Where the Geek is when she's not blogging (in Egypt or on a Eurotrip)

Hi there. Yeah, I know it's been a long time, my apologies. Thing is, I've been alternately getting sick and travelling - I am now in a sick phase, hopefully the last one in a while. Since my sicknesses are not half as interesting as my travels, let me tell you about those.

The first one was a total Eurotrip. The deal was that a friend of Marcin is currently working at Cern and he invited us to stay with him for what turned out to be an entire week. We took him with us on one way plus his brother both ways. That trip included:

• me crashing a Linux event in a Microsoft t-shirt (guys were staying, but hell knows if it was the t-shirt or the gender)
• a night and a morning in Prague
• visiting Bayreuth (but unfortunately not Bayreuth Festival Theatre because it had shorter opening hours than the student's office at my school)
• me meeting some friends I hadn't seen in at least 12 years (my, have they grown!)
• hanging at the Cern, especially at lunch time (which felt like being in a BBT episode, except they were many many more geeks - epic!)
• hanging at an English pub and playing some trivia games (there was a Star Trek category!)
• living maybe 50 meters from my middle school (ah, memories!)
• me visiting the place I grew up in, which is the most beautiful place in the world to me
• all of us visiting Geneva and Annecy
• the guys going to Milan to grab a pizza after climbing on the Matterhorn
• shopping
• drinking french wine
• losing a debit card and finding it soon after
  
• crossing the french/swiss border at least four times a day
• getting a flat tyre on the german highway.

All in all, that's more adventures than in Eurotrip. (Afterwards, I got scolded by my boss for taking all that overtime without asking him.) We're looking forward to organizing a similar trip next year.

Then I spent 3 days at home. These included working full time plus going to school on the evening (these were the first classes of the semester, so I didn't want to miss them). Consequently, cooking became microwaving and "taking everything out of the bags and dropping it on the floor" was the new unpacking.

Soon, we hit the road again, this time to a "real" summer vacation in the middle of October: we spent two weeks in Egypt. That trip included way less that the previous one:

• bathing
• sunbathing
• a bit of sightseeing.

That holiday did us both lots of good and we enjoyed every minute of it.

Okay, now, for the pictures: I'm still trying to get the ones that weren't taken with my camera, so below are a few of my own, featuring absolutely no one.

That's the nice place where I grew up:


That's the previously mentioned middle school:


And here is a little piece of Egypt (Deir el-Bahari):



Now, I'm back to the life I love! I recently came across a quote by Seth Godin:

"Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from."

I definitely don't feel the need to escape from my life, but a vacation now and again is a great way to spend more time with loved ones and friends, get a fresh perspective on everything, load your batteries, etc. etc.