With travel restrictions caused by the pandemic, we have not been on an airplane in almost a year and a half now. Instead, we spent a lot of time at my parents’ chalet on the mountainside near Gstaad. It’s a really beautiful area with white, snowy mountains all around.

Just before Christmas, we spent a few super relaxing days at the 7132 with its beautiful thermal baths and enjoyed one of the best meals in a long time (if not ever) at their Silver restaurant.  

Our second trip after the first lockdown: a few rather cold summer days in Hamburg.

Milan was our first trip after the first lockdown. It’s just a few hours by train from home. We should go more often. Great coffee at Orsonero, natural wines at Enoteca Naturale.

Last November, I had the chance to travel to Siem Reap with a client to shoot for about a week. I had been to Cambodia a few years earlier on a longer Southeast Asia trip and therefore wasn’t in too much of a rush to run to all the tourist destinations on this business trip (I wouldn’t have had the time anyways). Yet, I made it to Angkor Wat and many other Angkor sites twice within a week and was able to combine it with the shoots we did. It was an intense but great week. I even shot like half a roll of film.

We traveled to Slovenia last November by night train. Arrived in Ljubljana, we picked up our rental and toured the country for a week. Its small size is really convenient as you can pretty much surround the country in just a few hours. We visited Ljubljana, Koper, Piran, Soča Valley, Lake Bled, Celje, and Maribor. The photos below are from Piran, where we witnessed some serious flooding, and Lake Bled. The highlight of our trip was a dinner and night at the hotel restaurant Hiša Franko, which is situated pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Our room was beautiful and very spacious and the meal was among the best I’ve ever eaten.

Every summer for many years, we traveled to Sardinia for our family’s summer vacation when I was a child. It must have been around fifteen years that I last joined. Last September, I went back with Seraina for a week. We drove to Genoa by car, boarded the ferry and arrived on this beauty of an island the next morning. The beaches were just as beautiful as I’d remembered them.

Once again, it’s almost spring by the time I’m posting last year’s flashback. A ton of things happened in 2019. One thing was that I did not do a lot of photography work, taking less jobs but also not really working on personal work. Mostly, because I was really busy with what has become a full-time job by now: sourcing, roasting and brewing coffee for the small coffee roastery I started with my brother Dennys: Drip Roasters.

We visited Paris during the record-breaking heat wave last summer. The day before we took the train from Bern to Paris, we received a reminder by email to bring enough water. We were pretty much boiling in the city when it reached an all-time high temperature of 42.6° celsius. Two days later, the temperature dropped by 20-ish degrees. Despite the heat, we had an amazing time, drank too much wine and Chartreuse and ate too much great food.

A few months ago, Seraina and I travelled to Istanbul. We had been looking forward to this trip for quite some time, even before we had planned it. I had been to Istanbul once before, close to ten years ago and I had really liked it back then. We stayed at an airbnb in the Cihangir neighborhood, which is situated between Taksim Square and Karaköy. The area was great, the apartment was beautiful and cozy, and good coffee was nearby. We were expecting great food in Istanbul and that was what we got.