Our summer vacation happened in a place we always had on our travel bucket list in Europe, and as the time was good to do so, we visited the capital of Catalunia known as Barcelona. Needless to say it’s one of the most famous places to visit in Europe during summer with impressive cultural footprint.

Bologna is a smaller city in Northern Italy and conveniently to reach from Cologne. The airport is about 30minutes away from the city and can be reached with the public bus (around 6 EUR one way) or by taxi (ca. 20 EUR). The airport is walkable and up-to-date and has all you need (cafes, seats) and its clean and safe. On departure day it was a bit crowded and seemed less organized, but thats because of the size.

Bologna is to be said famous for three traits that are la grassa (the fat), la rossa (the red), la dotta (the academic). We wanted to find out it this was so!

It hosts one of the oldest universities in Europe and therefore one of the thing Bologna is renown for is the Bologna Process which tried to standardize academic levels throughout the EU to facilitate academic mobility. It helped to boost some babies (de).

Well, we visited Bologna as we wanted to go to Venice and the decision between Verona or Bologna was because it seems to be convenient to reach and easy.
So we went there to taste la grassa, the ‘fatty’ that describes their long-digesting cuisine such as Ragu and other delicacies.

We started off having a small walking tour to the twin towers and the Neptune fountain.
Bologna is really easy to walk and not very large, so you can wlak in the city center and would only need a bus if you live a bit off like we did.

We encountered indoor food markets and streets, and from the main station to the square of the Basilica, you would get enough chances to stop by and have an espresso and foccacia or dolce.

The Pantokrator is the highest mountain on Corfu island. Until the last day, I felt intimidated to go up and have alook on the mountain but as I had enough time to stoll around and believed having a look at other place would not be worth it anymore, I just went up to the top - by car.

On Sunday (day three), I left for what I have not seen yet around Kerkyra and what would be hard to reach with public transport.

One of the main things I wanted to see was Mon Repos Park, a place that has been built by Englishmen and was used as art school, botanic academy, public building and residence.

I believe one day in Kerkyra would suffice most sightseeings and the real beauty of Corfu is in the nature you can enjoy. To see more of the island, it is highly recommended to get a rental care and explore the island.

Too bad I went out too late and missed my bus to the airport for pickung up my ca, the walk by foot was a good morning exercise as well!

Spring is coming and since my first trip to Greece was a fantastic experience, I decided to take a short weekend trip to Corfu this time.

Corfu is one of the Ionian Islands and up in the north of Greece. It inhabits 100,000 people and is a well-known travel destination in summer.
On clear days, you can see the coast of Albania which is about 40 minutes away with a ferry.

The second time I visited Bulguksa, nothing has changed much and this wonderful temple is still an interesting place to go when you are in Gyeongju. In fact, the whole facility looks a bit more neater than I remembered. In total, I believe the high numbers of visitors made it possible to invest in preserving the temple in a good shape.

It is 2019 and the question is: To blog or not to blog? Since I started in 2010, many new content platform have emerged and arrived the critical mass to not ignore it anymore. A question I am asking myself all the time as it takes time and Wordpress and the server behind is intensive to take care of. While exploring serverless architectures, I have been researching to putting up new contents without the need to have a full-fledged server run in the background and being able to distribute content.

Years ago when I said I do not believe in walled ecosystems, I still think so.

I finally came across hexo.io, a static site generator that would allow me to host this whole site in AWS S3 buckets using a site generator based on NodeJS and other technologies.

So this is my first post using hexo and completely written in Markdown.

My aim is to put up a serverless website hosted completely in the cloud. For that, I need to migrate posts and images to this format.

The Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival is one of the best things to see when you travel to Korea in Spring. It’s in Gyeongsamnam-do and about a 2 hour drive away from Gyeongju.

It was my first car drive in Korea actually, which I somehow managed to do. Jinhae is a port town and is renown for its cherry blossom trees, which were once seen as a relict from the Japanese occupation. Nowadays this resentment seems to have diminished and people who come to see the blooming of blossoms rather enjoy the scene than seeing it from a historical perspective. In the upper picture, you can see the Mugunghwa, which was parked at the railroads end and serves for the scenery. Many people pose before the train and take candid shots and the entering of the station is worth seeing.

** Hoi An**, an ancient port city which has been renown for its trading route between the Japanese, Chinese and the western world by at the Mekong delta. It’s marked as UNESCO world heritage site and inhabits cultural heritages which portray the way of living back in those times.