No Matter What, Add Passion!

[UPDATE: HD is deactivated by default and there is no option to change that. So if you want to see it in HD, you have to activate yourself by hitting the HD-button inside the video.]

The Botanical Garden – Jardí Botànic – in Barcelona is located in Montjuc, the same area where the Olympic Games were hosted 1992. It is a huge garden with collections of Mediterranean plants from all over the world. I enjoyed a wonderful sunny day walking between those unknown plants… perfect motifs for shooting some photos. In the video a share my favorites, mostly macro photos.

Duration: 1:14 Min.
Format: 16:9
Resoultion: 720p
Codec: H.264

As some of you know, I moved to Barcelona (Spain) a few weeks ago. It was quite a challenge to find a room in a shared flat. If I hadn’t had some friends (thanks to Stephi!!!) who gave me some hints on where to search, I still wouldn’t know where to start. There is very little information for international people in the net on how to find a room / shared flat etc. in Spain, so i decided to share this information here:

So here’s my “best of list” and my experiences:

1. www.loquo.com

Big classifieds site with lots of ads. The site has an English translation, but not many English ads, knowing Spanish is very helpful. No special features, unstructured information.

2. www.nuroa.es (in Germany www.nuroa.de)

Meta-search engine. This search engine aggregates listings from many portals and makes them searchable in one place. It has an English translation and useful filters. Nice thing is that you can search for English keywords and nuroa will automatically translate them into Spanish. So if you search for “room” in “Barcelona” you get all listings containing the Spanish word for room: “habitación”.

3. www.idealista.com

Real estate portal with special section for shared flats. This section has a feature that matches your needs with the offering of the listings. The goal is to limit the results only to “relevant” listings. Nice feature!

4. www.fotocasa.es

Real estate portal with some listings for flat shares. English translation exists. Not so many ads in general for shared flats.

5. www.google.es

Like the “Eye of Sauron” Google sees just about everything… so if you prefer a plain, unstructured search with no special features at all, Google works, too. The danger is, however, that you might get a lot old listings as well.

Hope that this brief review helps everyone, that is looking for a shared flat or a room in Spain. As none of these sites work only for Barcelona, you should find good results in other big cities like Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia etc, too. Sure those websites also might be helpful in finding an apartment or even house to rent or buy, but I don’t have any experience with the buy / sell and rental markets.

See you in Barcelona :-)

As you may have noticed, the last few articels came online all very shortly. Well, thats because we are sitting right now in the SFO Airport waiting for the Check-In to open. Plenty of time to surf through the pictures and write some words for the blog :-). Local time is about 3 am, so 1 hour left ’till check in. Then just 3 more hours of waiting till boarding and then lift of…

Happy End :) We are coming back with a lot of great memories.

See You at home,
Caro & Ingo

Visiting Sequoia National Park wasn’t originally planned. Our last days of our trip were supposed to be a little bit more calm and relaxing. But the weather didn’t want us to enjoy the beaches of LA. Freezing cold and strong winds made our trip to LA really uncomfortable. Lucky we! So we came to see the largest trees in the world: the Giant Sequoias. The largest of these tree giants is “General Sherman” and he is so huge, you can fill a full bathtub every day into his trunk for over 27 Years untill he is finally full. “Giant Sequoias” are neither the tallest (Redwood Sequoia 115,5m high) nor the thickest (Árbol del Tule in Oaxaca, Mexico diameter of 11.62 m) trees, but in VOLUME they win.

Entrance to the Park: “The four Guardsmen”:

another Giant Sequoia:

Dead Sequoia: (Search for me in the picture *g*)

The largest Tree on Earth: “General Sherman”

Nearly forgot: As in most National Parks, there are wild animals around. Sequoia has lots of wildlife, but the most exciting animal to see there is one of the brown bears. And we saw two of them :) First a very young one and later the day a full grown bear:

Between Grand Canyon and LA there is a huuuge amount of “nothing”. Desert and barrens for hundrets of miles. Some dead ghost towns (supposed NOT to be ghost towns) on the way, where we planned to buy some gas… but other than closed, abandonned or broken gas stations we found no gas to buy. Driving through a dessert with at least 105ºF (41ºC), far away from civilisation (no mobile phone network) and not knowing how far you get with your remaining gas is… NOT GOOD! Luckily we arrived at Yoshua Tree National Park just in time, driving already 25 miles on reserve tank. Halleluja, there was was the first open and working gas station for the last 200 miles. (Once again: we began to look for a gas station over 200 miles before we went nearly empty).

Joshua Tree (a.k.a. “Wonderland of Rocks”) was a great National Park and perhaps the best campground we visited. And it would have been even better, if were rock climber. If you love rock-climbing this is the place to be :-) Sadly we neither had the skill nor the equipment to try this part. Nevertheless Zion had some unique rock formations and beautifull (desert-)vegetation.

Ingo in the “Wonderland of Rocks”

After the all the canyons in Death Valley, Zion and Antelope Canyon the Grand Canyon is the final canyon we visited. There was no plan to visit these places in this specific order but in the end, it could’nt have been better. The canyons were getting bigger and bigger and more and more special. But even after hiking all the other canyons up and down, it was still quite difficult to realise these unimaginable dimensions. It’s just tooooo big for our human senses to understand.

Sunset at Grand Canyon:

After Zion our next Stop should have been Grand Canyon. But moments before leaving, a friend recommend some nice places to visit on our way to Grand Canyon. So we took one day for some minor stop overs: Lake Powell, Colorado River (Horseshoe Bend & Lee’s Ferry), Antelope Canyon and the Vermilion Cliffs.

Colorado River at Horsehoe Bend:

“touching” Colorado River at Lees Ferry:

Antelope Canyon:

Zion was/is one of the most amazing places we visited till now. The combination of flora and fauna together with a deep canyon povides lots of things and places to explore. One hike we were especially enjoying was the Observation Point Trial. In 4 miles (6km) we made 2000 feet (610m) elevation and we were rewarded with breathtaking views into the canyon:

The narrow, steep and unpaved trial was sometimes a little bit scary. You shouldn’t have fear of heights because the trail runs up directly to the canyon wall. Looking down some hundrets of meters wasn’t uncommon:

Just before LV began to stress us, we picked up our stuff and left for our next destintion: Zion National Park. On the way we made two short stops at the Hoover Dam and the Valley of Fire.

Hoover Dam:

Hoover Dam Generators:

The Valley of Fire has its name because of these red glowing rocks: (absolutely no photo editing!!!)

 

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After nearly a weak of lonlyness and wilderness in Death Valley our journey brought us to Las Vegas. What an hard contrast!!! Loud, crowdy, blinking lights everywhere… Perhaps our experience of Las Vegas wouldn’t have been so intense, if we came here directly :-) Crazy town with crazy people and we in the middle of that. People come to this place to celebrate… so did we! For example the 30th birthday of Caro :-). Just look at her birthday-icecream:

Nearly every Hotel/Casino here would make a nice picture, but no reason to bore you :)
This Hotel is the “Excalibur”. Crazy, hu?

We are now at −282 feet (−85.5 metres). The “minus” means we are below sea level. This lake has not yet dried out completely. There are some small areas, where the water still beats the sun. And this fight is hell of unfair :-) Today the sun burned with 110°F (43°C) in the shadows, but what shadows? So if you find water, it is as the title says:  “Bad Water”! The salt concentration here is ultimate :)

The Devils Golf Course is on of many former lakes which dried out thousands of years ago. Now it is a deadly salty area as far as the eye can reach…

After our Trip to the Ubehebe Crater (the biggest hole we have ever seen) and Scotty’s Castle we arrived at our new host: the Furnace Creek Camping Ground. Furnace Creek lies 180 feet (54m) below see level and its raining nearly never there (for example periods of 20 Years and more without rain…). Allthough they have a lot of plants and also a nice golf course (deepest golf course on earth)… but don’t ask, where they take all the water to pour all that.

Staying and Walking on those dunes was very special. After our 4 miles hike through the desert, we were rewarded with the impressive sceneries of untouched dunes. The sand was hothothot, very fine and soft. After some difficulties to shot photos with sooo much glaring light, we are quite happy that some of them came out so nice:

as we were told, there is only a single small fresh water spring in the huge region of death valley. As this is like an oasis in the desert, we decided to discover the place as our first little quest here :)

some impressions:

and here two friends we made on the way up to the waterfall: