In 2001 and 2002 I had spent about eleven months in Saint Petersburg. I had just finished school and had to fulfil an obligation to the German government. Military service was still obligatory but you could avoid running around with guns by doing social work and you were allowed to do that in another country. I worked in the children’s hospital No.15 and played with the children. I also took care of Vova, a physically impaired boy of 13 years. That were my tasks. […]
Creating this website forces me to take a look back into my own travelling history. And here we are, in 2002, right at the beginning of my first longer trip, and the first time of really travelling outside of Europe. With my parents we went on holidays, every year, two weeks, usually with Christian groups and usually somewhere south where the sea was warm. Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia. Only once we got out of Europe, to Israel (and Egypt’s Sinai), the Holy Land, how fitting for a Christian family. My first time on an airplane. As a teenager, I would take tours with my friends, often on a bike, the first going to Lake Constance (about 160km). Later we discovered the BDP, a youth organization that offers trips around Europe. Sweden, Corsica, Slovenia. I wasn’t dreaming about anything further away. But in my last year in school something changed, […]