jottkah

Oops – it’s March already and I haven’t posted anything since the beginning of the year. So here’s a very tiny VSCO roundup with the Janaury photos. There’ll be lots more in February, though!

What an amazing last month of an amazing year! December started with a few days of snow, which made me very happy. And it ended with a trip to Stockholm – three days filled with museums, walks, fika, and a hot sauna. And stunning views out of the airplane window.

Have a great new year, everyone!

It’s always dark. It’s dark when I leave the house in the morning, and it’s dark when I come back in the evening. (And now it’s even Dark on Netflix, haha …) So there are hardly any photos from November. But there’s Benjamin Clemtine playing in Dortmund, and Fritzi, cutest cat in the world, sitting in a kitchen cupboard.

How can it be December already? Time always seems to go faster during the last months of the year …

Here in the blog it’s still October and here are my mobile phone photos from a short but awesome trip to Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic Ocean. The four days were filled with beautiful hikes, spectacular views, warm weather, cold beers, tasty pastéis de nata, scary car rides, and swimming in natural volcano pools.

(Also, there’s a selfie! Sort of.)

There was so much going on in October that I had to split this month’s VSCO Roundup.

October began with the last day of Way Back When Festival, where I saw the German Band Gurr, who were pretty amazing.

Then there was a weekend in Frankfurt to eat Grüne Soße and – the actual reason of the trip – see Sigur Rós. I’ve seen those guys quite often by now and still their music makes me have goosebumps all over and tears in my eyes. Sigur Rós concerts are a beautiful but exhausting full body experience for me. It was amazing.

And yet another music-related trip. I was one of the lucky people to win a ticket for The National in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. (I didn’t really win the ticket itself, I won the chance to buy one.) I admit it’s hard to compete with the greatness of a Sigur Rós show, but still, I was quite underwhelmed by both location and concert. I guess I had too high expectations for a bulding that’s been a huge topic in German media for a decade. I really love the silhouette of the Elbphilharmonie and how it fits into its surrounding, but the inside (especially the part you are allowed to visit without a concert ticket) was quite a disappointment. The concert hall itself is special and interesting, of course. I had a seat in the area in front of the stage and I think it’s even more fascinating from one of the upper levels. But still. I was incredibly distracted throughout the whole concert. As the sound is clear and brilliant (I guess. I mean, it DID sound really good, but I think my ears aren’t trained enough to really make out the difference.), there is so much visual noise all around you. There wasn’t a single moment where there was just “stage” and nothing else. All the time you see that cow-skin background right behind the stage, there is audience everywhere (which I actually find a nice idea, being able to sit behind the band/orchestra), you always see the emergency lights in the stairs, … Maybe I’m just too easily distracted and get visual overkill too fast. But that wasn’t the highlight I had expected.

After all those concerts I spent a few days on vacation – and that’s what part 2 of this roundup is gonna be about.

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Maybe it’s because I recently re-played Life Is Strange, but I suddenly remembered my old Polaroid SX-70 and the shoebox filled with film. The film is really old (I bought most of it when Polaroid declared they would stop production) and so is its expiration date. But expired film is even more fun because you never now what will happen, so I took the camera with me when I spent a sunny day at the beach in the Netherlands. Lots of photos came out wrong, some didn’t come out of the camera at all (they did eventually, of course, but not exposed), and some turned out showing exactly the mood of that day: light, warm, mellow.

Now I’m really looking forward to shooting the rest from that shoebox.

In September the outdoor swimming pool season ended (so I have to wait until May 1st, when they open again), I rode a nice bike borrowed from a colleague (mine had a flat tyre), I went to the horse races (won some money, but lost a little more), saw the Erik Kessels exhibition in Düsseldorf (and was a bit jealous because his ideas are so simple yet so fantastic), spent a beautiful day at the beach (and shot some polaroids), and went to the Way Back When Festival in Dortmund (Waxahatchee were amazing!).

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When I was preparing the photos for this post I thought that some old pictures had accidentally slipped in, because it felt like I had taken them months ago. But it turned out that it had only been a few weeks …

In August I went to a beautiful and relaxed music festival, spent a night at the beach, and saw some great art installations at Skulpturprojekte Münster. Also: minigolf and beer!

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July was wild.

I spent a lot of time on bike. I did my first triathlon relay (I was responsible for the bicycle part, obviously) and I rode my first 100 kilometers on a road bike for the Rapha Women’s 100. (We didn’t join an official ride but did our own – and I really love the idea that women all over the world do the same on this exact day. You can find lots of photos when you search for #raphawomens100. Mine are here.)

I also spent a lot of time in airports and planes and I spent even more time on a ship. That’s because I went on an awesome voyage that took me all around Spitsbergen. (And briefly to Oslo.) As there was no cell phone or internet connection most of the time, I didn’t take that many pictures with my phone because I hardly had it with me. But I took thousands (literally) with my real camera. And maybe one day I will post some of them here. But until then – here’s a ton of mobile phone photos I took in July.

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June mostly felt like summer is supposed to feel – bike rides, warm nights on the balcony, and lots of ice cream. The best part though was a hike in the Eifel, where you can book nice wooden platforms (with a toilet!) to camp on.

Also in this post: cat content!

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