-in-the-wild bit was the day I climbed the still-smoking volcano on the island of Vulcano. Enjoy!
I headed over to Trnava today after church, and enjoyed the churches (especially the insides of the Catholic one) and other nice architecture, as well as some people watching over a tasty lunch sat in the sun, all washed down with a couple of pints of nice Slovak beer.
While on a recent trip to Scandinavia for a bit of visiting and a conference, I managed to get a little photography in. I only spent a few moments in Helsingør, but managed to get a view of Kronborg Castle, the setting of Hamlet. My real destination for the day was Helsingborg, just over the sea. Helsingør and Helsingborg represent the closest points between Denmark and Sweden. The conference I was heading to was in Oslo, capital of Norway. I had already got some photos from there, but this time I checked out some different bits of the city (couldn't resist returning for another look around the fortress though). So, a nice little trip.
While I plan to keep the flat world map on the homepage for the foreseeable future, I've also added a version of my travel map based on Google Earth. You'll need to download the Google Earth plug-in to view it, which you should be prompted to do if you visit the page, if you don't already have it. It gives another way of viewing the places I've been, but since it is a 3D representation it doesn't have the size distortion issues that the flat map does (and thus Greenland and Africa - whose sizes are distorted by the flat map - can be seen to be rather different in size). Anyway, enjoy.
I recently got back from a trip to Belgium and Ukraine for a couple of conferences. I fitted in some vacation around it all, and saw a few interesting places. It was my first time in Belgium, so I was sure to check out the capital, Brussels. The conference I was in was in Leuven, which I found prettier overall.
I spent more time in Ukraine, enjoying a few overnight train journeys to get me from Odessa to Kiev (for the conference) to L'viv and then home again. Odessa was the first place I've been that lay on the Black Sea, though the architecture was much more of a highlight than that (since it's more about an industrial port that beaches). My favorite place of the whole trip had to be L'viv, however. Great architecture, a nice high place to climb to for a view of the city and the most incredible cemetery I think I've ever seen. Not to mention that it's cheap, and I had no trouble finding nice things to eat.
The photos are now uploaded, but I need to spend some time captioning them and I need to update the Ukraine page and fill out some more about Odessa and L'viv in their pages too. In the meantime, enjoy the photos.
I recently visited a few more places in the Czech Republic, and there was some decent weather for making some nice photographs. So check out the new images of Břeclav, Lednice and Valtice.
I just got back from my first visit to Bulgaria, where I went for a conference. Sofia itself has some pleasing sights - especially in the rare moments where the winter cloud lifted enough to get a view of the Vitosha mountain that rises majestically to the south of the city. But most impressionable were the views out of the city, as a Bulgarian friend drove me out to the Rila Monastery. I've not got to annotating the photos yet, but until I get round to that, just enjoy the views.
Today I took a trip to Brno, a city in the Czech Republic. It's the first place I've visited in the Czech Republic, despite having lived under an hour from the border for the last six months. Brno was an hour and a half away, and well worth it. The weather was as gorgeous as the city, which has some wonderful architecture - along the lines of Bratislava, Vienna and Budapest. The castle and the cathedral both lie on hills, and there were some great views over the city to be had at both of them. There was also a rather high density of churches.
Anyway, you can now enjoy the photos of Brno. Plus this takes me up to 25 countries I have photographs from - a cracking start to what I hope will be another great year of traveling.
I visited Devin on New Year's Day. Right on the border of Austria and Slovakia (OK, actually, just on the Slovak side), it hosts a castle with wonderful views of the Morava river flowing into the Danube. Today was especially beautiful, watching chunks of ice floating along the river. I've posted some photographs of it.
Also, I've uploaded some extra photos of Bratislava, including a few from the party to welcome the euro as the new currency of Slovakia. Enjoy!
Before I go out and enjoy the party welcoming the Euro currency to Slovakia along with the new year, probably getting rather cold in the process, I've done a few more things with travel.jnthn.net. One of them is adding this news section. Most posts will, I hope, be less boring than this one.
I plan to post here when I add new things to the site, along with some posts when I'm out there traveling. So this is the page to watch (RSS feed coming soon to help with that) if you want to follow the new photos and/or other content I put up here.
Anyway, here's to 2009, and I hope in that year some people other than those I've immediately shown this site to since I created it over the last month will find some enjoyment and use out of it.