Hi all, We arrived and somehow a whole week already passed. Wow, how time flies! We started the week in a very outdoor mood. We hiked a few hours every day - carrying children on our backs - up and down hills, through valleys and forests. By the end of the week we crashed with a kind of tiredness that you can only feel by doing too much physical outdoor activity and sleeping away from your regular bed. Something akin to how you feel after a week of basic training in the army :) Also, similar to basic training is the fact that looking back at the experience, the stories can be told with increasing exaggeration for decades to come.... Before we get to the combat stories - first thing first - our trip preparations: Introducing ... read more

We don't usually enjoy traveling in large cities. If you read back on our travels we usually enter cities just to stock up on essential stuff as well as essential pleasure (you sometimes just HAVE to have a good meal and a latte) Some big cities are worthwhile to visit. Rome gets the taste-buds flowing, San-Francisco is pleasant, Hong-Kong combines the East and West, Jerusalem is truly the most beautiful city in the world, Berlin is so...well...German and Paris has that je-ne-sais-pas that makes it really romantic. I'm positive that living in these cities is an enjoyable experience that I would like to experience as well. However, visiting the touristic sites in these places makes me feel a little stupid by standing in the same place as 18 million other tourists that year taking a photo ... read more

Slartibartfast: "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, 'Hang the sense of it,' and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day." Arthur: "And are you?" Slartibartfast: "Ah, no. (laughs) Well, that's where it all falls down, of course." From: Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy There are no straight roads in Norway. They all go meandering around some fjord, twisting around a lake or powerfully zigzagging up a pass. The roads are almost never level. They keep bobbing up and down. At one moment you are at sea-level and a few minutes later you are at a snowy mountain. Enter a tunnel and ... read more

Superman’s closet One of the good things about one of my recent business trips to Munich was that I knew about it ½ a year in advance so I could coordinate with my friend Ohad to join me at the end of the week for a few days in Austria. Clothes indeed make the man. At the end of the last day of the trade-show, with all the visitors already leaving the grounds and Ohad already on the way in the car, I went into a small closet. I took off my suit and tie and put on a worn out T-shirt. I replaced my dress pants with old travel pants. I changed my black shoes for hiking boots. I washed of the gel in my hair to let it expand in all directions. I ... read more

"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it." - Rudyard Kipling 1st of Elul arrived (September 1st in the Turkish calendar ) and with it also the 1st of Ramadan and the Moslem world entered a different phase, the holy month of Ramazan (Ramadan in Turkish ) The Muslims are expected to follow the 5 ‘pillars’ of Islam, one of them is keeping the fast of Ramazan , if capable of doing so. When preparing for the trip, we saw that the ramazan will begin at the middle of the trip, but we did not know what to expect from the people and would it be difficult to get food Ramazan month has its own temperament than the rest of the year. We eat breakfasts at the hotels we stay in ... read more