Auf dem Foto sieht man übrigens das Byron Bay Lighthouse. Schöne Ecke.

Wenn ich mir das grade nochmal zu Gemüte führe, denke ich, dass man Sylvester am Besten entspannt in kleiner Runde bei Temperaturen um 35 Grad feiern sollte.

Auf jeden Fall (was ich eigentlich sagen wollte), kann man seine persönliche Bilder-Adresse bei Flickr anpassen, wusst ich noch gar nicht. Habs doch gleich mal gemacht: Pixelkönig!

Sobald wieder Zeit zur Verfügung steht, werde ich alle meine 2 Millionen Bilder hochladen. Dafür gibts auf dem Mac (wahrscheinlich genauso wie beim PC) de n praktischen Flickr Uploader…. Kann man Flickr eine Langzeitarchivierung anvertrauen? Oder sollte ich die (neben Kopien auf DVD) trotzdem noch auf meiner Platte lassen?

Ein paar meiner Fotos (momentan nur welche aus Australien) gibts hier.

I hope I’ll be back someday…. but for now, we are on the way to the Whitsundays and Fraser.
So: see you later.

We went whalewatching the other day, I think it was a sunny, sometimes rainy day in August. Mark knows some guy with a boat who does those trips commercially, so everybody paid 50 bucks and off we went.

It is basically a little tip on the pacific, trying to see some big fish, hehe. This description does not really sound as amazing as it actually was in the end, but I added some pictures and this litte video to convey some of the excitement we experienced out there.

I think, just being on the pacific with a little boat is cool enough, but seeing whales is just something “from another world”…. totally amazing. But: check out the pics in the galleries to see for yourself.
The little baby whale on the video is only about 2 weeks old (according to Lee, the captain), but I found it scary enough to have that “monster” diving under our boat, seeing the size (and probable strength) of that little boy. Overall, it was a great day out and everybody enjoyed it big time.

Kai arrived in Sydney!
To meet him after more than a year and to say good bye to that great city, we decided to take advantage of the sweet offers Virgin Blue have on their website, and to fly down instead of sitting in the bus for over 12 hours again…. Sydney is still great, and meeting Kai was really sweet as well. We behaved like proper tourists:

Kai brought my new digi handycam to Australia and we walked around the city for days, filming and photographing everything. We went to the fishmarkets, paddy’s, to the Oxford street for the last time, went out for dinner and met up with all the friends we made. Was nice, until we left. Leaving Sydney felt strange, not having sydney “around the corner” (as 800 kilometres in down under are “around the corner”) even more. I added some pictures of that trip to the galleries as well.

Another exciting adventure I presented myself with was a nice little adrenalin kick:
I jumped out of a smoothly running plane at 14.000 feet.

Falling down is much faster than waiting to get up to that height, we (the tandem “instructor” and me) needed 70 seconds for 10.000 feet. The rest, as it appeared to me, was slooooow. Funny, because my skydive partner told me we were still descending at 2 meters per second…. I thought we were just sitting in the air, not moving much. However, jumping out scared the shit out of me (One could tell by looking in my face just before jumping), and actually, I thought I would be dying (die-ing?) of an heart attack jumping out there.
I needed some seconds to realize what’s happening to me in that moment, but after that, it is just a hell of a rush, and I am not able to describe it really. Everybody should do it, and I bet I will do it again some time. Check out some pictures in the galleries or the video to the right (you need quicktime).

However, we are going back to Germany soon.

Probably leaving on the 24th, we are trying to enjoy the last weeks as much as possible, especially as it is getting hotter and hotter everyday (the summer comes back!).

I am certainly looking forward to going back and seeing you all, but it will most definetly be quite difficult to adopt to the crap german weather and the cold environment again, after more almost 1.5 years of beautiful beaches, beautiful nature and an amamzing sun 7 days a week….

See you soon, anyway!

Hugs,
Lasse

Finally, after weeks of waiting, some fresh news from Byron!

Julia has been back for some days now – and for celebration purposes, we had a nice, massive, fresh and sweet cocktailparty. I have uploaded loads of pictures in the galleries, check some out to see what cocktails do to your brain, and to see our nice cocktail dresses!

Besides celebrating Julia’s return and handing in the last assignments, the summer is coming back again. I went swimming once (ok – at least for a minute), we saw dolphins, and you can start to wear FlipFlops again.

Yippie – I’ve started to hate regular shoes.

Anyway, on the 24th of September, our final, big research projects are due. That means, 12.000 words of academic blabla have to be handed in and the stress of the last weeks (or even months) will be over! If you haven’t participated yet, go to my new website and participate in the nice survey.

That’s all for now. Seems that nobody visits this page anyway! Leave comments, write letters!

And sorry to all of you whose emails have yet been unanswered….. as I said: Working all day, and during breaks, we are at the beach…

Got up at 5.30, my room was freezing! But nevertheless, it was well worth it! Besides the sunrise itself, we saw some dolphins swimming and jumping at Wategoes – I think soon there will be whales as well. I’ll keep you informed.

You can check out how the actual sunrise looked in the following quicktime:

You can zoom in and out with the shift and the control (ctrl / strg) key, and save it with a right click (in case you want it).

We decided to go to Wategoes the next time, and take some more pictures! I am sure the other
beaches will be visited afterwards as well…

Anyway, all the best,
Lasse

Anyway, we chose the brand eins as our theoretical client, and I think it went really well actually – now we are waiting for the grades (we’ll probably be waiting for another six weeks or so).

On wednesday – after having held the presentation – we rewarded ourselves with the nice Thai Lucy restaurant and some wine. After dinner, we went to Ulli’s place to watch some movies (apparently they were having a party, but it ended up as some police academy action).

However, I found myself totally drunk talking to Ulli until 5 o’clock and slept almost the whole next day. Niiice. The sunset woke me up at 4 pm.

Can’t remember what I did on Thursday.

On friday all the other groups who hadn’t held their presentation showed what they had done, and afterwards there was – apparently – another big party at Eddie’s place, but at the time I went there (10 pm) I was the only guy around.

Pretty boring, especially without any alcohol (I still had enough from wednesday), so I went home at about one, although Mark and Tinka showed up some time after me and it turned out to be quite nice, but I needed my bed again I guess.

However, I’ve just come back from the Pighouse Flicks Cinema where I watched “Lost in Translation” with Mark and Carlo.
I liked it very much! Great movie, great actors, crap japanese culture, or as Mark said “I got homesick while watching”. Hehe.

Tomorrow morning we plan to watch the sunset (at 6′o’clock [...]), and I try
to catch some of this kind of pics (this actually shows my room)….
See you later,
Lasse

You can find a better, bigger quicktime movie here. If you cannot see anything, you need to install Quicktime. Visit Apple for more infos.

Pretty beautiful, but quite scary as well….. to impress you all a bit, i attached a little clip (see below) and put some pictures in the “TIERE” gallery.

Later in the night, I went to the “Great Northern” to see New Zealands top act “Salmonella Dub” and the nice and irie “Cornerstone Roots” band. Patrick and Tinka asked me to join them, so I did – it was really worth it (17 bucks), but – as always in small clubs – far too loud.

That’s all for now, see you later
lasse

I went to the main beach to meet Matt, Kate and Jake and another american guy and – off we went…

Amazing things happen underwater, I met thousands of different fish as well as massive sharks (scary but they were being lazy and hanging around on the ground), big turtles and a stingray.

Matt and the american guy told me about some strange named shark (obviously I forgot the name), orange brownish with interesting patterns. I didn’t see it as I lost the rest of the group earlier and went out. Boring Lasse, but swimming around for 40 minutes is rather exhausting, especially if you haven’t done any sports for weeks!

However, I took my underwater cam with me and now I am waiting for the pictures which I’ll upload in a week or so. I guess they will be quite dark anyway but may be enough to let you know how it looks down here.

See you later
lasse

I hope everybody enjoyed the show…. I think it was crap (big time), but I liked the Ukraine and – of course – Max the Man. But it couldn’t get much funnier than those little Guys from Austria, could it? Just to remind you who it was, I’ve found this nice little pic on the net: “Tie Break”

I am still wondering how they managed to enter the contest (= they must have been chosen from the austrian people!)…. however, I am currently listening to “Athena”, the band which invented “turkish ska” and came up with the nice “Turkish Delight” shirt….. and I must say, it is a nice album (“Athena – Holigan”), although I cannot understand a single (turkish) word….. Almost forgot: I think Stefan Raab in his role as the german guitar player(in the background behind Max loosing his voice) was pretty cool as well.

However, I keep on working. See you later
Lasse

Being honest, it is just great music and worth a try for y’all. puh. had to be said. And by the way, their web page is quite fancy as well!

Nothing else to say – yesterday was one of the hardest days, I got up at around eight, worked in the morning till half past 12, went to school till 4, went back home, returned to school at 4.45 and came home at around midnight after workshops and a meeting with my marketing-teammates Patrick and Fabian…. it is not much better today, but at least I just found some time to tell you guys. by the way, do you all enjoy the webcam? I finally figured out how to adjust it to the bright sunlight outside (hey, just took me 9 months!)… the foggy feature is our mosquito net….

so – have to start working again,
see you soon

lasse

sorry for being so “lazy”, but firstly, my computer was not working for a couple of weeks (almost), and secondly my parents came to visit and took my girlfriend….. so, Julia has left for a little break in Bielefeld, studying….not much happening here anymore. I am working all day trying not to be too lonesome, and during breaks, I call her!

However, as you can see, not much time for gonesurfin…

…but, as a little excuse, I uploaded the following little clip and will try to write a little note every now and then.

See you later,
Lasse