As many other Danes we like to visit the Greek islands and we have been doing so every summer for years. Even for our honeymoon. This year the Greeks are experiencing a drop in turism most likely because of the deadly riots in Athens and the bad publicity with the economic trouble in the country that threathens to bring down the European economy. This is a shame because the Greek islands are in my experience both calm, safe and beautiful. The last few years we have visited Crete, Samos, Zakynthos, Rhodes and ancient Olympia at the Greek mainland.

This year we decided to visit the Greeks in Cyprus – an independent country since 1960 but with strong ties to Greece. Their language is Greek and the population are 77% Greek. Our decision not to visit Greece has nothing to do with the problems the country is facing as we booked the vacation many months before the riots. If we had not already booked this vacation I think we would have visited Greece – the prices are low right now and we would like to help the Greeks in these difficult times. I can certainly recommend visiting the Greek islands – I love the food, the people and the ancient history.

The view from Platanias, Crete

Greek sailor (Yannis?), Samos

Mozaic from Rhodes

Jumbled column, Samos

Taking pictures is really Poul’s thing, but recently I discovered what seeing the world through a camera can do to your perspective. We visited my parents and I took a tour of the garden with our camera and even though I know nothing about shutter speed, image composition or getting the right lighting I think I got some really cool images.

My trick was to zoom in on details and especially the beautiful flowers and trees. Suddenly the garden was full of treasures just waiting to be discovered. Let me just include a few of my favorites. The last one was taken by Poul but I had to include the cute pixie that in reality is about 5 cm high and almost hidden at the edge of a flower bed.

“We like to travel!”

Let me just break that sentence down for you. “We” are a Danish married couple (Poul and Therese) – both geeks working in IT as software developers.

The word “like” is a bit of an understatement – we actually love to travel but “love” is an overused word which we try to avoid. Alternatively we could have written “We ♥ to travel” or “We ♥ travelling” but that is also much too cliché – so we settled for “like”.

And then we come to “travel”. By travelling we mean both vacation, business travel, adventure and just getting out of the country for any reason. Denmark is a very lovely country but 30+ years here is enough; we need to see something new. In 2009 we travelled 8 times between us – some for business but mostly recreationally. We started the year in the African continent, spent most of our days in the European continent, visited the North-American continent and ended the year in the Asian continent. Our plans for 2010 is to work hard and eventually save enough money to travel in Asia for 6 months to a year.

So yes, we like to travel!

This blog is our diary

We started this blog because we would like to have a channel of communication when we travel and also to have a place to rave about our geeky projects. Right now we are both working full-time while also doing our own projects in our free-time and trying to keep up with interesting trends in software development. Our background include 3 ScrumMaster Certifications between us, one academic education as a Computer Scientist and one education as a Computer Engineer and we have been working for IBM, “Den Blå Avis” (Ebay), Lego, Aarhus University, one local hospital and the JAOO IT-conference to name a few.

When we travel we tend to take a lot of photographs and we intend to share a lot of them with our blog readers. The photo in the blog header is also one from our travels – it is taken in Bangkok at Christmas time. The blue spots on the picture are Christmas decorations that hung in front of the view. Beautiful isn’t it?