I’ve started working at JSI a long time ago, even before I went to Sweden. Last year was the first time I got a chance to go on a short business trip to Luxembourg for the project I’m working on.
I flew from Venice to Amsterdam and had about 7 hours till the next flight which gave me a chance to visit Amsterdam again.
That’s a lot of cheese
Netherlands’ wooden shoes.
Main train station in Amsterdam
Tulips
Water canals in Amsterdam
How is this thing still standing?
After that I had the shortest flight of my life – just about 45min from Amsterdam to Luxembourg. We literary just ascended to the flight height and then descended for landing.
My hotel was located near the old city center, it was a nice old stylish hotel with very nice staff. It was late evening when I arrived so I had a chance for a quick walk and to prepare for the next day where I had to present something at the expo center.
Old mill in Luxembourg.Our corner at the expo
I had the conference for 3 days. It was nice meeting people I’ve only known before through e-mails and skype calls. The other nice thing about the conference were the coffee breaks which were essentially my lunch and dinner during my stay, eating in the restaurants was so expensive, you could easily spent over 30€ for something that would be less than 8€ in Slovenia.
I usually had work from 9 to 5 so I had a lot of time to explore the city.
You really can’t see a boring building in the city, all look old and rich.
City streets
Luxembourg
Below the old town
Bridge to old town
Park with Wi-Fi, my favourite place. 🙂
Villas around the city
Statues on the church in the center
Where I had the conference.
Villas in the city
Old mill again
City streets in night
Luxembourg
After the conference finished I had an extra day to get back home so I used it to see the town a bit more and then slowly took my way toward the airport in the evening. This was my second time visiting Luxembourg, first time spending multiple days in it. It’s a very nice city and worth the visit. Especially the old town has a special charm to it.
So in order for Biba to have a friend we decided that we should get another ferret, male this time… and so it became Bibon.
Bibon
We got him when he was 3 months old, so he is about 1 year younger than Biba. For some reason Biba was afraid of him at first, but after few days they became great friends.
Young Bibon
Young Bibon
Bibon and Biba
Bibon and Biba playing.
Bibon hiding
Biba looking for Bibon
When we got him he had around 400g and was half the size of Biba, but somehow he grew like a mashroom after rain. In less than a month he was already twice the size of Biba.
Bibon and Biba sleeping
Bibon and Biba sleeping
Bibon 2 the size of Biba
On alert
He is quite the opposite of Biba. He likes to cuddle, sleeps less but when he sleeps it’s impossible to wake him up, he likes to play more and there is no greater thrill than to do something that he is not allowed to.
Near the end of the year (2015) we randomly found out a return plain ticket from Venice to Valencia, Spain cost only 45€, of course we had to buy it, it was almost cheaper than bus ticket from Nova Gorica to Ljubljana.
Soon after, on the 20th December, we were on the plane flying toward Spain. We landed in the evening and took metro to the city center where we had hotel. Next day we had reservation in a nearby restaurant for paella.
Underground from airport to the city center.
Early in the morning (at least early for Spain) we woke up and went for a walk through the old city center. The city is old but fairly clean, there were a lot of people but not too much, since it was out of season. Despite being December it was quite warm, almost 20 degrees during the day in the sun. City was full of trees, not just any trees, the trees were full of mandarins. After trying one we soon learned why no-one ate them – they were sour as lemons.
Mandarins in December through the city of Valencia.
Mandarins in the street
Trying mandarins from the street. They were sour as lemons.
In the city center there was the largest closed market in Europe (if I remember correctly). They were selling all sorts of fruits, vegetables, meat and fishes. The biggest surprise was strawberries. They had really big and juicy strawberries for less than a quarter price of the ones in Slovenia. After buying 1kg of them we learned they were also much better than the ones we get here in Slovenia (during the late spring/early summer – we have no strawberries in December), they were very sweet as oppose to the ones we get in Slovenia which are watery almost without the taste. After enquiring a bit we were told that the season for greenhouse strawberries has just begun.
Spanish prosciutto, not as good as Slovenian of course.
Strawberries in December.
Buying some fruit
They were sold for around 2.5€ per kg.
Zefran, one of the most expensive spices.
If I remember correctly this is the largest dome over the market or something.
Fishes on the Valencia’s market.
In the afternoon we had a chance to try paella at last. It was so good, almost worth the whole trip just to try it.
Paella in Valencia.Paella in Valencia.
After the lunch we had a chance to explore the city some more.
Valencia
Valencia city center.
Valencia
Church in Valencia
Some colourful buildings.
The thing in the middle is separate building. Its about 1m wide.
The narrowest building in Europe.
City center
The next day we had a chance to visit the famous beach in Valencia. It looked so nice, very very large full of sand, you almost wanted to go for a quick swim in the sea. We had a nice lunch at the beach-side – again paella of course, with some snagrias to have full Spanish meal.
Valencia’s beach.
Palm trees at the beach
Paths alongside beach
What could this mean?
Almost empty streets during the summer
After the lunch we went to the other side to visit City of arts and sciences.
Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències
It was really interesting inside. They had tons of experiments that you could try everything from space and stars to animals. We also saw a 360 degree movie about Jerusalem, it was quite a fun experience.
Preparing to see the movie. The thing I have around my head are headphones. The movie was dubbed to different languages.
After we finished with everything it was already night and time to go to sleep. Next day we had something really special planned.
L’Hemisfèric
The next day we had “How to make a paella” cooking course. It lasted for about 5 hours and we did everything. In the beginning we went to local market (from previous days) to buy the ingredients. We also bought few grams of zafran alongside with snails, rabbit, chicken and other ingredients. After it we went to the restaurant where me Veronika and another two couples from USA were instructed how to do everything from cleaning to cooking ingredients.
Cooking paella
In the end we tried our creations and while it was ok, I think I will stick to going to the restaurants there, theirs is better. 😛
Paella course
When the water evaporates it is done.
Paella cooking course.
Time to try it.
After the course we went to visit the bullfighting arena near our hotel. It was closed few years ago and turned into a museum.
Bull fighting arena
Veronika in the middle of arena
It is quite large.
Arena from the outside
This was our last day in Valencia, but we couldn’t leave without trying one more thing: The black turtle burgers. We read online that it’s a must try after paella and spoiler alert, it was really worth it. Note: you really need a reservation before though, it is packed full all the time.
Veronika enjoining her burger, while I did a fatal mistake and took a burger with pancakes instead of bread buns. 🙁
The interesting part is that the fries are even better than the burgers. They are dipped in the cheese and spices sauce.
The black turtle french fries.
After big dinner we went to hotel and took the bus next day back to Slovenia. It was a fun trip and we will definitely go again if we find another cheap flight. It’s a good trip for a few days and if you go outside of summer season it is fairly cheap.
After thinking for a long time and about 2 months of time to implement it I have finally migrated my blog to the new format.
I have created the old blog to learn about web technologies and to be able to customise it to my liking without bounds, the weather information (that stores a lot more information that is actually visible and is automatically pulled from weather services when I submit a post) is a feature I’m most proud of. Well the other reason was that I was going to Sweden as Erasmus exchange student and wanted to save some excerpts from my life in order to read them later, if anyone else was interesting in reading it was beside the point, but as it happens few people did read it. After coming back from Sweden there were fewer moments worth writing about and I happened to have less and less time to write about and oh it was time consuming to write on the old blog. On average it took me 3-4 hours to write average sized post, because I was a bit lazy in implementing backed because no-one but me saw it.
Fast forward few years, I have even less time and somehow am lucky enough to be able to travel quite a lot with my job. I still want to write from time to time and share some photos from the trips. In order to still be able to do so I had to move to new blog which is build on wordpress framework and offers me much more support in blog management site. I still had to heavily modify some aspects of it in order to keep the old blog post format (with weather and comments) but now I’m finally done.
I have changed the look to a bit darker one which looks better for photos, I think, and transferred all the content from the old blog to this one. I know there are some problems with styling of photos in certain posts but if you see any mistake or have an suggestion please do not hesitate to contact me via comment or e-mail.
It should also be possible to subscribe to newsletter when new post is posted, so you get notification over the email.
Let this be it for now and hopefully I’ll start to cover some old content from previous years that I think should be on here.
Woah I can’t believe it has been more than a year since I last wrote something up here. The 2016 was my busiest year by far, I have travelled more than any year before, even the year when I was in Luleå and most exciting, we have moved with Veronika into our first apartment, which we are renovating for the last 6 month and will continue to do so for a few more months. And lastly, most incredibly, we have started to develop our game more intensely, got it to the stage of being almost feature complete and submitted it to Bitsummit conference in Japan, where if we are accepted Sebastian and Vito will present our work to thousands of visitors.
Jean and Maggie visit Slovenia. Here we went for a boat ride in Bled.
So in short what happened last year, that I want to write about?
Trip to Valencia
Trip to Luxembourg
Jean comes to Slovenia!
New York, USA
Appartement
Trip to Greece
Trip to Vienna
Hopefully in the next few months when my schedule clears I will be able to write everything I have envisioned. Even though a lot of time has passed since the events, thankfully I have tons of photos which will help me relive and remember the most fun and interesting moments of past year.
Oh yea, talking about photos, I have finally upgraded my camera, so here is a short teaser of what is to come:
My favourite photo from last year: Central Park, New York
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